SLWD Chapter5 PDF

Supporting Learners with Dyslexia in the ELT Classroom | Michele Daloiso
5 DEVELOPING COMMUNICATIVE
SKILLS
Introduction
There are a number of strategies and techniques that can be used to support
learners with dyslexia of all ages in the development of communicative skills in
English as a foreign language. Language ability consists of various skills involving
bottom-up and top-down processes—here, skills involving bottom-up processes
are called ‘technical skills’ (for example, decoding letters while reading a text),
while those involving top-down processes are called ‘strategic skills’ (for example,
using reading comprehension strategies while reading). This distinction is essential
because most learners with dyslexia struggle with technical skills, which in turn
causes problems for the development of strategic skills. This chapter will discuss
the main technical and strategic skills involved in oral and written language
(listening, speaking, reading, and writing) and provide guidelines and practical
activities for supporting both. It also provides some suggestions for dealing with
vocabulary and grammar.
Activity 5.1 Once there was a boy …

Read the story about Marcos and answer the questions. Then check the notes on this
activity at the end of the chapter.
Middle school to high school
Some years pass. Marcos has achieved average grades at middle school, but in his first
year at high school he finds himself struggling in an unsupportive environment. None of
his teachers know about dyslexia, and they expect him to carry out the same tasks as his
classmates despite his learning difference. Marcos gets totally demotivated and fails his
first year. His parents decide to move him to another school.
After talking to many principals and teachers, they finally find a school which seems to fit
Marcos’s needs. His new EFL teacher is Kevin, a young man from the USA. Kevin knows
about dyslexia because his best friend back in high school was dyslexic. When he started
his own career as a teacher in the USA, Kevin encountered learners with dyslexia and
attended some training courses on this topic.
Supporting Learners with Dyslexia in the ELT Classroom | © Oxford University Press
4403320 OHLT Dyslexia.indb 125 03/01/2017 10:28
126 Developing communicative skills
Kevin spends some time observing Marcos doing everyday EFL activities and tries to
identify his needs. The work on sounds and spelling Marcos did with Clara in primary
school is now paying off, as his reading skills are not far below the average range. Marcos
is also aware of the phonological and orthographic features of English, as well as his own
learning style, so he successfully employs strategies for learning new words. However,
when it comes to more complex oral and written tasks (performing a role-play, reading a
longer text, writing a composition, etc.), Marcos gets easily lost, as he seems to lack the
right strategies to prepare for and manage these activities. For instance, when reading
a text, Marcos tends to concentrate on decoding every single word but then does not
remember what he has just read. Similarly, when working on a composition, he tends to
write in one go, which makes his written work messy and disorganized.
After identifying Marcos’s strengths and weaknesses in oral and written English, Kevin
draws up a ‘learning agreement’ for Marcos. He shares the results of his observations,
explains the strategies that he will use in class for support, and sets goals for
improvement. One of these will be the teaching of strategies that Marcos can use to
improve his approach to oral and written tasks. Marcos finally starts regaining motivation
and self-confidence.
• Marcos fails his first high school year and consequently changes schools. Why do you
think high school might be so difficult for learners with dyslexia?
• Marcos’s new EFL teacher knows a lot about dyslexia thanks to his best friend’s
experience as well as to his own training. Do you know anyone who has dyslexia? If
you can, ask them about their difficulties in high school.
Oral language
It has already been established in Chapter 1 that oral skills seem to be less affected
by dyslexia. However, there is evidence that understanding and speaking English
as a foreign language are not easy for some students with this learning difference,
so specific support might be required. This section discusses the skills involved
in listening and speaking and provides suggestions for supporting learners with
dyslexia in oral tasks.
Listening
In order to understand an oral text (for example, a recorded dialogue), one needs
to activate both bottom-up processes, such as recognizing and analyzing sounds,
and top-down processes, such as reflecting on the information heard. Table 5.1
shows some of the basic technical and strategic skills involved in listening. (Note
that it is specific to foreign language listening skills. For example, being able to
extract information from language, intonation, etc. is a skill which is innate in our
first language but not in a foreign language.)
Developing communicative skills 127
LISTENING SKILLS
Technical Strategic
• Recognize sounds. • Identify the context (setting, characters,
• Segment the speech stream. etc.).
• Recognize the phonological form of • Extract information from language,
familiar words and connect it to their intonation, etc.
meaning. • Formulate and check hypotheses.
• Process grammatical structures. • Self-evaluate one’s performance.
Table 5.1 Activating listening skills

Learners with dyslexia might struggle with listening tasks because of their reduced
phonological processing skills and memory limitations. These limitations primarily
affect the development of technical skills, which also has consequences for strategic
skills. In fact, these learners may have to use most of their attentional and cognitive
resources in analyzing the speech stream, leaving little room for top-down
processes such as reflecting on what has been heard. Therefore it is essential to help
learners with dyslexia develop both technical and strategic skills.
Technical skills
The following are some guidelines for supporting learners with dyslexia in the
development of technical skills for listening comprehension:
• Small listening units: Listening tasks should not be too long, as it is hard for
learners with dyslexia to keep a large amount of oral input in their working
memory. If appropriate, teachers can break down the listening task into smaller
units and guide the learners step by step, for example by assigning a brief
comprehension task for each part.
• Dealing with similar sounds: It is a good idea to avoid texts that contain a lot
of words with similar sounds (for example, ‘pat’/‘bat’, ‘slim’/‘swim’, etc.), as this
will lead to confusion. However, if it is not possible to change the audio track,
teachers need to make sure that learners will be able to distinguish between
similar words, so preliminary phonological exercises would be useful.
• Understanding the speech stream: We have seen that phonological work at an
early age is helpful. For all learners, regardless of their age, it is useful to let them
listen to an audio track several times. Slowing down the speaking rate also helps,
and this has become relatively easy to do thanks to the availability of free apps
and online tools that allow you to change the tempo of audio tracks. It can also
be useful to record a slower version of the track, or read aloud some key passages
before listening to the track, articulating sounds clearly with the appropriate
intonation and speaking rate. Another possibility is to provide learners with a
transcript of the audio track in the form of a digital document that they can
listen to using text-to-speech software, which in most cases allows for speech
speed control. However, this is less appropriate when the text is a dialogue
because, given that the dialogue will be read by the same voices, learners
will miss relevant non-linguistic information (who is speaking to whom,

number and gender of speakers, etc.).
• Supporting auditory input: Research shows that learners with dyslexia find
it hard to listen and read at the same time (Kormos & Smith, 2012), so it is
advisable not to ask them to do so (see ‘Accessible exercises’ on page 135). It
is useful to provide bimodal texts which integrate audio and visual input so
learners can rely on different types of information to understand the text.
Strategic skills
It is important that learners with dyslexia develop strategic skills that they can use
both before and during a listening task to help them with listening comprehension.
Pre-listening
This phase is very important to develop comprehension skills for all learners,
particularly those with dyslexia because it provides them with the necessary tools
for understanding the text. In particular, pre-teaching some keywords, expressions,
and grammatical structures, with great emphasis on their pronunciation, will help
learners recognize and analyze them while listening. However, the pre-listening
phase should also promote the activation of top-down processes that are essential
for good comprehension. Teachers should encourage students to formulate
hypotheses based on contextual clues (title, pictures, communicative situation, text
type, etc.), because this will provide them with a purpose for listening.
While listening
Learners should be encouraged to employ a variety of strategies for listening
comprehension. However, these should be taught explicitly and systematically.
The section on reading later in the chapter (see page 137) will provide suggestions
for the explicit teaching of reading comprehension strategies. Since listening and
reading share many similarities, there is a clear crossover of exercise types and
strategies used for both listening comprehension and reading comprehension. The
listening task should be conducted using a step-by-step approach, which includes
the following:
• Moving from global to detailed comprehension: This implies that learners
are given the opportunity to listen to the text more than once. Since learners
with dyslexia can easily lose track while listening, it is essential to direct their
attention to the relevant parts of the text. One way to do this is to associate each
audio track with a task that will help them to focus only on the information
required.
• Moving from context to language: When working with a video clip, it is useful
to ask learners to first watch the clip on mute, and to help them formulate
hypotheses based on the setting, characters’ appearance, body language, dress
code, and behaviour; then, the learners can watch the scene again with the audio
and focus on the dialogues to check their hypotheses. When working on an audio
track, teachers should first guide learners through the analysis of non-verbal
information (contextual sounds, voice tone, intonation, etc.) and then focus
on the linguistic details. In both cases, it is useful to split long passages into
sub-passages and carry out the suggested procedure for each of them.
Accessible exercises
Activity 5.2 Analyzing accessibility: Listening

