Information about the Topic – State of the Art, Formulation of the Teaching Problem

Definition of Dyslexia: 

Dyslexia is the most researched disorder in the group of Specific Learning Difficulties (SLDs) and also the most common cause of reading, writing, and spelling difficulties. It extends along a continuum from mild to severe, and from short to lifelong (Magajna et al., 2008). It is an intrinsically determined disorder, and it stems from developmental or central nervous system specificities. It involves a group of diverse but interrelated factors that are part of the individual and affect their functioning throughout life (Raduly-Zorgo et al., 2010). Learners with dyslexia often have difficulties processing and remembering verbal information due to difficulties in verbal memory and verbal processing speed (BDA, 2010; Rose, 2009).

A significant aspect of dyslexia is a deficit in the phonological component of language, which manifests itself as a poorer ability to recognize, discriminate, and manipulate sounds in spoken language. Due to difficulties with phonological awareness, students with dyslexia often struggle to differentiate sounds, divide words into syllabus, recognizing onsets, rimes and phonemes, adding or removing sounds to form new words. Phonological awareness is also crucial for reading and spelling, since it affects the ability to learn how to match sounds and letters. 

Phonological processing in the mother tongue and in the foreign language has been shown to be linguistically interdependent, meaning that phonological processing skills in one language predict word recognition skills within and across languages (Geva, 2000 cited in Nijakowska, 2016). This means that if a learner has phonological weaknesses in his or her first language, he or she is likely to have similar difficulties in the foreign language (Simon, 2000), with the intensity and nature of these difficulties depending on the language or its orthographic system.

The orthographic system of a language affects the learning of reading and writing in that language. Languages with shallow or transparent orthographic systems, such as Italian, Spanish, Finnish, Greek and Slovenian, where there is a consistent mapping of sounds and symbols, are more learner-friendly, while languages with deep orthographic systems, such as English and French, make it more challenging and difficult for learners with dyslexia to learn to read and spell in these languages (Nijakowska, 2016). In transparent languages, a single letter or sequence of letters is often pronounced in the same way, whereas in a non-transparent language, there are several different pronunciations. Similarly, a single phoneme may be spelled in different ways in non-transparent languages, while it is always spelled the same way in transparent languages (Frost & Ziegler 2007). 

Further, individuals with dyslexia also have difficulties with orthographic awareness. These include recognitions of letter positions, combinations and sequences that make a word, familiar letter patterns within whole words or within words, the correspondence between sounds/phonemes and letters. These difficulties are more pronounced in languages where a single sound can be represented by more than one letter (e.g. bright) or different letter combinations in different words (e.g. try, time).