Dyslexia and ELT: How to help young learners in the classroom

Joanna Wiseman
A child sat at a desk with a pen in hand, looking up at their teacher and smiling

When you’re teaching English to young learners, you might find that there are a few students in your class who are struggling. But sometimes it can be hard to tell why. Is it because their language level is low? Or are they finding classroom work difficult because of a general cognitive difference, like dyslexia?

How to help young dyslexic learners in the classroom
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So how can you improve your understanding of dyslexia? And how can you adapt your teaching methods to soften the difficulties often faced by students with dyslexia?

How does dyslexia manifest itself in young learners?

Students often struggle with spelling, pronunciation and reading comprehension when they are learning English as a second language. It can be difficult for teachers to discern whether these problems are simply down to a low level of English, or if they are related to a cognitive disorder like dyslexia. So how can we tell?

There are some clear indicators:

  • When written work is of a lower level than speaking ability
  • Difficulty remembering sequences: days of the week, for example
  • Missing out or adding words when reading aloud

And there can be behavioral signs too. If you have a student who consistently employs work avoidance tactics like asking to go to the bathroom, or looking for a pen, this might be a signal that they are struggling in the classroom as a result of dyslexia or another neurodiversity.

The biggest signal of dyslexia is a clear difference between intelligence and written output. If you have a student that performs well in speaking tasks and listening, but their reading level is disproportionately low and their written work doesn’t reflect their language skills, then it could be indicative of dyslexia.

There is often little support available in an ELT context, but there are some easy-to-implement changes which can make a big difference to your students’ performance and results.

The classroom environment

The first step is making sure that your classroom is dyslexia-friendly. Teachers should ask themselves the following questions:

  • How well-lit is the room?
  • How organized is the room?
  • Is it obvious where you get certain information from?
  • Are keywords and vocabulary up on the walls?
  • Are lines of sight clear?

The second step to consider is how we ask students to work:

By playing to the dyslexic strengths within a team, it helps that student get the recognition for their skills and allows their peers to support them with the more standard tasks that can cause difficulty.

Marking and assessment

It can be difficult to make changes to a standardized system. The traditional method of grading students is by output. But output grading, ie. grading the work that students produce, comes with problems.

If you grade by output, students will stop trying once they’ve achieved the level they need to pass, and the dyslexic students who are struggling will get frustrated and give up. Consider grading by input instead, where you assess the thought process behind the work and the time and effort involved.

Even if your Director of Studies doesn’t support a change to the assessment system, you can still include some unofficial input grading in your classroom which will motivate all your students, not just the students with dyslexia.

The science of dyslexia

It’s a truism to say that knowledge is power, yet the more you know about dyslexia as a teacher, the more you can do to mitigate its effects on your students’ learning.

There are a number of theories of what dyslexia is: there’s the hemispheric balance theory, and the temporal processing theory. These theories understand dyslexia as a developmental issue within the brain. Once we see dyslexia in this way, , and how teachers can soften the difficulties that their students have.

For young learners, try focusing on phonetical awareness. Phonemic awareness - breaking words down into the constituent sounds - is hugely helpful for dyslexic students.

Teachers should help students work on this by testing them in class. You can use games like top trumps, flashcards, matching games and mnemonics to do so.

For example, using flashcards, you can test your students' awareness of sounds: "does hippo sound like happy?" or "does cough sound like through?"

A multi-sensory approach is often useful, involving colors, rhythms, writing out big words. These are the basic principles of the Orton-Gillingham method, an approach which breaks language down into blocks so that dyslexic students can learn through building these linguistic blocks back up again.

Students can struggle with learning facts - the brain of the dyslexic needs to see the connections to make sense of it all. So when we teach in this way, we are teaching structure and connections, and students have a more profound understanding than simply remembering how a word is spelt or pronounced.

Be mindful of your language

Children and young people absorb our prejudices and stereotypes, even if they are unconscious ones. Its incredibly important to be mindful of the language you use when dealing with dyslexic students.

Avoid language such as ‘learning difficulties’, which immediately accuses people with dyslexia of struggling, of difficulty, when in fact everything is difficult if the teaching isn’t appropriate. Also try not to use medical language - a ‘cure for dyslexia’, where there is no cure, or a ‘diagnosis of dyslexia’. Don’t use the phrase ‘despite your dyslexia’.

Dyslexia is best understood as a cognitive difference that should be celebrated. With the right support, the talents and abilities of dyslexic children can really shine in the classroom - something that every teacher should be aiming for.

Further reading/resources

If you’d like to learn more about the Orton-Gillingham approach, they have a lot of on their website. For more general information about dyslexia, check out and for older teenage learners there is .

You can also download this practical guide to supporting dyslexic students in the foreign language classroom

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  • A suitcase with flag stickers on sat on a map of the world

    How do English phrases travel across countries?

    By David Crystal

    All living languages change. It’s a fact of life that some people find uncomfortable, but that no one can prevent. The only languages that don’t change are dead ones.

    How does change happen? The chief way is through mutual influence, when languages – which means people – come into contact with each other. An immediate effect is that words and phrases begin to be exchanged.