Find a listening activity in a secondary or adult EFL textbook that you are familiar with.
Look for a ‘Listen and write’ activity or a ‘Listen and answer’ activity where students
answer open questions. Do you think it is accessible for learners with dyslexia? Consider
the following:
• How many sensory channels are activated?
• What do learners have to do in order to successfully complete the exercise?
• Is this procedure likely to cause problems for learners with dyslexia? If so,
what supportive activities could you suggest?
Then read on and check your ideas.
In general, considering their difficulty performing multitasking activities, learners

with dyslexia might face two types of obstacles:
• They may find it hard to complete an exercise or take notes while listening to (or
reading) a text, regardless of the type of exercise they are doing. They should be
encouraged to listen to the audio track first, then share with the teacher and/or
their classmates what they have understood (in L1, if appropriate), and complete
the exercise only once enough global understanding of the content has been
acquired.
• Even if learners are only asked to complete the exercise after listening, this
might not be sufficient to help them because the type of exercise itself might be
inaccessible.
Here is a list of common exercises that are widely used for checking
comprehension, with some comments on their level of accessibility. The level of
accessibility of each exercise is not determined by the content (for example, easier
or more difficult questions) but rather by the procedure required to arrive at the
answers, which might prove challenging for learners with dyslexia.
Listen/Read and do
These activities are accessible when the ‘do’ part of the activity involves a non-
linguistic action (colour in, complete a map, choose the correct picture, perform an
action, etc.). Based on the Total Physical Response (TPR) method (Ray & Seely,
1997; Asher, 2000), these activities are likely to be successful mainly because they
allow learners to demonstrate that they have understood a linguistic input without
having to speak or write in the foreign language. On the other hand, when the
‘do’ part of the activity is linguistic (listen/read, translate, paraphrase, summarize,
take notes, etc.), it is less likely to be accessible to learners with dyslexia, as these
activities require skill automaticity (i.e. the ability to activate a given skill without
thinking, such as decoding letters during reading, writing down correctly spelled
words when taking notes, etc.).
True/false and multiple-choice

The accessibility of these exercise types is controversial. Although they are highly
structured and do not require simultaneous use of several language skills, they
can be confusing (Schneider & Crombie, 2003), because they often require not
only a lot of reading (for example, long multiple-choice items) but also detailed
comprehension in order to identify the right answer. Teachers should bear in mind
that many learners with dyslexia easily lose track of what they are reading. It is
helpful to provide exercises in table format. Figure 5.1 shows an exercise with each
item on a different row of a table, which makes it easier for learners to follow what
they are reading because the lines help to separate the items from each other.
Not
True False mentioned
1. Silva is Slovenian. x
2. Silva is twelve. x
3. Silva lives in the capital of Slovenia. x
4. She doesn’t go to school on Saturday. x
5. She usually goes to school by bus. x
6. She never wears jeans. x
7. She listens to English on television. x
8. Silva usually plays basketball at weekends. x
9. She hates sport. x
10. She likes Italy. x
11. She wants to work in another country. x
12. She has an aunt in England. x
Figure 5.1 An exercise in table format
In addition, learners with dyslexia might unintentionally skip keywords (for
example, a negative, an article, or a preposition) which are essential in identifying
the right answer. A good tip is to go through and highlight the keywords in each
item, and to make sure that the learners know what they mean before doing the
whole exercise.
Open questions
These can be problematic because they require learners with dyslexia to
demonstrate their comprehension level by means of another language skill. This is
particularly evident in writing, but it can also apply to speaking, depending on the
learner’s EFL profile and degree of dyslexia. Moreover, issues of skill automaticity
might lead to poor written answers which do not give objective information about
the learner’s actual level of comprehension. It is recommended that learners are

taught how to deal with different types of comprehension question gradually over
time; for example, starting with yes/no questions, then moving on to questions that
require minimal writing or speaking (a couple of words, then a phrase or a short
sentence). When more elaborate answers are required, learners should be allowed
to use some compensatory tools (spellchecker, picture dictionary, mind maps)
to support technical skills. They should also be explicitly taught some strategies
for dealing with open questions, such as identifying the type of question, and
organizing information in a coherent paragraph (Daloiso, 2012). It has been
suggested that learners should be taught to identify question types on the basis of
the information to be used to answer them (Raphael, 1986). The following is a
categorization of types and suggestions on what to teach (drawing inspiration from
Klingner et al., 2007):
• Right there (for example, When did Elizabeth II become Queen?): Teach learners
that the answers to literal questions like this can be found in one sentence in
the text.
• Think and search (for example, What factors might cause air pollution?): To find
the answer to this type of question, learners must draw conclusions. Teach
learners that they need to integrate information from more than one place in the
reading, and that, because these questions are more complex, they often require
a sentence or more to answer.
• The author and you (for example, What would you have done if you were in
Dorian Gray’s shoes? Do you agree with Lord Henry when he says, ‘Nowadays people
know the price of everything and the value of nothing.’?): These questions require
learners to connect information from the text to what they have already learned
and may require them to consider their own experiences and opinions or to
extend what they have learned. Teach learners that some of the information
needed to answer the question can be found in the text, while other information
will come from things they already know.
• On your own (for example, What have you learned so far about cultural
stereotypes? After reading the article, do you still think these stereotypes are true?
What can you say about them?): Teach learners that these questions can be
answered from their own experience without using information from the text.
(Teachers tend to ask ‘On your own’-type questions before reading to elicit
learners’ prior knowledge; for extension activities after reading, teachers often
use both ‘On your own’- and ‘The author and you’-type questions to connect
what learners already know to what they have just read.)
Speaking
Speaking is a complex skill which requires learners to simultaneously control
bottom-up processes, such as retrieving words and grammar from memory, and
top-down processes, such as communicating in a way that is appropriate to the
context and situation. Developing speaking skills in English as a foreign language
is a long process for every learner, as it requires a lot of practice. However, although
speaking skills are less affected by dyslexia, these learners might struggle with
speaking tasks for a variety of reasons which are directly connected to their learning
difference (poor skill automaticity, memory limitations, limited processing speed,
etc.) and which go beyond the mere ‘lack of practice’. Table 5.2 shows some of
the basic technical and strategic skills involved in speaking. Note that, since most
speaking tasks are interactive and therefore involve the use of listening skills, some
bullet points refer back to the technical and strategic skills required for listening.)
SPEAKING SKILLS
Technical Strategic
• For oral interaction, use technical skills • For oral interaction, use strategic skills
for listening. for listening.
• Retrieve words and grammatical • Communicate in a way that is
structures from memory. appropriate to the situation, context,
• Correctly articulate sounds. and cultural background.
• Form appropriate utterances in terms • For oral interaction, use culturally
of grammar. appropriate interaction rules
(e.g. turn-taking, interrupting).
Table 5.2 Activating speaking skills

