Teaching Large Classes

The following article focuses on teaching large classes. It was originally used on our Delta Module One course and answers the following questions:

a. What are the challenges and disadvantages of teaching large classes?

b. How can these challenges/disadvantages be overcome so as to maximise learning?

 1.  a) Problem – lack of individual attention : The larger the class the less individual attention each learner can receive from the teacher, and the more difficult it is for the T. to identify individual problems. The definition of a large class can be anything from the 20-30 learners often found in state school classes, to over 100 in some university contexts (eg Italy).

b) Solution: When eliciting, nomination may be preferable to “open” questions. This allows the T. to ensure that stronger learners don’t dominate by answering before others have had “thinking” time and to ensure each L. is asked to contribute.  Problems of embarrassment potentially caused by nomination can be overcome by i) allowing Ls to confer in pairs before eliciting an answer in full class format,  ii) gearing the level of difficulty of the questions to the L’s ability and level of confidence, or ii) using a a “hands up”  system.

2. a)  Problem- Unsuitable environment: Some very large classes (eg in universities) may be held in traditional lecture theatres, with learners sitting in long rows. This can preclude the use of activities such as mingles, and also make pair changes difficult. 

b) Solution : This does not make pair changes impossible however. Ls can be asked to speak to the person on their left, on their right, or the person in front of or behind them  (if the T. pairs rows accordingly).

 3. a) Problem – Marking (1): The larger the class, the more time the T. has to spend on marking any written activities which are given to the group.

b) Solution: This may lead to the T. giving more “controlled” activities where an answer key can be distributed, or the activity can be done on and marked by a computer, using sites such as Quia.com.  These can then just be followed up in class. 

a) Problem – Marking (2): However, if the course has a writing component, eg most exam preparation classes, this will inevitably mean that direct tests of writing need to be administered both for practice and formative assessment.

b) Solution: It may therefore be worth spending some class time training the Ls in the skills of peer assessment – probably using checklists provided by the teacher. The Ls can first peer assess, while the T. monitors, and the teacher follows up some of the peer comments at class level.   S/he can then take a reasonable number of scripts (from different Ls each time) to assess before the next lesson.

4. a) Problem- L engagement: The larger the class the more difficult it is to ensure full engagement of all learners. Ls may be distracted by their phones, start having side conversations, or just stop concentrating on the lesson. In addition, Ls who are not particularly interested in learning have the chance to “hide” at the back where they hope the T. will not notice them.

b)  Solutions:

i) Class rules can be established (possibly after discussion and negotiation with the Ls) such as that all phones are turned off during the lesson, or that ls don’t talk to each other when the group is in T/class format but listen to both the T and the other learners. With particularly problematic classes (eg disruptive YLs), these might be written up on a poster and kept on the wall.

ii) The T. can ensure the Ls continue listening by using techniques such as asking a L to repeat what another has just said. If they weren’t listening, they won’t be able to, but knowing the T is liable to do this helps keep them focused.

iii) If s/he sees the less engaged Ls at the back, the T. can change the seating arrangement at the beginning of the lesson – eg by each asking all the learners in the last row(s) to change places with those in the first, second or third rows.

5. a) Problem – Checking Ls are on task : The larger the class, the more difficult to check that everyone has understood the instructions for an activity.  Whilst in a small group the T. can – apart from checking understanding – quickly monitor groups at the beginning of an activity to check they are on task, in larger groups the T may not reach the last groups for some time – which if off-task they will have wasted.

b) Solution:  As well as checking instructions as normal, the T can often ask a pair or group of stronger learners to demonstrate the start of the activity. This gives everyone a model of what they should be doing.

6. a) Problem – Monitoring and Feedback: Additionally, with a “lecture theatre style” seating arrangement, it may be impossible for the T to get close enough to the Ls “in the middle” to monitor at all. And the amount of noise made by a large class whilst working on a task may make it difficult for the T to hear enough to monitor effectively. Even if this is possible, there will not be enough time to give feedback on everything overheard.

b) Solution: One of the Ls can be given the role of “monitor” of the group. Their job is to note down any questions the group have, anything they didn’t know how to say, anything that didn’t seem correct, and any other problems that arise. The T. can then ask the groups to prioritise the questions/problems and take one or two (as time allows) from each group in the follow up.