    Origins of English

    The history of English shows this taking place from the very beginning. When the Germanic tribes first arrived in Britain, bringing with them the dialects that would become English, their vocabulary already contained words and phrases borrowed from Latin, a consequence of the interaction with the soldiers of the Roman Empire.

    Today we think of such words as 'butter', 'cup', 'kitchen', 'mile', and 'street' as true English words, but they are all Latin in origin ('butyrum', 'cuppa', 'coquina', 'mille', 'strata'), taken into Germanic while the tribes were still on the European mainland.

    The process continued over the centuries. An everyday word like 'take' reminds us of the Viking invasions, for this came from Old Norse 'tacan'. So did 'knife' (from 'knifr'). Even basic grammatical items were affected: 'they', 'them', and 'their' are all from Old Norse.

    When the French arrived, in the eleventh century, the borrowing became a flood, with thousands of French words expanding the vocabulary to an unprecedented size, in such domains as law, religion, politics, food, and the arts – 'duke', 'abbot', 'war', 'peace', 'pork' and 'beauty'. During the Renaissance, Latin added tens of thousands more.

    In all cases, the words traveled because cultural contact – in its broadest sense – made them do so.

    The history of contact

    This history of contact is one of the reasons that English has so many near-synonyms: we can 'ask' (from Old English), 'question' (from French), and 'interrogate' (from Latin). We can talk about a 'fire', 'flame', and 'conflagration'; 'kingly', 'royal', and 'regal'. But although French and Latin are the dominant voices, they are put in the shade by the accumulated impact of the many languages that English has since encountered as its speakers moved around the globe, especially in the days of the British Empire.

    Today, a search through the files of any major dictionary shows the presence of hundreds of languages, from 'aardvark' (Afrikaans) to 'zygote' (Greek).

    It’s been estimated that around 80 percent of present-day English vocabulary comes from languages other than the original Anglo-Saxon Germanic. English seems to always be a vacuum cleaner of a language, sucking in words from whichever culture it was in contact with. The process continues. In recent years, dictionary writers have been considering such new borrowings of words from other languages.

    But not everything in language change is due to borrowing. When we look at recent lists of updates in the dictionary world, we find hundreds of phrasal expressions, such as 'solar farm', 'travel card', 'skill set', 'cold caller', 'air punch', and 'set menu'.

    Blends of existing words form an increasingly large component of modern vocabulary, such as 'glamping' (glamorous + camping) and 'Pokemon' (pocket + monster), as do internet abbreviations, such as 'GTG' (got to go) and 'BRB' (be right back).

    And it’s here that we see the most noticeable phenomenon of the last few decades: the impact of English on other languages. The traveling is now going in both directions.

    Over a decade ago, Manfred Görlach published his Dictionary of European Anglicisms, showing English to be "the world’s biggest lexical exporter”. The book lists hundreds of words and phrases that have entered the languages of Europe. A small selection from letter 'A' shows 'ace' (from tennis), 'aerobics', 'aftershave', and 'aqualung', as well as phrases such as 'acid house' and 'air bag'.

    The factors are exactly the same as those that brought foreign words into English in the first place, such as business, culture, medicine, sport, the arts, popular music, science and technology. The difference is that these expressions come from all over the English-speaking world, with American English the primary supplier, thanks chiefly to its presence in the media.

    The impact of media

    It is the media that provides the main answer to the question “How?”. In the old days, face-to-face contact caused expressions to be shared, and it would take time for words to travel – a generation before a word would become widely used. Today, the use of English in film, television, and especially the internet allows 'word travel' to take place at a faster rate than ever before.

    A new word or phrase invented today can be around the globe by tomorrow, and if it appeals it will spread on social media and become part of daily use in no time at all. Even an everyday phrase can receive a new lease of life in this way.

    Many countries try to resist the borrowing process, thinking that an uncontrolled influx of English expressions will destroy their language.

    The evidence from the history of English shows that this does not happen. Because of its global spread, English has borrowed more words than any other language – and has this caused its destruction? On the contrary, in terms of numbers of users, English is the most successful language the world has ever seen.

    Borrowing does change the character of a language, and this too is something that causes concern. But again, I ask: is this inevitably a bad thing? Shakespeare would have been unable to write his characters in such an effective way without all those borrowings from French and Latin.

    Much of his linguistic playfulness and creativity relies on how everyday words are contrasted with their scholarly or aristocratic counterparts. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, Don Armado gives Costard a coin as a tip, calling it a "remuneration".

    Costard has no idea what the word means, but when he looks at his coin he realizes he’s been given a tiny amount. “Oh, that’s the Latin word for three farthings”, he reflects. “I will never buy and sell out of this word”. It always gets a laugh from an audience.

    Today's challenges

    Keeping up-to-date with language change is probably the greatest challenge facing foreign language learners because there is so much of it.

    Textbooks and teachers face a daily risk of falling behind the times. But the risk can be reduced if we build an awareness of change into the way we present a language. And understanding the natural processes that underlie linguistic change is the essential first step.