In addition to some general principles which can be applied to teaching speaking,
it is useful to focus on two areas:
• how to support executive functions such as task management and language
retrieval during speaking tasks
• how to enhance pragmatic skills (produce messages appropriate to the context
and situation, regardless of their grammatical correctness) as a compensatory
tool in EFL communicative competence.
Technical skills
Activities that require oral interaction in EFL can cause barriers for some learners
with dyslexia due to limitations in executive functions such as working memory,
task planning and execution, skill automaticity, and processing speed. One
area in particular which causes major issues is the rapid retrieval of words and
grammatical structures from memory. This typically results in reduced fluency
and accuracy, which is in turn likely to have an impact on communicative efficacy.
In other words, difficulties in managing bottom-up aspects of the language, such
as words and grammar, may well have a negative impact on top-down aspects of
communication such as efficacy and fluency. The survey conducted by the DEAL
Research Group on the barriers that coursebooks present to learners with dyslexia
(see page 108) showed that the speaking sections of coursebooks are usually
perceived as being too loosely structured and unguided. For instance, learners are
often required to perform a dialogue by freely reusing communicative expressions
found in previously analyzed dialogues, while learners with dyslexia would benefit
from more structured activities and preliminary exercises to help them retrieve the
necessary words and grammatical structures.
The following is a suggested procedure to help learners prepare for oral interaction
(Daloiso, 2015).
• Activate the communicative resources: Ask learners to reflect on the
communicative situation being covered (for example, interaction in a café, at the
airport, or at work) and, based on their own experiences and/or relevant short
videos, to identify the communicative goals of the participants, dos and don’ts,
and expectations.
• Retrieve the linguistic resources: Engage learners in structured exercises for
reviewing words and grammatical structures which are necessary in order to
interact successfully in the given communicative situation, and summarize
them in the form of visual organizers such as mind maps, flow charts, timelines,
etc. Importantly, by connecting words and grammatical structures to their
communicative functions, students learn ‘what to say and how to say it’.
• Guided practice: Engage learners in a variety of structured and guided activities
that help them use a specific number of words and linguistic structures in the
given communicative context. Teachers should start with activities that only
require learners to notice the linguistic expressions used for communicative
purposes (for example, ‘Read the dialogue. What does Kevin say to order
food?’), then introduce activities that include options (for example, ‘Read the
dialogue and choose the most appropriate expressions.’), and finally suggest
guided activities to reuse the expressions (for example, ‘Complete the dialogue
with the expressions that you have studied.’).
• Free practice: Encourage learners to use target words and phrases freely in
communicative tasks. However, depending on the degree of limitation in
executive functions, learners with dyslexia should be allowed to refer to their
visual organizers to compensate for any difficulties they may have.
See also Appendix 1 for an example of a tool for oral interaction relating to the
first two stages of the procedure above. It outlines a procedure that teachers and
students could use to activate and organize the communicative and linguistic
resources necessary for a given oral interaction task. During the final two stages
of the procedure above, teachers can use other common speaking techniques in
addition to the activities already suggested, provided they first check their degree of
accessibility (see ‘Accessible exercises’ below).
Strategic skills
Pragmatic and interactional skills are essential for speaking activities in any
language. For EFL learners with dyslexia, these skills may help to compensate for
limitations in other areas, such as grammar and vocabulary. In fact, pragmatic
and interactional skills are not directly affected by dyslexia, so these learners can
use them to mitigate their difficulties in speaking tasks (Daloiso, 2012). However,
there are two points that need to be considered in relation to these skills. First,
they are dependent on top-down speaking processes that learners with dyslexia
can fully activate only when they receive appropriate support in activating the
technical skills required for oral interaction. Second, the development of pragmatic
and interactional skills might need to be explicitly stimulated in order for these
learners to consciously use them as compensatory strategies. As with phonological
and orthographic work, pragmatic/interactional work should be explicit, organized
in highly structured learning units, and multisensory. Table 5.3 presents some
activities which are used in clinical intervention to deal with semantic-pragmatic
language disorders (Firth & Venkatesh, 1999), and also suggested in foreign
language teaching studies (Balboni, 2015; Daloiso, 2015), especially those
underpinned by the formative-communicative approach.
Pragmatic/ Why it is What teachers can promote

interactional important
skill
Analyze visual Most of the sensory • Observation of details; for example,
inputs information that show learners pictures and ask them to
the human brain identify missing details, errors, odd or
receives comes out-of-place elements.
through the eyes. • Semantic decoding; for example, show
pictures or short video clips (without
audio) of various facial expressions, and
ask learners to form hypotheses about
the characters’ emotional feelings.
• Inferential skills; for example, show
two pictures from a cartoon strip
and ask learners to hypothesize what
happened in between the two scenes.
Integrate visual During oral • ‘Vision → Language’ pathway; for example,
and linguistic interaction, show pictures, cartoon strips, film
information participants frames and ask learners to hypothesize
exchange both what the characters would say; analyze
verbal and non- facial expressions and connect them to
verbal messages, appropriate linguistic expressions; use
which are to cartoon strips and ask learners to match
be decoded pictures and speech bubbles.
and interpreted • ‘Language → Vision’ pathway; for
simultaneously. example, convert a spoken dialogue into
a mimed version; dramatize a recorded
dialogue by adding appropriate non-
verbal information (gestures, dress code,
distance, objects, etc.).
Contextualize Analyzing the • ‘Context → Language’ pathway; for

linguistic context of a example, give learners a context
messages communicative (situation, characters, communicative
exchange is a key goals) and ask them to hypothesize what
skill for successful the characters would do; watch a film
interaction. sequence, pause right at the climax of
the sequence, and ask learners to use the
contextual information to form hypotheses
about what is going to happen next.
• ‘Language → Context’ pathway; for
example, give learners an out-of-context
extract from a dialogue and ask them
to make inferences about the context;
give learners a dialogue with missing
cues and ask them to analyze it, deduce
contextual information, and complete it.
Table 5.3 Developing pragmatic/interactional skills
Accessible exercises
Activity 5.3 Analyzing accessibility: Speaking