7. a) Problem - Resources: Large classes may be particularly common in third world contexts, where the difficulty may be compounded by lack of funds to provide adequate resources for the number of learners – eg textbooks, recorded materials, technological solutions etc.

b) Solutions:

i) If learners can sit together around tables, one textbook per group may suffice.

ii) A “Dogme style” approach can be taken which is materials free and dependent only on T/S and S/S interaction.

8. a) Problem - Summative assessment. Because of the marking time involved summative assessment is difficult for both oral and written work, and may push the T. into adopting indirect, discrete item testing methods (which as mentioned above can be done and marked on computer if the technology is available, but are in any case more practical than direct testing).

b) Solution : There is no ideal solution for this, particularly with extremely large classes. However, in a class of say 30 learners and one hour lessons, the Ls can be divided into three groups of ten.  In the last three lessons, each group does one of the following (obviously alternating so that they complete all three) : an indirect test, a direct test of writing, a direct test of speaking – done in pairs with the T, giving each pair 12 minutes of speaking time. This spreads the marking load for the T over three lessons and ensures all Ls are occupied in each lesson. To ensure reliability which could be affected by Ls telling each other about what they did, the items in the indirect test should be changed slightly, and the tasks in the direct test – though obviously all remaining within areas covered by the course to ensure content validity. 

Dealing with Difficult Situations : Negotiating Course Content

In this, the first in an occasional series on Dealing with Difficult Situations, we look at a common situation – the one-to one student who has different ideas to you on how the course should be structured. How do you react if you’re convinced that what the student wants is not what they really need? Do you insist on doing it “your way” and almost certainly lose the student’s belief in the efficacy of the course? Or do you give them what they want although firmly believing it will do little to advance their learning? This article looks at a response which worked well with one student.

I once had a client who came to Britain to do a two week, six hour a day, one to one course at the organisation where I was working. We had a clear statement from his company of what they expected from the course and, as always, before his arrival we did an extensive language audit and needs analysis, including analysing typical reports he would have to read and write, the minutes of the type of meeting he would have to attend and so on. He was at a lower intermediate level, with a grammatical, functional and lexical competence which was clearly inadequate for the high level job which he had. He needed to reach a level in which he was capable of attending meetings, giving presentations and negotiating in English, as well as writing complex technical reports. His two weeks with us would be the first step in a course which would then be continued on a non-intensive basis on his return to Venezuela. I spent much of the week before his arrival working on the course objectives and syllabus, and putting together the course materials.

On the first morning of the course, immediately after meeting him, I explained how the course would be structured, and how we had arrived at those specific objectives based on the information we had collected. He then politely, but firmly, stated “No, I don’t want all that. I just want to talk.”

This left me with a dilemma. First of all, I was convinced that, at his level and with the specific needs that he had, “just talking” was not going to help him very much. Secondly, that was not what his company (who were paying and who we had to report to) had asked for. And thirdly my heart sank at the idea of trying to plan 60 consecutive teaching hours of the type of chat he clearly had in mind in a one-to-one situation.

However, it was also clear that if I just refused to take his wants into consideration, it would have a negative effect on his attitude towards the course, which would mean that it was unlikely to be successful. There was also the possibility, however minimal I considered it, that he was right and I was wrong. On the spot, I therefore proposed a verbal teaching-learning contract : he would try it “my way” for the first two days of the course, after which we would switch to “his way” for the next two days. At the end, he could decide which approach or which activities had led to the most successful learning, and from then on we would follow that approach for the rest of the course. I also made it clear that he would have to play an active part in the “conversation” part of the course, thinking of and introducing topics as well as just waiting for me to do so. But both of us undertook to “give it all we’d got” for the full four days, temporarily putting aside whatever doubts we each had about the other’s methods.

