Προσκεκλημένος Ομιλητής
Chloë Marshall
UCL Institute of Education, University College London, UK
Beyond phonology in studies of English-speaking pupils with dyslexia
Chloë Marshall, PhD, with Jennifer Donovan, PhD, and Liz Broadbent, MA
For a long time, phonological processing deficits have been claimed to underlie the reading and spelling difficulties of children with dyslexia. Much of the research on dyslexia – including on dyslexic children who are become literate in English, a notoriously irregular orthography – has focused on such phonological difficulties. In this talk, however, I present two studies that go beyond phonology.
In Study 1, which investigated spelling in 8-9 year-olds with dyslexia, Jennifer Donovan devised an intervention that makes use of interactive (dynamic) assessment to teach spelling strategies that include phonology, semantics, morphology, and orthographic rules. An evaluation of this assessment has indicated its effectiveness in helping teachers to better understand their pupils’ spelling strategies and in improving these pupils’ spelling. In Study 2, Liz Broadbent compared how well dyslexic children aged 7-11 read texts printed in two different fonts, Arial and OpenDyslexic. Both dyslexic pupils and pupils without identified reading difficulties read more accurately and fluently when the text was presented in the OpenDyslexic font, although there was no advantage for reading comprehension.
I conclude the presentation by discussing the implications of these and similar studies for (1) our understanding of the causes of dyslexia and (2) for how dyslexic pupils should be supported. I argue that for both these objectives we need to go beyond phonology in order to understand how other features of language and text challenge dyslexic readers.
Προσκεκλημένα εργαστήρια
Francesca Volpato
Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice, Italy
Assessment and training materials for second language learners and students with learning difficulties.
In this talk I will present some studies in which the syntactic competence of Italian-speaking students with learning disabilities and bilinguals / L2 learners of Italian was assessed using comprehension and elicited production tasks. In addition to the materials used for the assessment of complex syntactic structures (subject, object and oblique relative clauses, passive sentences, sentences containing clitic pronouns), I will present some activities and training materials used to improve the linguistic competence of these students. The activities proposed to these participants were developed following previous studies (Levy and Friedmann 2009; Thompson et al. 2003) and consist in the explicit teaching of syntactic rules (argument structure, theta theory, and syntactic movement) involved in the derivation of complex syntactic structures. These studies have shown that the explicit teaching of syntactic rules contributes to improving the linguistic syntactic abilities of these individuals. At the end of the teaching period, the participants showed improved performance in the production and comprehension of trained structures, and generalization effects to other (untrained) complex syntactic structures.
Θέμελης Καραμίνης
Edge Hill University, London, UK
Αξιολόγηση επικοινωνιακών ικανοτήτων και ανίχνευση συμπεριφορών σχετιζόμενων με τον αυτισμό στα ελληνικά
Στο εργαστήριο αυτό θα εστιάσουμε στο Ερωτηματολόγιο Αξιολόγησης Επικοινωνιακών Ικανοτήτων (την ελληνική έκδοχη του Social Communication Questionnaire) και τη χρήση του για την ανίχνευση αυτιστικής συμπτωματολογίας σε κλινικά, εκπαιδευτικά και ερευνητικά πλάισια. Θα δούμε, επίσης, τις ψυχομετρικές ιδίοτητες του εργαλείου, κάνοντας συγκρίσεις με άλλες χώρες και γλώσσες. Τέλος, θα συζητήσουμε τις προκλήσεις στη διάγνωση του αυτισμού σε χώρες όπου υπάρχουν λιγότερα διαθέσιμοι πόροι και διαγνωστικά εργαλεία, καθώς και τη πιθανή χρήσιμότητα νέων τεχνολογιών, όπως η μηχανική μάθηση.
Πρόγραμμα Συνεδρίου
(ανανέωση 28/09/2022)