Find a speaking activity in a secondary or adult EFL textbook that you are familiar
with. Look for a role-play or discussion activity where students talk in pairs and exchange
information. Do you think it is accessible for learners with dyslexia? Think about
these aspects:
• What do learners have to do in order to successfully complete the exercise?
• Is this procedure likely to cause problems for learners with dyslexia? If so,
what supportive activities could you suggest?
Below is a list of common exercises for oral practice with some comments on their
degree of accessibility. Teachers should bear in mind that oral practice exercises are
not good or bad for learners with dyslexia per se; it depends on when the exercise
is used within the learning unit (see the suggested procedure in the ‘Technical
skills’ section on page 133) and how learners with dyslexia are required to perform,
particularly whether they are allowed to use extra support or not.
Dramatization
Learners are typically required to act out a dialogue from the coursebook, either in
pairs or in small groups. Acting out a dialogue in a foreign language is a hard task
for learners with dyslexia if they are required to memorize the cues and retrieve
them from memory without any support. The activity is accessible if learners
receive appropriate support (for example, more time to rehearse the cues, and
using tools for oral interaction like the one shown in Appendix 1).
Model dialogue
Learners are required to write a dialogue similar to one that has just been analyzed,
and to change some details. This activity might work if it is conducted in pairs or
small groups, with the role of ‘writer’ assigned to a classmate without dyslexia, but
it is advisable to introduce a more structured step first in which learners are assigned
the dialogue in a gap-fill format which they complete by inserting relevant details.
Information gap
Learners are required to work in pairs and orally exchange information to
complete a specific task. There are usually cues or pictures, often with a table to
be completed with the information provided by the partner. This activity requires
a certain degree of autonomy and spontaneity in communication, so it could
prove difficult for learners who struggle to express themselves in English as a
foreign language. It might be useful to provide some model expressions or prompt
sentences which they can use for reference to successfully exchange information.
Exchange of information
Learners are engaged in conversation about opinions, experiences, ideas on a given
topic, etc. This loosely structured type of activity can be problematic for learners
with dyslexia due to their limitations in executive functions, so it is advisable to
carry out this activity in incremental steps, allowing learners to review and organize
the communicative and linguistic resources necessary to successfully engage in this
type of interaction (for example, ‘How often do you use social media?’ ‘Do you
think social media has helped or hurt our society?’).
Role-play
This is one of the least-structured types of activity for developing oral
communication skills because it provides learners only with the scenario and the
roles, on the basis of which they are then expected to improvise a dialogue without
any written support. Role-plays can cause frustration and anxiety for learners
with dyslexia, so they should be used with care and only in the free practice
stage of the procedure suggested in the ‘Technical skills’ section on page 133.
Some learners might also need extra time to rehearse in pairs or small groups. As
already mentioned, depending on the degree of their limitations, it might also be
appropriate to allow them to use notes and visual organizers during the role-play.
Written language
It has already been established in Chapter 1 that reading and writing are the main
areas of difficulty for learners with dyslexia in their first language. This section
discusses the skills involved in reading and writing in English and provides
suggestions for supporting learners with dyslexia in reading and writing tasks.
Reading
Reading comprehension is not just about decoding words. Expert readers
constantly integrate technical skills, which are mainly related to the bottom-up
process of decoding, and strategic skills, which consist of top-down functions that
enable readers to access the meaning of a written text. Table 5.4 shows some of the
basic technical and strategic skills involved in reading.
READING SKILLS
Technical Strategic
• Recognize the written form of familiar • Identify a purpose for reading.
words. • Employ appropriate reading
• Decode unfamiliar words. comprehension strategies before,
• Retrieve semantic, morphological, and during, and after reading.
syntactic information from memory. • Use a variety of clues (context,
• Identify relationships between words at language, experience, factual
the sentence/paragraph level. knowledge) to understand the text.
• Monitor and self-evaluate one’s degree
of comprehension.
Table 5.4 Activating reading skills

During the process of reading acquisition, technical and strategic skills are not
developed in sequence. In other words, it is not the case that learners can develop
reading comprehension strategies only after having developed decoding skills. As
such, when working with young learners, teachers should develop technical skills
and strategic skills concurrently—see the suggestions below. To foster the former,
teachers can also refer to the suggestions for phonological and orthographic work
provided in Chapter 4. When working with older students who might have limited
technical skills which are unlikely to be addressed in the EFL classroom as they
would require individualized training, teachers can provide extra support for
technical skills and boost strategic skills as suggested below.
Technical skills
When working on written texts, technical skills can be supported in a variety of
ways, both before and while reading.
Before reading
Decoding written text is a demanding task for learners with dyslexia in any
language, but it can be even more frustrating in English as a foreign language
because they are likely to encounter a lot of words that they are not able to
visually recognize yet. For this reason, it is recommended that teachers focus on
vocabulary and promote decoding skills before moving on to read texts in English.
For instance, learners could be encouraged to create sets of flashcards featuring
common words to be practised regularly; teachers can encourage the learners to use
their cards to help them review the written form of some common words that will
appear in the text. The teacher can also pre-teach six or seven keywords from the
text to the whole class, focusing the learners’ attention on their written form and
meaning.
While reading
Learners with dyslexia are likely to need three types of extra support while they are
reading a text:
• Sensory channels: Bimodal presentation, i.e. the presentation of a text in two
different formats, is claimed to have a positive effect on word-recognition
skills and vocabulary acquisition, as well as on reading comprehension
and information recall (Elkind, 1998; Disseldorp & Chambers, 2002;
Mastroberardino et al., 2007). As such, some learners with dyslexia might
benefit from the use of text-to-speech software, or silently following along while
the teacher is reading the text aloud. While bimodal presentation should be
avoided during listening tasks, as it introduces unnecessary written input, when
the focus is on reading skills it could be an effective strategy, because in this case
decoding is supported by listening.
• Format: Teachers should make sure that written texts are presented in an
accessible format, in terms of text legibility and readability (for detailed
guidelines, see Chapter 3). Although this is obviously not enough to ensure
reading comprehension, it is also true that removing layout-related barriers
makes texts more accessible and therefore promotes reading comprehension.
• Time: Since decoding is a time- and energy-intensive task for learners with
dyslexia, teachers could support them in the following ways:
1 Provide them with the reading passage in advance so they can decode it as
many times as they need to before the upcoming class.
2 Encourage silent reading in class, instead of having learners read aloud.
3 Introduce some forms of differentiation, such as providing groups of learners
with reading passages of different lengths according to their decoding speed.
4 Follow a step-by-step reading procedure. For example, split the reading
passage into sub-passages and associate each paragraph with a brief
comprehension task. This requires learners to alternate between decoding and
reflection, thereby reducing the amount of information they have to retain in
working memory.
Strategic skills
Research shows that learners with dyslexia benefit from the explicit and systematic
teaching of reading comprehension strategies, and to this end a variety of effective
teaching procedures have been developed and implemented, such as Transactional
Strategies Instruction (Pressley et al., 1992) and Collaborative Strategic Reading
(Klingner et al., 2001). These teaching procedures aim to enhance reading