We thus started working on the course materials which I’d prepared, and at the end of the two days I was starting to see results. But as he hadn’t changed his mind, we then switched. The first morning went well – he was a nice guy and he had plenty to say about his job, his life and his country. By the end of the afternoon he seemed to be starting to flag a bit, but he went away with both of us having agreed to think of various new topics for the second day. The next morning we kept going, but after lunch he came back and said he’d already made up his mind how he wanted the course to continue. He felt he had learned far more in the first two days than afterwards, and could we go back immediately to the programme that had been planned.

Despite the fact that we had “wasted” nine out of the sixty hours and the programme had to be adapted slightly, the course overall was extremely successful. From that point on, the student participated actively and enthusiastically, showing full commitment to the approach and to reaching the objectives which had been set. I’m convinced this wouldn’t have happened if I had just tried to convince him I knew more than he did about his needs and had imposed my syllabus on him. He needed to experience the difference in order to convince himself.


Have you experienced a similar situation and found another solution which worked well? Leave a comment telling us about it. Or if you’ve found a solution for a different type of difficult situation, why not send us an article describing it?

Acknowledgement

Photo provided under Creative Commons Licence by DavidQuick via Flickr

An ELT Glossary : Register

Register is a  term used to indicate that different varieties of language will be used in different contexts - with context being understood to mean the situation, the purpose of the communication, the type of communication,  the  roles and relationships relationships between the participants in the communication, and various other factors. These factors may, for example,  influence the choice of lexis used (eg technical or non-technical - elided or left out), the structures used (eg Sit down! or Would you like to take a seat?; We did a load of tests or A number of  experiments were performed...), or the phonological features (eg in I'm going to talk about... , does the speaker say /gəʊwɪŋ tuː / or  /gənə/ ?).

Halliday and Hasan (1976) divide these factors  into field, mode and tenor of discourse:

Field of discourse : “the total event, in which the text is functioning, together with the purposive activity of the speaker or writer; it thus includes the subject-matter as one element in it” (1976 : 22). 

Mode of discourse : “the function of the text in the event, including therefore both the channel taken by the language – spoken or written, extempore or prepared – and its genre, or rhetorical mode, as narrative, didactic, persuasive, phatic communion and so on” (1976: 22). 

Tenor of discourse : "the type of role interaction, the set of relevant social relations, permanent and temporary, among the participants involved." (1976: 22).

Some examples :

• Field : A lecture on linguistics will use different language than a teacher might use in a beginners language course to describe grammar. 
• Mode : A political speech, written to be spoken and presented to a large audience, and with a persuasive purpose will involve different language features to an anecdote recounted "on-the-spot" to an individual and intending to entertain.
• Tenor : The  choice of a formal/informal, direct/indirect request exponent will be dependent on whether the participants are eg an adult speaking to a child or a shop assistant speaking to a customer. And even in these cases it will depend on status/affective involvement and frequency of contact. 

Reference

Halliday, M., and Hasan, R. (1976) Cohesion in English, London : Longman

Dealing with Latecomers

One of the things most guaranteed to annoy me when I’m teaching groups is when people turn up late – I don’t mean just one person occasionally being late, but the whole group regularly dribbling in gradually over the first twenty minutes or so. What can you do about it? I’d like to suggest three strategies : talk to the group about it; agree a course of action; and adjust your lesson accordingly.

Talk to the group

Your first aim in talking to the group is to find out why they come late.

