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Students with dyslexia talk about some difficulties they face

Students with dyslexia talk about some difficulties they face
10.1
Learning hasn’t been fun at school. The Greek educational system is based in memorisation, memorising loads of vocabulary, dates, names. So a student with dyslexia cannot really cope all this, especially if the student is not taught in a special way.
37.8
At that time, I didn’t even know I was dyslexic. People didn’t know what dyslexia was. So that wasn’t really easy.
49.4
Also, I had a very low attention span. That means that during the lesson I couldn’t really stay focused for more than five or 10 minutes. So I was daydreaming.
63.3
So when I went back home to study I really couldn’t remember anything the teacher had explained during the lesson. So it was just me in front of a book trying to work out what it says and trying to memorise all the information by heart. A number of characteristics I had resulted in low self-esteem. So my self-esteem was really low. That was even worse than the difficulties I had in learning. It was not easy to make friends and maintain friendships. So I felt pretty isolated on many occasions. My organisation skills were also awful. So this affected both my learning and my life in general. For example, my room was always in a mess.
122
I couldn’t find things on time, being late at school. It’s a chain. One difficultly brought the other. My name is Brandruff McAllister. I am a second year Biochemistry undergraduate. Dyslexia, it’s mainly impacted my writing and my comprehension, which makes it very difficult for me to learn things. It takes me longer to, I think, actually take information and actually understand it. And it’s also quite difficult with subjects like maths because I can quite frequently make errors. Even though I can understand a topic, but it’s just very difficult for me to sometimes be consistent. Hello, my name is Kirstie, and I study English language and Spanish studies at Lancaster University.
173.8
I think it’s affected me especially when I was at school a lot because I didn’t get diagnosed until a lot later. And I felt that I was stupid because I couldn’t do things that the other the children could. So my reading was a lot slower. And it took me a lot longer to learn things. And since being at university again, my reading is a lot slower so if affects it because we have lots of reading. And it takes me a lot longer than other people. I’m Markos Markianos. I’m a student here at Lancaster University. I am currently in my second year of studying Biomedicine. Outside school it hasn’t really affected me.
218
Most of my friends are really understanding when I spell things wrong or mixed up words. Inside school though, I did have a rough time with spelling tests and just generally writing. History was really hard on me.
238.9
However, thankfully, the secondary school I went to had a really good dyslexia department. And they helped me work through it. Basically, every day during the summer my mother would take me at around midday and have a two to three hour spelling session just to try and improve my grasp on the words. Eventually, I started seeing patterns in how the words were formed. And then I had a lot of progress over the summer.

Watch this video and take notes about the difficulties dyslexic students mention in the following areas in their academic and private lives:

  • reading
  • spelling
  • attention span
  • time management and organisation skills
  • time required for effective learning and successful learning outcomes
  • self-confidence and self-esteem
  • social skills and relationships

Which of these did you expect based on your experiences and which ones were unexpected for you? Remember to use #tags in your comments.

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Dyslexia and Foreign Language Teaching

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FutureLearn - Learning For Life

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