strategy awareness (i.e. metastrategic skills) as a basis for learners to develop their
own strategic skills. However, traditional EFL teaching practice does not appear
to provide this kind of explicit focus on reading strategies. A typical procedure
consists of asking learners to read a written text (after contextualizing it) and
complete some exercises to check their level of comprehension. This procedure
has two limitations. First, most of the exercises used tend to measure the extent
to which learners have understood the text, but they do not provide information
about the cognitive processes that led them to choose those answers. Second, the
procedure is mainly focused on understanding the particular text which is being
analyzed, and there is no explicit teaching of reading comprehension strategies,
which learners are expected to learn implicitly with practice. These limitations are
bound to cause the so-called ‘Matthew effect’ (Stanovich, 1986), whereby ‘the rich
get richer, while the poor get poorer’. Those who struggle with reading are unlikely
to develop strategic skills on their own, and without explicit support their reading
comprehension performance is unlikely to improve.
In order to raise learners’ reading strategy awareness, teachers can design two types
of interventions.
First intervention
Revise the classic sequence of ‘pre-reading → while-reading → post-reading’ to
‘prepare → interact → reflect’, in order to make the metacognitive dimension of the
process explicit.
Phase 1 Prepare for comprehension
Before asking learners to read a text, it is common practice to do preliminary
activities which usually serve to pre-teach keywords and explore learners’
knowledge of the topic. However, one should also consider the fact that in real life
people usually have a purpose for reading; for example, searching for information,
solving a problem, or simply reading for pleasure. However, in the EFL classroom
these types of natural motivation to read cannot be taken for granted, because
students do not choose to read; they are just required to do so. This usually means
students have a passive attitude towards the written text, and many learners with
dyslexia tend to either avoid reading altogether or move straight on to decoding
the text without having done much pre-reading reflection (Daloiso, 2014b), often
because they know that they will need more time than their classmates to read
the text. This usually results in poor comprehension and greater frustration. It is
essential that EFL teachers prepare these learners adequately before reading the
text. In particular, they should learn some basic strategies like the following:
• Making connections between their knowledge/experiences and the topic of
the text. This is not an obvious strategy for poor readers, as they will tend to
jump straight to decoding the text without formulating hypotheses about it
beforehand (Williams, 1993).
• Previewing the text, i.e. observing all the clues that could support them while
reading. Since some learners with dyslexia tend to overlook these clues because
they are so focused on decoding the text, it is important to explicitly direct their
attention to the analysis of the title, any pictures or diagrams, words in bold,
etc., and to encourage them to formulate hypotheses about the text based on
these clues. It is also useful to encourage them to turn these hypotheses into
questions, which they can use later as a comprehension guide.
• Formulating a specific reading goal so they can read the text with a clear
purpose. An effective tool is the Know, Want, Learned (KWL) chart which
prompts learners to ask themselves ‘What I know’→ ‘What I want to know’
→ ‘What I learned’. Figure 5.2 shows a KWL chart taken from a case study
concerning the explicit teaching of EFL reading comprehension strategies to a
group of 19 teenage learners with learning differences (Daloiso, 2014b). The
first two columns activate the learners’ knowledge and help them formulate a
reading goal.
BEFORE AFTER
READING READING
What I already know What I want to know What I learned
• I know that ... • Who ...? found not found
• ... • What ...? found not found
• ... • How ...? found not found
• ... • ...? found not found
• ... • ...? found not found
Figure 5.2 Example of a KWL chart for developing reading skills (adapted from Daloiso,
2014b)
Phase 2 Interact with the text
During this phase, learners usually read through the text and complete the
exercises provided for checking comprehension. However, these exercises can be
integrated with more personalized activities. For instance, if learners created their
own questions during the previous phase, it would be appropriate to ask them to
find the answers to these questions in the text and write them in the KWL chart.
Learners can then be encouraged to share their findings. Some questions might
remain unanswered because the text does not provide the relevant information, but
this will serve as an excellent stimulus for further reading to search for the answers
elsewhere. Some learners might encounter obstacles while reading the text, for
example because there are unknown words or expressions, or because some of the
sentence structures are too complex. Teachers should encourage learners to use a
variety of strategies to overcome these obstacles (Nuttall, 1996; Urquhart & Weir,
1998; Nation, 2001). For example:
• Decide if the unknown word/expression is relevant to the task at hand by
checking whether it occurs more than once in the text, if it is present in the title,
etc. If so, use the following strategies; otherwise, skip it.
• Use the context to determine the possible meaning of the unknown word/
expression.
• Analyze the unknown word/expression from a morphological and syntactic
point of view (for example, if it is a compound word, identify its component
parts and use any which are familiar to work out the meaning of the word;
determine whether the word is a noun or a verb by analyzing its position in the
sentence).
• If the sentence is too complex, identify the key elements (subject/verb/object).
Remove the optional parts, analyze them one by one, then insert them back into
the sentence and try to define their contribution to the overall meaning.
The first two strategies are probably the ones that learners with dyslexia will be
able to use most easily, while the others are likely to be more challenging because
they require a high degree of morphological and syntactic awareness. However, the
performance of poor readers in comprehension tasks is likely to improve if learners
are explicitly taught some morphological properties of the English language,
such as prefixes (Graves, 2004), which are very useful for analyzing unknown
words. So after doing specific morphological and syntactic work, learners with
dyslexia should be encouraged to also use more elaborate strategies like the ones
discussed here.
Phase 3 Reflect on comprehension strategies
During the post-reading phase, teachers usually correct the exercises to check
comprehension. This phase should incorporate some explicit reflections on the
strategies that learners employed to understand the text, overcome any obstacles,
and monitor their work. The KWL chart can be used to help learners focus on
what they have learned so they can self-evaluate their degree of comprehension.
Then learners can be invited to add a new column entitled ‘How I learned it’ so
they can record the strategies that they used in the previous phase. To help them
recall these strategies, teachers can provide some prompt questions. Table 5.5
shows a sample procedure (based on Gunning, 2002) that was used in the case
study mentioned on page 140 concerning the explicit teaching of EFL reading
comprehension strategies. The purpose of the procedure is to elicit the strategies
that learners with dyslexia have used to understand a text. The procedure requires
the teacher to read the text again and ask learners specific questions to elicit the
strategies they used. It serves as a good model for teachers to refer to in order
to develop prompt questions for their own students. It is also useful for needs
analysis, i.e. to understand what types of strategies learners use (or do not use) for
reading comprehension.
Phase Aims Instructions and sample questions

Introduction To share with Get learners to share impressions of the
participants a text they have just read and the difficulties
common goal they experienced while reading it.
and the proposed
procedure.
Before-reading To understand Ask the question: ‘What is the first thing
reflections whether learners you did when you received the text?’ If
consciously used pre- learners name a strategy, ask them to
reading strategies. explain why they used it and if they found
it useful.
While-reading To investigate: After reading aloud the first paragraph,
reflections 1) the learners’ ask: ‘What were you thinking while I was
perceptions of how reading? Do you think you understood
well they understand what I’ve just read? Can you tell me at least
what is being read; one thing you think you’ve understood?’
2) the strategies After reading aloud the second (and third)
they use to deal with paragraph, ask: ‘What’s the relationship
reading obstacles. between this paragraph and the previous
one? Did you find any difficult passages?
What did you do when you realized you
didn’t understand that part?’
After reading aloud the last paragraph, ask:
‘In your opinion, what was the final
message of this text? How do you know?’
After-reading To understand Ask questions such as: ‘What did you think
reflections whether learners when you finished reading the text? Was it
consciously used easy or difficult? Did you feel you grasped
post-reading its meaning? How?’
strategies. Investigate
the learners’ overall
perceived level of
comprehension.
Table 5.5 Example procedure for needs analysis (Daloiso, 2014b)
Second intervention
Explicitly teach some reading comprehension strategies.
The teacher might notice that some learners perform poorly in reading
comprehension tasks because they do not seem to know what strategies can
be used for comprehension and how they can be employed. In such cases, it is
appropriate to devote some time to the explicit teaching of key strategies.
Activity 5.4 Strategies for reading comprehension

Read the list of possible strategies for reading comprehension. Decide when it is
appropriate to use them: before, while, or after reading. Write the numbers of the
strategies next to the appropriate arrow. Then check your answers to this activity at the
end of the chapter.
BEFORE
WHILE
AFTER
1 Don’t read the whole text in one go. Stop after each paragraph and summarize it
using keywords.
2 If there are any exercises to complete, read them carefully and focus only on the
parts of the text where you think the answers are.
3 If you find a difficult word and you think you need to know its meaning, try to work
it out by analyzing the context and its form (e.g. suffixes, compound words, etc.).
4 If you find a difficult word, stop for a second and think: ‘Is that word important or can
I skip it for the moment?’
5 Observe the text layout: are there any details that can help you identify the text type
you are about to read?
6 Preview the comprehension exercises to get an idea of the information you are
required to find in the text.
7 Read the title carefully and search for keywords.
8 Look for images and tables.
9 Think about the hypotheses you formulated before reading. Were they correct?
10 Think about the strategies you used for comprehension. Were they appropriate and
effective? Did you encounter any obstacles? What could you do to overcome them
next time?
11 Think about the words/expressions you already know around the topic.
12 Consider what you know about the topic.
13 To get an overview of the text, just read the first line of each paragraph.
14 Write down a hypothesis about the topic of the text (e.g. ‘I think the text is
about … because …’).
Photocopiable © Oxford University Press
As Activity 5.4 shows, there is a variety of strategies that expert readers use to
complete reading comprehension tasks successfully. Most of them are likely to be
more appropriate for teenage/young adult learners than for young learners because
they require a high level of cognitive functioning.
The following is another procedure that was tried out in the case study mentioned
on page 140 concerning the explicit teaching of reading comprehension strategies
to a group of EFL teenagers with learning differences.
1 Strategy elicitation and experimentation
• Provide learners with selected texts, each presenting one specific obstacle
to comprehension—for instance, difficult language, unfamiliar text type or
topic, etc.
• Ask learners to try to understand the text using the strategies they already
know (which are often inappropriate or insufficient) and ask them to share
the difficulties they encountered.
• Encourage them to try out new strategies to overcome the obstacle.
2 Metacognitive mapping
• Encourage learners to think back to the tasks they performed during the
previous phase and share their reading habits, then reflect upon the new
strategies they have used, and discuss their effectiveness in overcoming the
obstacle to comprehending the text.
• Ask learners to classify the strategies into groups and summarize them in a
mind map.
3 Small-group/individual practice
• Provide learners with a similar text to be read in small groups (or individually,
if appropriate, depending on the degree of learners’ difficulties).
• Ask learners to apply the strategies previously learned to overcome the
obstacles in the text and answer multiple-choice questions.
• Encourage learners who have misunderstood a passage to review it and
form hypotheses about the reasons for their misunderstanding (misused or
inadequate strategy, distraction, etc.).
4 Metacognitive synthesis
• Encourage learners to think back over the whole lesson and summarize the
procedures for applying the strategies that were focused on.
• Ask learners to produce a concrete outcome; for example, a ‘Smart Reader’s
e-book’ containing a reading strategies inventory and the procedures for using
each strategy, as well as the material created by the learners—mind maps,
drawings, photographs—to visually represent the strategies learned.
Explicit teaching of some basic reading comprehension strategies can also be
carried out in primary school. In fact, it is essential to do so before learners move
on to secondary school, where they will be required to do a lot of reading. This is
also an ideal way of concluding phonological and orthographic work, as it prepares