• Keep in mind that there may be a cultural element at work here – how important is punctuality in the culture? If you are working in a culture where punctuality is the norm (Swiss, German) and lateness a sign of disrespect (Japanese) you’re less likely to have problems than if you are working in certain Mediterranean or Arab cultures – where you may find that your expectation of punctuality and intolerance of lateness is far higher than that of your students, leading to your feelings of irritation in a situation that they find perfectly normal.
• Secondly, with the best will in the world lateness is sometimes inevitable. If you live in a city where the traffic is chaotic, or if your students have a boss who frequently asks to see them just as they’re supposed to be leaving, the lateness may not actually be their fault.
• However, lateness is sometimes due simply to a failure on the students’ part to recognise the true extent of its effect on the course. Your second aim is therefore to make sure that they realise that if not everyone is there at the start of the lesson, there are two possible consequences : firstly, that you wait and the lesson doesn’t start on time – which will mean that you don’t get through all the activities you have planned and that their learning will suffer; or secondly that you start, but each time someone arrives you will have to go back to the beginning and explain everything again, wasting an equal amount of time. Students often have no conception of a lesson as a structure with a beginning, middle and end which is planned precisely for the time available in the lesson. You need to make this clear to them if they are to understand the problems fully. I often show them a very simple plan (usually of their last lesson, so that they recognise it), with the activities and aims and timing for each stage specified. I point out for example how the lesson started with the presentation of new material, and then progressed through activities designed to help them gradually assimilate and use the new language. We then have something concrete to refer to in a discussion of the potential results for their learning of missing the beginning and/or not getting through to the end.

Agree a Course of Action

Needless to say, this discussion has to take place in a positive manner. It’s not a matter of playing the heavy-handed teacher, but of trying to collaborate with the students in order to improve the success of the course for everyone. The next step in the discussion is thus to decide on a plan of action to avoid the problems as much as possible. I usually suggest the following :

• Firstly, that they do make an effort to be in the classroom ready to start at the start of the lesson – which means aiming to arrive at least five minutes early.
• Secondly, that if they know in advance they will be late – for instance because of an important meeting – that they let me know, so that I can adjust my plan accordingly.
• Thirdly, that if they do arrive late, they come in with the minimum amount of disturbance possible. I always ask students to leave seats near the door free for latecomers, so that they don’t have to climb over half the class to sit down, and I ask them not to launch into a long explanation of why they were late, or to start distracting their neighbours by asking what we’re doing, what page we’re on etc. They simply come in, sit down, listen, and wait until there’s a suitable point when I can catch them up.

How can this best be done? I would generally let whatever activity I’m in the middle of finish before turning my attention to the latecomers, otherwise the interruption may distract and penalise the students who were on time. There are then various possibilities :

• If the students are currently working on an individual, pair or group work activity, the fast finishers can be asked to explain what we’re doing to the latecomer, while the others continue working.
• Alternatively, at the end of the current activity I might ask the class as a whole to recap on what we’ve been doing. For example, if I had been doing a presentation of a new structure, I might ask one student to describe the “story” of the presentation situation, another to repeat the model sentences, and others to explain the rules. This not only involves everyone, but also helps me confirm that they have understood.
• Or thirdly, if the student comes in just before I’m about to start the group on a IW, PW or GW activity, I might get the activity started, check that they’re all on task, and then sit down and briefly take the latecomers through whatever they’ve missed. This should not be done however, if it means not being able to monitor the rest of the group.

Adjust the Lesson Accordingly

In my experience however, although this sort of discussion and agreement can improve the situation, it rarely resolves the problem completely. The other option is therefore to accept that lateness will happen, and to adjust the lesson accordingly.

I feel strongly that this should never mean simply waiting for the latecomers. This simply penalises the students who have turned up on time (which is unfair), and teaches them that they might as well arrive late too. However, it is possible to plan initial activities which are useful for those present, but allow you to hold back the start of the main part of the lesson for ten minutes or so while the others are arriving. For example you can :

