Investigating Teachers’ Ability in Recognizing Dyslexic Students through their Writing Errors
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Date
2019
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University Of Oum El Bouaghi
Abstract
This study investigates secondary school English teachers' awareness in identifying learners with dyslexia. It seeks to explore teachers' ability to recognize learners who may be at risk of dyslexia through their writing errors. The researcher adopted mixed method approaches, which were judged the most suitable for collecting data, namely a questionnaire and an interview. The former addressed English teachers at secondary school level in Oum el Bouaghi totest their knowledge on dyslexia, and their ability to recognize dyslexic students through their writing errors, while the latter was done with three speech therapists to seek out their insights about the current status of dyslexia in Algeria and in Oum El Boughi, in particular. The findings have revealed that around the half of the teachers' sample have prior knowledge of dyslexia and most of them were able to diagnose, to some extent, dyslexics' writing problems. Though teachers claim that they know about dyslexia, their knowledge seems to be quite limited especially in distinguishing dyslexics form non-dyslexics whom exhibit similar symptoms. The results obtained from the analysis of experts' interview elucidated that more attention is given to children on the expense of teenagers and adults, and to Arabic on the expense of foreign languages. Thus, this study concludes that extensiveteacher-training is recommended to identify the characteristics of dyslexia for within the national language curricula at all academic levels.
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Keywords
Dyslexia, Learning disability, Writing problems, Teacher training