learners to move from decoding single words and short sentences to analyzing
short texts. However, reflection on reading strategies might be challenging for
many learners because it requires abstract thinking. For this reason, it is essential
to make metastrategic work as concrete as possible. In Inclusive English (Daloiso,
2017), a section of learning units specifically devoted to reading comprehension
strategies aims to do this. Students first listen to an episode of The Adventures of
Sherlock, Holmes and Watson, a series of picture stories about two children and their
mouse who become involved in ‘cases’ that they have to solve using their detective
skills. In each story, the characters employ a different detective skill; for example,
looking for clues, gathering relevant information, not jumping to the wrong
conclusions, etc. Students are then engaged in a variety of activities which require
them to apply the same detective skills to reading comprehension. The metaphor
behind this is that trying to understand a written text is effectively the same as
trying to solve a case.
Writing
Writing a text is a very complex process, because it requires the use of a variety of
skills. On a technical level, for instance, one must retrieve words from memory
and remember how to spell them correctly, while on a strategic level one must
collect and organize ideas into a coherent whole. Table 5.6 shows some of the basic
technical and strategic skills involved in writing.
WRITING SKILLS
Technical Strategic
• Activate motor skills for writing. • Plan text (gather information, collect
• Convert phonemes into graphemes ideas, organize them in a logical
(especially when taking dictation). sequence, etc.).
• Retrieve words and grammatical • Process text (e.g. check coherence
structures from memory. and consistency).
• Review text.
• Self-evaluate one’s performance.
Table 5.6 Activating writing skills

Although the limitations experienced by learners with specific writing difficulties
primarily involve technical skills (particularly those related to the orthographic
and motor aspects of the writing process), there is evidence that they can also have
an impact on learners’ strategic skills (De Beni, Cisotto, & Carretti, 2001). As
mentioned on page 127, limitations in technical skills (bottom-up processes) have
a negative effect on the development of strategic skills (top-down processes). For
this reason, learners with writing difficulties should be supported in both areas.
Technical skills
In a variety of learning contexts, and depending on local school regulations,
learners with specific writing difficulties are exempted from some writing
assignments in both their first and the foreign language, but this is not the case in
all contexts. EFL teachers should bear in mind that writing long texts is one of the
most challenging tasks for these learners, who therefore need specific support. As
already discussed in relation to listening, speaking, and reading in this chapter, the
pre-task phase is essential for activating the language needed for the task at hand.
Learners should be engaged in activities for recalling keywords and expressions, as
well as those reviewing key grammatical structures that might be necessary during
the writing phase. Alongside traditional gap-fill exercises to practise these words
and structures, it is important to encourage learners to summarize what they have
practised in the form of mind maps and visual organizers to be used later on as
reminders.
Writing tasks should be introduced gradually in EFL lessons, starting with tasks
that only require learners to write short sentences (for instance, to answer listening/
reading comprehension questions) and then moving on to completing a text
with missing information (Kormos & Smith, 2012). When the composition of
longer texts is required, learners can be encouraged to use technology as a tool
to compensate for their poor motor skills and orthographic difficulties. Word
processing software can provide support by allowing for the personalization of text
layout, checking spelling and grammar, and giving users the option to search for
appropriate synonyms in an integrated thesaurus. However, technology is not a
substitute for teaching (Steinbock, 2016), so it is essential to teach learners with
dyslexia when and how to use technology effectively during writing tasks. For
instance, spellcheckers are excellent tools which can be used to compensate for
learners’ orthographic difficulties, but they should only be used during the spelling
revision stage of a writing task. If they are used when learners are engaged in top-
down processes such as idea collection or content shaping, spellcheckers turn out
to be distracting and frustrating.
Strategic skills
When engaged in writing a text, learners with dyslexia tend to focus on the
technical aspects of the writing process, which are not automatic for them, and
overlook essential top-down processes, such as text planning, content shaping, and
reviewing. As such, they benefit from highly structured procedures which guide
and support them before, during, and after writing. Below are some suggested
steps that teachers can follow with the whole class, or in small groups, alongside
the activities suggested for supporting technical skills (for a review, see De Beni,
Cisotto, & Carretti, 2001; for a useful guide aimed at students with learning
differences, see Mooney & Cole, 2000).
Before writing
Encourage learners to do the following:
• Carefully analyze the instructions to identify what they are required to do and
how they are supposed to do it.
• Reflect on the topic of the writing task; collect and share ideas and information
with classmates.
• Reflect on the text type (‘Have you ever written/seen this kind of text before?’,
‘How is it structured?’, ‘Who is the sender/receiver of this letter/email?’).
• Organize their ideas and information into a ‘content roadmap’ consisting of
various steps (for example, Title → Intro → Message 1 → Message 2 → Message
3 → Conclusion). Figure 5.3 shows an example for a brief film review (the steps
might change depending on the text type).
CONCLUSION
A sequel is planned –
2–3 suggestions
to improve on
the first film
MESSAGE 3
Why it was not a success:
– too long
– original ideas,
but complex plot
– few dialogues
MESSAGE 2
What critics MESSAGE 1
liked – 2 quotes
Summarize the
plot (NOT the final
scene … no spoiler!)
INTRODUCTION
Why I chose this film
Title, director, genre, main cast
Award-winning film,
but not a blockbuster - why?
TITLE
A catchy title
Figure 5.3 An example ‘content roadmap’ for a film review
While writing
• Introduce a preliminary step of shared writing. Learners should be encouraged
to do the following:
1 Follow the teacher’s model; for example, teachers could write the first
paragraph of the text and share their thoughts, strategies, difficulties, etc. in
order to provide learners with a model for writing.
2 Work in small groups and formulate the second paragraph. Some paragraphs
will then be dictated to the teacher, who will encourage learners to rephrase
unclear passages, choose more appropriate words, and add discourse markers.
• Ask learners to continue writing the text individually or in small groups, and
encourage them to stop after each step of the content roadmap to check if it has
been carried out appropriately.
After writing
Encourage learners to review the text from the point of view of the following:
• The message. For example, write eight to ten guide questions together to review
the content (for example, with reference to the film review in Figure 5.3: ‘Is the
title catchy? How? Did I provide the essential information about the film? In
message 3, did I say that it was just my opinion?’).
• The paragraph structure. A standard paragraph usually consists of an opening
(topic) sentence → comments, examples, details → a concluding sentence. To
help learners check the structure of their paragraphs, it can be useful to ask them
to highlight the three parts in different colours.
• The language (grammar, spelling). Ask learners to reread each sentence and
identify the basic elements; for example, focus on nouns (objects, people) and
decide if they are singular/plural, etc. Ask learners to activate the spellchecker and
focus on each element highlighted. Encourage them to read the text backwards,
focus on each word, and decide whether the spelling is correct or not.
At the end of the writing process, teachers can conclude the activity with a final
metacognitive step in which learners are prompted to review the whole process
and reflect on the strategies that have been used. The steps and strategies can be
organized in a visual organizer to be used as a general reminder for writing tasks.
See Appendix 2 for an example of a tool for writing composition.
Dealing with vocabulary and grammar

