Written tasks for a dyslexia-friendly classroom
Learners with dyslexia have difficulties with their spelling, writing, sequencing, and organisational skills. These are four key issues when we ask them to produce any written text, from stories or essays to magazine articles, film reviews or reports.Today I am sharing this written task designed to help my B1 students with dyslexia. It is an after reading activity where all students were asked to complete the task below following «The Hound of the Baskervilles» session.
Remember what works for dyslexic students helps absolutely all students!
During my eTwinning training on «Tools to support inclusive classrooms» I came across this sublime Inclusive English Learning Language project that attracted me like a magnet. The elements of the written tasks proposed to students in these projects combined visual materials and text, which will certainly boost your students creativity whilst their team-working skills are developed alongside their communication and collaboration skills. Needless to say their critical thinking comes alive throughout the whole project!. With this visually enhanced learning of writing structures we ended up with a written task for B1 students that is dyslexia-friendly and where our students could display their 21st century skills.
CIELL infographics offer a reference that would inspire your students’ original written creations (like this composition about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that my group enjoyed designing with Canva) but also an impressive array of pannels the students can choose from to build up their written texts. They are presented with templates with the basic essay structure:
- Introduction (rephrase topic / answer the question).
- Body (paragraphs with topic sentence, explanation, examples and concluding sentences).
- Conclusion (summary).
Then for each paragraph they are invited to pick up one pannel that matches out of three and do fa final puzzle by dragging and dropping the pannels into the correct order. The final product is a written task like this one about Agatha Christie combining text and creative visuals with listening options on the CIELL website.
(images from CIELL)
Your class presentation (that can be accessed here with the password BAKERSTREET) will provide you with useful tools for the classroom like Rewordify, which can help improve your students’ reading abilities by simplifying the complex vocabulary. The presentation comes with written extracts like biographies and a choice of visual materials for your students’ creations.