• Check homework. This is often useful if there are only one or two students present initially. It gives you a chance to sit down with the students, look at their work, point out their mistakes and find out which they can self-correct and which need further explanation. It also means you have one or two workbooks less to take away and correct outside the class.
• Spend some time on general conversation – What did you do at the weekend? Of all the things you’re working on at the moment, what is causing you the most problems and why? Describe the story of the last film you saw at the cinema or on TV etc. This can be done in pairs or groups with the teacher monitoring and then writing mistakes overheard on the board for correction. If there’s time left, students can then report back on what their partner said.
• Use a filler activity for general listening or fluency practice. I would usually use an activity which is slightly below the level of the students in the class, so that it doesn’t need a lot of introduction or pre-teaching. For example, with an upper intermediate class, a fairly simple Find the Difference activity or one of the many other fluency activities described in the Teaching Speaking section. Or, in an advanced class I might use the type of activity focusing on idiomatic English which is included here in the Language Snippets section.
• Do a remedial activity. For instance, if during the previous lesson you noticed that various students were having problems with a specific verb form, do a brief remedial presentation and an exercise focusing on that form.
• Do a recap of the previous lesson. It often surprises me how few students review the last lesson before they come to the next. They therefore arrive not remembering at all what they did, and when the teacher tries to build on what has gone before, the foundations just aren’t there. Take them through the last lesson step by step. Ask them to recall the presentation situation and model sentences, to explain the rules, to remember what the reading or listening passage was about, etc.
• Do an activity which you had planned for the previous lesson but didn’t have time for.

Whatever you do, the objectives should be that :

• The students who are present feel that they have learnt or practised something useful and have not just been marking time.
• When the latecomers arrive, they walk into a class which is in full swing – so that they recognise that they have missed something.
• What they have missed does not prevent them, or anyone else, from achieving the main objectives of the lesson.

How long you feel you can hold back the “real” start of the lesson will depend on how long you have available. If you only teach 45’ minute lessons, it may be impossible to wait longer than five minutes. If you have two hours, it can be considerably longer. It’s a matter of balancing the time needed to teach a coherent lesson with the time available and the constraint that, if you start too soon, the lesson will in any case be disrupted and you’ll waste time repeating explanations.

Acknowledgement

Photo provided under Creative Commons licence by Malky via flickr

Helping Students with Learning Disabilities : Part Two

For  Part One  of this article, click on the link


So, you’re not an expert but you feel fairly sure that one or more pupils in your class have some sort of learning disability. And there’s no-one you can turn to for advice. What can you do in your classes that may help the learners involved, that certainly won’t make things worse for them, and at the same time won’t hold back the other members of the class?

Luckily, as I said in the first part of the article, many of the strategies recommended for helping students with learning disabilities are no more than good teaching practice – they just become even more necessary in this situation. And some of the more specific action can just be turned into a fun activity for everyone. There is no need for the class to know that activities are targeted at particular student, or to mention the idea of learning disabilities at all. Many of the actions can be introduced just by saying This is something that a lot of people find useful. Try it, and if you find it makes things easier, you can go on using it …
Below are some of the strategies that you can use which are likely to help all your learners. No more than an overview is given here, but these ideas and many more are discussed in the articles and websites referred to in the text and in the further reading section.

1. Create a positive classroom environment which is success oriented and in which what the students can do is more important than what they can’t. For example, when working with children who you suspect to suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), keep activities short, breaking longer assignments down into separate stages which you are sure they can cope with, and deal with one stage at a time. Give positive reinforcement after each stage – possibly just praise, or, with younger learners, a concrete reward such as stickers. Find out if your dyslexic learner has above average abilities in other areas – for example, highly developed interpersonal, musical, or artistic skills and give them a chance to use those skills in the lesson. For more on nurturing self-esteem, see this article by Robert Brooks.


2. If students have behavioural problems, provide clear ground rules stated positively (what you do want the students to do, not what you don’t), reinforce positive behaviour with praise and rewards, and establish clear consequences that will follow if the rules are broken. An excellent source of information on dealing with students with ADD and behavioural problems can be found on the TeacherVision website. Look at the various articles under the heading Teaching Students with ADD/ADHD


3. Provide clear objectives and a clear activity structure for the lesson, and show how these are related to what has gone before in the course. Preview the structure and objectives at the beginning of the lesson, refer to them as you work and review them at the end, making sure the learners understand exactly what they are going to achieve and how. Make sure they understand from the beginning what you expect them to be able to do at the end. They will often benefit from a lesson structure which remains the same each time, so that they know exactly what they are doing and why. The same criteria are important in choosing the coursebook.