Clearly, we cannot separate the learning of strategies for developing language
skills from vocabulary and grammar, which are the building blocks learners rely
on during oral and written tasks. Therefore it is important to support learners in
these two language areas in order to facilitate the acquisition of key skills. This
section provides suggestions on how to deal with vocabulary and grammar during
skills work.
Vocabulary
In general, unlike vocabulary acquisition in one’s first language, in the EFL
context words are mostly learned through explicit instruction, i.e. by doing specific
activities to analyze, memorize, and reuse them. This is beneficial for learners
with dyslexia, who cannot rely on incidental learning and therefore have to use
intentional strategies for learning new words (Schneider & Crombie, 2003). As we
have seen in this chapter, while working on listening or reading comprehension
it is useful to pre-teach some keywords that learners will encounter in the text.
Teachers should bear in mind that learners with dyslexia have difficulty holding
a large amount of information in their working memory. This implies that only
a restricted number of words (six to eight) should be introduced in each lesson.
When selecting the words to present in this phase, it is recommended that
similar-sounding words and words with similar meanings should not be taught
in the same lesson. Moreover, the information about these words (pronunciation,
spelling, basic meaning, collocation, etc.) should not be presented all at once.
When pre-teaching words before a listening or reading task, teachers should focus
on pronunciation and meaning first, and add further information later (Kormos
& Kontra, 2008). When working on speaking and writing, learners will need to
reuse known words. However, the memorization of new words is not an automatic
process for learners with dyslexia. Teachers should help by:
• providing accessible exercises for guided practice
• teaching strategies for memorizing words (for example, mnemonics).
In terms of practice exercises, a variety of common exercise types can be used,
provided that their degree of accessibility has been checked.
Activity 5.5 Analyzing accessibility:Vocabulary

Find a vocabulary activity in a secondary or adult EFL textbook that you are familiar
with. Look for a matching activity (for example, matching words and pictures) or a
word puzzle activity such as a crossword. Do you think it is accessible for learners with
dyslexia? Think about these aspects:
• What do learners have to do to successfully complete the exercise?
• Is this procedure likely to cause problems for learners with dyslexia? If yes, what
supportive activities could you suggest?
The following is a list of exercises that are widely used for vocabulary practice with
some notes on accessibility.
Picture–word matching
This type of exercise is fairly accessible, as it integrates visual and verbal
information without requiring learners to rewrite the words. It is advisable to
arrange the exercise so that pictures precede words (for example, pictures on the
left and words on the right), so learners can carefully analyze visual information
first before reading the words. This will make the decoding of familiar words easier,
because learners can retrieve potential candidate words from their memory while
looking at the pictures. Rather than simply reading and matching the words,
picture–word matching exercises can be done in a multisensory way by asking
students to listen, say, read, and write down the words.
Games and puzzles

Crosswords, word searches, and letter mazes can help raise learners’ orthographic
awareness (Nijakowska, 2010). However, these should be used only in relation to
specific systematic work on phonology and spelling, otherwise they are likely to
prove frustrating.
Set-forming exercises
Activities in which learners are required to form sets of words based on certain
criteria are particularly useful for metalinguistic work on vocabulary. Learners can
be engaged in a series of set-forming activities which gradually move from focusing
on criteria which are usually easier for them (for example, the meaning of the
words) to more challenging criteria (for example, words that sound similar or share
the same grammatical property).
Words in context
This category includes exercises that ask learners to reflect on vocabulary in
complete sentences or within a text (for example, complete a sentence/paragraph/
text using a set of words). The advantage of this activity is that it provides learners
with context, but some disadvantages might arise due to the greater amount
of reading required. Besides, when asked to complete a text using a wordpool,
learners have to frequently interrupt their reading of the text, which often results
in them losing their place or misreading some passages. One possible solution is
to provide an alternative version of the text, where the wordpool is replaced with a
choice between words within the text.
In terms of strategies for memorizing words, it is important to remember that learners
with dyslexia will need frequent revision. It is advisable to teach learners how to retrieve
words/phrases from memory during oral/reading comprehension and oral/written
production. In fact, the direct teaching of this kind of strategy has been confirmed to
be beneficial for learners with dyslexia (for a review, see Calvani, 2012). The following
list shows the types of strategy that can be used for enhancing memorization; it
combines information from Oxford (1990) and from some publications on foreign
language teaching to learners with dyslexia (Schneider & Crombie, 2003; Nijakowska,
2010; Daloiso, 2012, 2014a, and 2015; Kormos & Smith, 2012).
1 Creating mental links

• Grouping: Form sets of words according to a common criterion (semantic,
phonological, orthographic, etc.).
• Associating: Associate words with a photograph, an object, or an experience
that is relevant to the learner.
• Placing words in context: Create a story based on the words to be memorized.
2 Applying images and sounds
• Using imagery: Establish connections between the target words and the senses
(for example, think about the sensations caused by the object/action the
target words refer to).
• Semantic mapping: Organize words in concept/mind maps.
• Using keywords: Identify a familiar word in one’s first language that sounds/
looks like the target English word, then generate a visual image that combines
the familiar and new word (for example, the target English word ‘fame’ = the
Italian word ‘fame’ (meaning ‘hunger’) = a visual image of a famous English-
speaking movie star eating spaghetti).
• Representing sounds in memory: See strategies used for phonological/
orthographic work in Chapter 4 (for example, the /s/ sound can be
represented as a snake).
3 Reviewing well
• Structured reviewing: Create flashcards/wordcards to use frequently for
revision (the Anki software can be an excellent tool—see Website references).
4 Employing action
• Using physical response or sensation: Act out words written on cards.
• Using mechanical techniques: Write the English word for things in your
bedroom on labels, and stick them to the objects. Read the labels every day.
Once you feel confident, remove some labels, say the objects, then check and
stick the labels back on again.
Grammar
In the EFL context, grammar rules are mostly learned through explicit instruction,
i.e. by doing specific activities to analyze and practise the target structure. This
is beneficial for learners with dyslexia, who cannot rely on implicit learning.
However, the traditional grammar lesson might prove to be too difficult for
them, as in this format language is usually presented out of context, and learners
are required to memorize rules and exceptions, usually presented in the form
of boxes and tables, which typically suit analytical thinkers’ needs but seem to
be less effective for students with global and pragmatic learning styles. In actual
fact, reflection on English grammar should not be a separate type of lesson;
rather, it should be incorporated into skills work (particularly listening/reading
comprehension) in order for language structures to be noticed and analyzed
in context. Directly after working on text comprehension, learners should be

