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| source: google.com |
Introduction
Dyslexia has been known as the most common linguistic learning disability. Based on the research of University of Michigan Health System, for students with learning disability, eighty percent of them have dyslexia. As the British National Health Service, for about four to eight percent of England’s child students have several degree of dyslexia.
The symptoms of dyslexia are vary for each person. As mentioned before that dyslexia is a linguistic disability, so it has many symptoms. In Medical News Today’s website, Nordqvist (2015) mentioned numbers of most common dyslexia symptoms in young children, such as :
· Learning to read - the child, although he/she has normal intelligence and receive proper teaching and his/her parental support, has difficulty in learning to read
· Milestones reached later - the child learns to crawl, walk, talk, throw or catch things, ride a bicycle later than most of other kids
· Speech – beside that being slow to learn speaking, the child commonly mispronounces words, finds rhyming extremely challenging, and he/she does not very well at distinguishing different word sounds
· Slow at learning sets of data - the child takes longer than the other children to learn about letters of the alphabet and how they are pronounced at the school. Probably, there are problems in remembering the days of the week, name of the months of the year, name of colors, and also some arithmetic tables
· Coordination - the child seems clumsier than the other children
· Left and right - the child usually gets confuse with "left" and "right"
· Reversal – letters and numbers can be reversed without realizing
· Spelling - the child maybe learn how to spell a word today, but he’she will completely forget at the next day. And also, a word will be spelt in a many ways even it is on the same page
· Phonology problems – the child finds difficulty in processing sound of a word that has more than two syllables
· Concentration span – the child usually finds it hard to concentrate for long period, if compared to other children
· Sequencing ideas - a person with dyslexia, when he/she expresses a sequence of ideas, it seems illogical for common people
· Autoimmune conditions – they who have dyslexia, have more immunological problems, let’s say fever, eczema, and other allergies.
The dyslexic person has difficulty in recognizing symbols and constructing it into language. It makes them find difficulty of learning language. Especially for writing and speaking, because their most problems is dealing with symbols, patters and sounds.
Based on the symptoms mentioned before, we have known that most of the symptoms are found at young children. It is indeed can be found at early stage. The children, especially students, with dyslexia can be very hard to follow the lesson at their school. Moreover, when they found that they are different with the other children, it can make them stressful and lose their motivation to learn language.
The aims of this article are to gather some informations of dyslexia from several sources and compile the strategies from several sources to teach language to dyslexic schoolchildren. By knowing what is actually dyslexia is and its symptoms and also strategies to teach children with dyslexia, the author hope that it can be very useful for the readers, especially for parents or future parents, for teacher or those who will be teacher.
Teaching Strategies for Dyslexia Schoolchildren
From many sources, author knows that there are many strategies to teach dyslexic schoolchildren. Because the most common problems are at writing and speaking and also reading, the strategies are mostly compiled to solve the problems of that skill. Below are the strategies for parents and teacher when dealing with dyslexic schoolchildren based on Knudsen’s interview results with the teachers of dyslexia schoolchildren (2012) and Benwell’s article at English Club website :
· Learn more about dyslexia (causes, symptoms, signs, treatment, etc)
· Teach them words with large font
· Use material with simple structure
· Give them praise for what they have done well and do not scold them when they made mistake
· Find their particular weaknesses and make them realize it. Help them solve their weaknesses
· Encourage them to increase self-confidence
· Give short assignment and give them more time to finish it
· Change written assignment to oral assigment
· Ask them to orally retell what they have written
· Read the test instruction for them, they may not understand if they read it by themselves
· Use audio in the lesson
· Do not focus on teaching writing only, but also give them more chances to learn about reading, listening and speaking
· They may not speak in very good pronoun, but make sure you pay a lot of attention to listen to what they say. Because their speaking probably better that their writing in some cases
· Make eye contact when they speak.
Those above strategies look like simple, but do not underestimate it first before trying it. Teaching dyslexic schoolchildren is much more challenging than teaching common schoolchildren without the condition. It is found also that in some cases, the schoolchildren loses motivation to learn language because of the negative responses from the environment. In this case, it will be more difficult to bring them back to learn language. Thus, it ends up with their worse condition in communicating with others.
When dealing with schoolchidren with dyslexia, parents and teachers must be in one mind and purpose. Parents and teachers should discuss about the schoolchildren itself. Parents and teachers can share about the children condition, weaknesses and particular problems. Discussing about the strategies is also a good method.
Finding the most appropriate strategy to teach language to dyslexia schoolchildren is depending on many factors. Further to the interview conducted by Knudsen, she found that two factors influencing the strategy were time and the age of the children. The teachers felt they had too short time to help the dyslexic schoolchildren on a one-to-one basis. Moreover, it was harder to teach the older students, because the gap between the stronger and the weaker one was bigger than younger students. One strategy may suitable with a student with dyslexia, but may not suitable with the other student with dyslexia even though they are at the same class. It gives more challenges to the teachers to experimenting and improving better strategy.
Conclusion
Dyslexia is a linguistic disability. It appears since the early period. The symptoms are different from one to another children. It give more effects for schoolchildren during their learning of language. The most common problems are found at writing, speaking and reading skill. There are some strategies to teach schoolchildren with dyslexia, like Knudsen shorten it become three points. They are didactics, tools and assessment. There also some other strategies stated by Benwell in her article at English Club. Applying teaching strategies towards schoolchildren with dyslexia is like doing experiment. It depends on many factors such as time and age of the students. One strategy may suitable with a student with dyslexia, but may not suitable with the other student with dyslexia even though they are at the same class. The teachers should be always trying to improve better strategy to teach dyslexic schoolchildren.
