Teaching EFL to Students with Dyslexia: A Handbook for Practitioners

Lively, original, motivating and fun, this book offers practical advice on how to improve your EFL lessons for your student with dyslexia. Written by a qualified EFL teacher and dyslexia trainer, and based on sixteen years of experience, this book 1. explains, step by step, how to make lessons multi-sensory; 2. looks at the four language skills in turn and discusses how to make them hands-on for the student; 3. shows how to make learning vocabulary physical; 4. looks at each tense individually and shows how to teach it kinaesthetically; and 5. targets specific aspects of grammar and demonstrates with examples, how any grammar point can be adapted to make it accessible, physical and memorable for a student with dyslexia. This book is purely practical: it shows how to structure a lesson in a way that makes use of the strengths of the dyslexic brain. It looks at how people with dyslexia learn – the creativity, the problem solving, the ability to see connections, the big picture approach – and uses these strengths to inform lesson-planning. It also recognises the issues that students with dyslexia face – weak short term memory, delays in processing information, delays in accessing material already learnt – and shows how to plan a lesson to allow for these issues, in ten minute chunks with one piece of realia per chunk, with plenty of repetition to achieve automaticity. Discussing how to manage repetition in a way that is engaging and fun, it lists the range of realia needed to create humorous, memorable, eccentric and innovative lessons. This is a book for teachers who are just beginning their careers, but also for those with years of experience. A student with dyslexia needs movement, hands-on experience, and memorable “hooks” to learn new material. But this book does more than just repeat this message: it shows in everyday practical detail how to apply those ideas in the classroom to every aspect of language learning. Can you guess, for example, how three wide baskets on the floor and a set of rubber bricks help to practise conjugation? Or why you need a bag of plastic animals to teach the comparative and superlative? An EFL teacher needs a lot of skills, building up good rapport and giving constant positive feedback, tailoring lessons to the individual student. Teaching a student with dyslexia requires these abilities and more. This book offers practical ideas, using examples from the author’s personal experience in a lively, humorous and motivating tone. This is a timely and valuable contribution to the resources available to EFL teachers.