4. Consider how much time learners need for an activity. Learners with ADD will need a brisk pace to the lesson, whilst dyslexic learners will benefit from more time to complete activities. This may mean that you have to abandon the lockstep at certain points in the lesson and have students working on different tasks. Consider too how long homework is liable to take, giving different assignments if necessary, and how long students will need for tests. Where the problem is recognised, it is common practice to give students with learning disabilities extra time for tests and exams (this option is also available for students taking Cambridge ESOL exams such as FCE), and if you are working in a situation where you do not want to make the situation explicit, tests without time limits can be the answer.

5. Students with learning disabilities are often highly sensitive to noise and other distractions. Reduce these as much as possible, for instance by placing the learners close to the teacher and the board rather than at the back of the room where they can see and be distracted by what else is going on.

6. Use a multi-sensory approach to learning. This may be as simple as reading aloud the explanations or homework that you write on the board, but you can also use multi-sensory activities which present or practice language through audio, visual (non-verbal) or kinaesthetic channels. For example, to teach spelling kinaesthetically, cut an old towel (or other piece of rough material) into rectangles about the size of half a mouse pad and stick each rectangle on stiff card. Ask the students to learn the word by writing it with their finger on the cloth. If they have difficulties forming the letters, help them by guiding their hand – in large classes this can be done as pairwork, with the learners without disabilities acting initially as the guide. Again, no-one needs to know why roles were allotted as they were, and this is an activity which can help more than just the students with learning disabilities. As someone with a predominantly kinaesthetic learning style, it’s a way of learning foreign language vocabulary which I find useful myself.

7. When creating handouts, make them as “reader-friendly” as possible. Use text styles which are as easy as possible for students with dyslexia to read. Choose “non-curly” fonts such as Arial or Verdana and use large print; avoid italics, underlining or using all capitals - which obscures the shape of the word making it less easy to identify. Pastel coloured matt-finish paper creates less glare than white gloss paper, and dyslexics often find it causes less visual stress. The visual stress and reading difficulties caused by glare, also called Meares/Irlen syndrome, is a problem that many non-dyslexic people also share. It can be reduced by coloured filters – sheets of transparent coloured vinyl - which are placed over the text. Different people will find different colours most helpful. You can find out more – and see whether you yourself might benefit – on the Dynamic Vision website. In addition, this article by Mario Rinvolucri talks about how the use of the filters might be introduced into the EFL classroom, and also gives the address where they can be obtained.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Photo provided under Creative Commons Licence by szlea via flickr.

FURTHER READING

In addition to the references given in the first part of this article, other useful sites include :

Dyslexia

http://www.tefl.net/esl-articles/dyslexia.htm
http://www.dyslexia-teacher.co.uk/t6.html
http://www.childdevelopmentinfo.com/learning/dyslexia.shtml

ADD /ADHD

http://www.childdevelopmentinfo.com/learning/teacher.shtml
http://www.hltmag.co.uk/sep06/mart04.htm

General
http://home.iprimus.com.au/rboon/LearningDisabilities.htm#educationmanagement
http://www.tesolgreece.com/nl/75/7503.html

See also...

Delaney and Farley, Special Educational Needs - Into the Classroom, OUP

Helping Students with Learning Disabilities : Part One

If you look at the literature on learning disabilities, you’ll find statistics like “one in ten children are estimated to suffer from some form of learning disability”, “15% of Canadians are affected by learning disabilities”, “one in six children suffers from dyslexia”. The figures are obviously contradictory, but it’s equally clear that whatever the truth, a high number of people have some sort of cognitive disorder which affects their learning.

It's not surprising then if, every so often, we suspect that one of the learners in our classes may be failing because of a learning disability. And yet it is a topic which, as far as I know, is rarely covered on TEFL courses, meaning that EFL teachers are largely unprepared to help students with these problems.

In these two articles I want to look first of all at what we mean by a learning disability, and secondly, what practical measures we can take to help these learners achieve to the maximum of their, often very high, ability. And many people with learning disabilities are high achievers – Richard Branson, Tom Cruise, Whoopi Goldberg, Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, Jamie Oliver to name but a few.

