EFL teachers’ awareness of dyslexia: The case of Iranian context
Dyslexia is one of the most common learning disabilities among students, and teachers are often the very first to notice dyslexic students. It is therefore imperative that teachers be well-prepared to intervene appropriately and effectively once they encounter dyslexic students. The current study investigates teachers’ knowledge about the disorder in an English as a foreign language (EFL) context. Employing a questionnaire designed by Soriano et al. (2016), the study evaluates the awareness of dyslexia among 84 Iranian English teachers working in language institutes. The findings revealed that the majority of the teachers lacked adequate knowledge of the disorder but that they wished to learn more about this learning disability. Furthermore, the teachers’ awareness of the disorder was found to be independent of their demographic characteristics such as gender, previously completed programs, years of teaching experience, and experience with dyslexic students. The findings of this research can be informative for teacher educators, curriculum designers, and materials developers as there seems to be a need for revisions in teacher training curricula, instructional policies, and materials.
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Researchers and teachers have long been perplexed by the instances in which intelligent students have difficulties with reading, spelling, and other language skills. It is apparent that those students have specific learning disorders, which affect cognitive processes related to learning fundamental skills. Dyslexia is one of the most common learning disorders (Department for Education, 2016) which can pose serious challenges for a student in achieving academic success in a typical classroom setting. Therefore, students with dyslexia may require special education and additional support services. Indeed, due to an impairment of different neuronal networks that are distributed in different brain areas such as frontal, parietal, temporal, and occipital, the dyslexics experience reading disorder (RD) (Black et al., 2017). Therefore, having a slow rate of accuracy as well as a slow rate of speed is a recurring error in the reading and writing of dyslexic people (Afonso et al., 2019; Suárez-Coalla & Cuetos, 2012, 2015). In other words, dyslexia would reduce people’s reading and writing performance to such an extent that those with a high Intelligence Quotient (IQ) would gain a significantly lower reading and writing score in comparison to their other cognitive abilities. Therefore, dyslexia can be defined as a specific learning disability with a neurobiological basis that is characterized by difficulty in word recognition, spelling, and decoding (International Dyslexia Association, 2002). It should be pointed out that dyslexia can manifest itself in a variety of ways in people of all ages, while those related to reading skills can emerge during early school years; when it turns out that a pupil can’t progress in learning reading at the same rate as his/er peers. Generally, when compared to their peers of the same chronological and reading age, dyslexic students were found to have impaired phonological awareness skills. Phonological awareness skill is a multifaceted and complex ability that is crucial to language and literacy development (Melloni & Vender, 2020 Another noteworthy point is that dyslexia not only affects children’s literacy skills in their first language but also their foreign language learning (Nijakowska, 2008). In other words, students with dyslexia in their first language are likely to suffer from the disorder in their L2 as well (Bonifacci et al., 2017). Besides, even when dyslexic learners receive L1 intervention, they are likely to fall behind in L2 (Nijakowska, 2010). Therefore, language teachers who teach young learners and teenagers a second or a foreign language may come across learners with a variety of specific learning disorders.