encouraged to do the following:
• Notice the target language structure in context and relate it to its
communicative function before analyzing it from a grammatical point of view.
• Analyze the structure. This is one of the hardest tasks for learners with dyslexia
because they tend to struggle with understanding abstract concepts such as
nouns, verbs, the passive voice, etc. Although metalinguistic analysis is abstract
by definition, teachers can use a variety of multisensory techniques to make
grammatical concepts more understandable. For example, if the teaching point
is noun morphology, teachers can use colour-coding to identify distinct parts
(for example, prefixes) of a given set of words to help learners visualize them.
If the teaching point is word order, teachers can write the various parts of an
example sentence onto cards of different colours and show that the basic word
order in English corresponds to a given sequence of colours. A comparison
with the learners’ first language can also be useful, to highlight similarities or
differences; learners can visualize these variations using the coloured cards,
which will result in similar or different colour sequences.
• Practise the structure. EFL coursebooks usually provide a lot of exercises for
grammar practice, but not all of them are immediately accessible to learners
with dyslexia. As a first step, teachers should suggest noticing activities, i.e.
exercises that only require learners to identify the target structure, first orally,
and then in its written form. Once learners demonstrate that they can do this,
teachers can move on to controlled practice, which should first be done orally,
in order to avoid skill automaticity issues in reading and writing. Controlled
practice involving writing should first be based on structured activities that
only require minimal writing, such as gap-fill, matching, or multiple-choice
exercises. It can be useful at this point to ask learners to reuse the multisensory
techniques that were used earlier (for example, ordering words on coloured cards
in a sequence to form a sentence). Free practice should be introduced only when
the learner feels confident with the language structure. For this phase, teachers
should propose oral or written tasks, following the suggestions given in previous
sections of this chapter.
Summary
This chapter has covered a variety of strategies and techniques to support learners
with dyslexia in communicative skills work. We have seen that listening, speaking,
reading, and writing all involve the use of technical and strategic skills. It is
essential to foster both of these skills because learners with dyslexia might primarily
struggle with technical skills, which often causes problems for the development
of strategic skills. Since communicative skills depend on the building blocks of
vocabulary and grammar, the last section also discussed how to deal with these
two areas.
SUMMARY OF CHAPTER 5
Developing communicative skills
• Break the listening task into smaller • Help students formulate
units hypotheses about the text
• Pre-teach keywords and expressions Listening • Move from global to detailed
• Avoid ‘listen and read’ (unnecessary comprehension
here) • Start with context, then language
Oral
• Activate communicative and • Enhance pragmatic and
linguistic resources for speaking interactional skills to help
Speaking
• Move from controlled to free compensate for weaknesses
practice
Strategies and
Technical skills Strategic skills
techniques for developing
(bottom-up processes) (top-down processes)
communicative skills
• Pre-teach keywords
• Present text in both audio and • Use metacognitive perspective
visual format in comprehension tasks
• Check text layout accessibility Reading • Explicitly teach ‘before, while,
• Introduce accommodations after’ reading comprehension
(e.g. silent reading, differentiated strategies
texts)
Written
• Activate linguistic resources
(words, expressions) for the • Teach text planning
writing task • Introduce shared/pair
• Move from short to longer texts Writing writing
• Introduce accommodations • Use strategies for content and
(e.g. spellchecker, online dictionary) language review
VOCABULARY GRAMMAR
Presentation Presentation
• few target words per lesson • notice/analyze structures in
• avoid similar-sounding words context
• pronunciation–meaning mapping >
introduce other information about
target word
Practice
+ • multisensory techniques
(e.g. colour-coding)
Practice
• accessible exercises
• accessible exercises • structured practice
• memorization strategies
Figure 5.4 Chapter 5 summary map
Keys to activities
Activity 5.1 Once there was a boy …
High school can be a painful experience for learners with dyslexia for a variety of reasons.
First, the number of subjects to study increases, and so does the workload at school and
at home. Second, learning activities in many subjects are based on reading and writing,
so learners are required to read longer texts for studying and writing compositions
and essays. Even in the EFL context, the amount of reading and writing increases, and
learners are expected to develop oral and writing skills at a higher level. Since all these
tasks require skill automaticity, learners with dyslexia will need specific support in the
four communicative skills. This chapter suggests two approaches for these learners:
supporting bottom-up skills (decoding, retrieving words from memory, etc.) and
enhancing top-down processes (reading comprehension strategies, task management
skills, etc.). The former are the primary area of difficulty for learners with dyslexia, which
in turn might negatively affect the latter. Besides, teaching strategies for oral and written
tasks is a key area for developing students’ autonomy in language learning, so it should be
incorporated in the EFL curriculum for everyone, regardless of any learning differences.
Activity 5.4 Strategies for reading comprehension

Before reading: 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12, 14 (Note that some of these strategies are normally
done first. For example: ‘Read the title carefully and search for keywords.’)
While reading: 1, 3, 4, 13
After reading: 2, 9, 10
Suggestions for further reading

For insight into language learning strategies:
Grenfell, M., & Harris, V. (1999). Modern languages and learning strategies: In
theory and practice. London: Routledge.
Oxford, R. L. (1990). Language learning strategies: What every teacher should know.
Boston, MA: Heinle & Heinle
For suggested procedures and activities for teaching foreign language skills to
learners with dyslexia:
Kormos, J., & Smith, A. M. (2012). Techniques for language teaching. Teaching
languages to students with specific learning differences. Bristol/Buffalo, NY/Toronto:
Multilingual Matters.
Nijakowska, J. (2010). Sample activities for learners with dyslexia learning English
as a Foreign Language. Dyslexia in the foreign language classroom. Bristol/Buffalo,
NY/Toronto: Multilingual Matters.
Schneider, E., & Crombie, M. (2003). Metacognition. Dyslexia and foreign
language learning. London: Fulton.
Turner, E., & Pughe, J. (2003). Dyslexia and English grammar. Dyslexia and
English. London: Fulton.
Turner, E., & Pughe, J. (2003). Developing English skills for GCSE. Dyslexia and
English. London: Fulton.
For further information (see Website references):
The website of Languages Without Limits for a variety of articles, suggestions, and
activities for teaching languages to learners with special educational needs.
The website of Dyslexia for Teachers of English as a Foreign Language for a self-
study course about dyslexia in the EFL classroom, with practical suggestions.

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Supporting Learners with Dyslexia in the ELT Classroom | Michele Daloiso

Activity 5.1 Once there was a boy …

Table 5.1 Activating listening skills

will miss relevant non-linguistic information (who is speaking to whom,

Activity 5.2 Analyzing accessibility: Listening

In general, considering their difficulty performing multitasking activities, learners

True/false and multiple-choice

the learner’s actual level of comprehension. It is recommended that learners are

Table 5.2 Activating speaking skills

Pragmatic/ Why it is What teachers can promote

Contextualize Analyzing the • ‘Context → Language’ pathway; for

Table 5.3 Developing pragmatic/interactional skills

Activity 5.3 Analyzing accessibility: Speaking

Table 5.4 Activating reading skills

(Klingner et al., 2001). These teaching procedures aim to enhance reading

What I already know What I want to know What I learned

• I know that ... • Who ...? found not found

• ... • What ...? found not found

• ... • How ...? found not found

• ... • ...? found not found

• ... • ...? found not found

Phase Aims Instructions and sample questions

Table 5.5 Example procedure for needs analysis (Daloiso, 2014b)

Activity 5.4 Strategies for reading comprehension

Photocopiable © Oxford University Press

also an ideal way of concluding phonological and orthographic work, as it prepares

Table 5.6 Activating writing skills

Figure 5.3 An example ‘content roadmap’ for a film review

Dealing with vocabulary and grammar

Activity 5.5 Analyzing accessibility:Vocabulary

Games and puzzles

1 Creating mental links

in context. Directly after working on text comprehension, learners should be

Figure 5.4 Chapter 5 summary map

Activity 5.4 Strategies for reading comprehension

Suggestions for further reading

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