What comes to mind when you hear the term “learning disability”? Dyslexia, or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder perhaps? And how well do you really understand these terms? Dyslexia, for instance, is an umbrella term which covers a variety of more specific disorders, and two dyslexic people may well have quite different problems.
All together over sixty different learning disabilities have been identified – and this, for the ordinary EFL teacher is the first problem. Most of us will never have a really in-depth understanding of the field, and are unlikely to be able to diagnose learners’ problems with any real degree of accuracy. We may have a general feeling that “something’s not right” and feel that a student demonstrates various general indicators of dyslexia, ADHD etc, but diagnosis is the work of experts. Not every learning problem is a learning disability. For example, as the Helpguide website points out :

“ If parents or teachers have a personal style at odds with the child’s style (such as a highly structured, visually organized adult and an energetic, kinesthetic child who learns by doing, not by seeing), the mismatch may appear to be a learning disability in the child.” 

To be sure you have diagnosed a learning disability correctly, you really need confirmation from an professional.  But most of us are not so lucky. If you are working in the private sector, you are unlikely to have the necessary help and back-up of a learning disability expert. Even worse, in some parts of the world the concept of learning disability may not be recognised at all, and even when it is, the education system may not provide the means of dealing with the problem. And if the system doesn’t recognise the problem, then neither will the students themselves – or their parents if they are of school age. This is the situation in which students will start to get “labelled” – as “lazy”, “badly-behaved” or “stupid” – and to believe it themselves.


Luckily, there is a lot you can do without having specialist knowledge – and without necessarily having to mention the idea of learning disability to either the institution where you are working or to the students themselves. Many of the strategies that can be used to help students with learning disabilities are, I feel, just general principles of good teaching – they just become even more necessary than usual with this type of learner. We’ll talk about those in the next article, but in the meantime there is a wealth of information on learning disabilities on the web. You’ll find some of the most useful general articles listed below, while others which focus specifically on teaching strategies will be listed in the next article.

In general terms, a learning disability is a neurological malfunction which may create problems with tasks such as focusing and maintaining attention, text-deciphering, interpreting and organising information, remembering verbal information and many others. One article which gives some excellent visual examples of what it means to be dyslexic and to try and read a normal text can be seen on the ETNI website. Because of these problems, the learner will consistently underachieve academically – that is, underachieve in terms of what their general level of intelligence, be it average or high, shows them to be capable of.

However, given this, what are the warning signs that a student may have a learning disability? There are too many to list them all here, but in summary, they may include :

• reading and writing problems - generally poor reading ability, tendency to reverse letters (ie reading saw for was, or writing d for b), poor spelling etc.
• auditory problems - including excessive sensitivity to noise, or difficulty paying attention when spoken to.
• spatial problems - difficulty in following instructions, or differentiating right from left.
• motor problems - such as extreme clumsiness.
• memory - such as difficulty in memorising information.
• organisation - may have difficulty organising belongings, following a schedule etc.
• social - may not use eye contact, may have difficulty reading body language or facial expressions, and experience social isolation.
• attention - may have a short attention span and be easily distracted, and have difficulty conforming to routines.

Two articles which include fuller descriptions of the symptoms of learning disorders can be found here and here.

If you’re working in a part of the world where learning disabilities are recognised, and if you’re in the state system, you may well have someone on the staff who is an expert – or at least the possibility of referring the student to an expert. In any case, you will be able to sound out the opinions of other members of staff who have taught the student to see if they agree with you, and to see if they think referral is necessary.

See here for Part Two of the article.

Acknowledgement

• Photo provided under Creative Commons Licence by Kevin Zollman via flickr.

Further reading

• For a detailed and very useful account of the problems caused by, and the signs of, various learning disorders, see these excellent articles by Christine Root and Pearl Pirie
• Follow these links for specific information on dyslexia, on indicators of dyslexia, and on ADHD
• Kormos and Kontra (eds) Language Learners with Special Needs: An International Perspective Cambridge