Part IV: Reading and foreign language learning

Annals of Dyslexia, 2000

In June 1999, the British Dyslexia Association (BDA), in cooperation with IDA and the European Dyslexia Association, held a conference on bilingualism, multilingualism, and dyslexia, including the study of modern foreign languages. For the first time educators from around the world gathered together to examine thorny questions about the effects of language problems in the native tongue on learning a second or third language, similarities and differences between languages and their effect on at-risk learners, and crosslinguistic transfer of linguistic rules. Part IV presents three views on dyslexia and learning a foreign language: the perspective of researchers on bilingualism; that of an adult dyslexic who struggled to learn French; and a case study report of two students with characteristics of hyperlexia who studied a foreign language.

In the first article, Geva and her colleagues report on dyslexia among children for whom English is a second (foreign) language (ESL). They examine risk factors for reading difficulties over two years in ESL children in comparison to children for whom English is their first language. Their results indicate the importance of phonological awareness and rapid naming for bilingual learners, and support research findings on children's learning to read their first language.

The second article by Charlann Simon provides a personal perspective on learning a foreign language, that of a speechlanguage specialist who has training in English as a Second Language and is herself dyslexic. Simon describes her process of learning French as a dyslexic from both professional and personal perspectives. She provides useful tips to teachers of foreign languages, including the advice that teachers be flexible in their expectations and help students to identify their language strengths. The author urges teachers to structure the foreign language for dyslexics and to help them understand the task at hand by directly teaching metacognitive strategies.

In the third article, Sparks and Artzer present the first study of its kind on hyperlexia and foreign languages. They provide an in-depth case study of two adolescents whose progress the first author has been following since the students were in grade school. Both students were reading words accurately before the age of five. One student meets the accepted criteria for hyperlexia; the other presents some hyperlexic behaviors. Common to both, however, is unusual strength in reading words accurately early in life. The authors make a case for their conclusion that word recognition extends across alphabetic orthographies (i.e., the students also exhibited strengths in word recognition and relative weaknesses in comprehension in Spanish).

The articles add to a growing body of literature on the relationship between native and foreign language learning in relation to individuals with dyslexia.