Help, the English Language-teacher is Dyslexic (held.com.br)
Even I sometimes wonder how it is possible that a dyslectic person like me can be a foreign language teacher.
It is often said that teachers who have learning difficulties themselves tend to be good teachers.
It seems difficult to understand for most people that something which appears very easy to learn for everybody actually can, for some people, be very difficult, almost impossible or really impossible to learn. The same goes for many teachers.
Someone with learning difficulties knows from personal experience that this can happen. Such person also knows how it feels not to be able to learn what for the others is easy. This helps becoming a good teacher. A teacher with learning difficulties is more likely to be open to unexpected, serious learning problems a certain pupil can have.
Luckily, there are now many resources available which help dyslectics survive better in this language steered world and me to teach languages. Below, you can find the ones which help me most with my teaching.
One of the things that help me a lot is computer technology. Before the availability of home computers or personal computes, yes, I am from that time, correcting texts myself was impossible. I would come to the point that rewriting a page to remove the spelling errors it had, I would introduce at least one or two new ones. With a computer I can correct only the errors which I know are in the text and leave the rest unchanged.
When spelling correctors became available I could find much more of my spelling mistakes myself. Over time they became better and better.
Like with most dyslectics, my handwriting is often difficult or impossible to read, sometimes even for me. Writing on a computer and having a printer, producing readable texts has become much easier.
With typewriters, producing readable text was easy enough of course but correcting spelling got stuck on the mentioned point of introducing as much errors as correcting when retyping a page. Correction fluid was helpful for those who could detect errors before taking the paper out of the typewriter, something which I wasn't able to.
My notebook sized whiteboards. Pieces of white laminate, about A4 and A3 in size. More about these Whiteboards at this page.
I always wanted to know why. Why things are the way they are. Why I had to do things this way or that way. Often I got frustrated because my teachers couldn't or didn't want to give me the answers. To which extent this is related to being dyslectic, I am not sure. It does seem to be true that dyslectics are more intelligent than non-dyslectics, at average of course. Being intelligent makes the urge to to know about the why's stronger.
Thinking I can't be the only one who always wants to know why, I started to give my pupils the kind of explanations I always wanted to get. They seem to appreciate it. Some pupils even tell me they missed those explanations with other teachers and like it that I do give them.
Thinking that if something works for me, who has learning problems, it therefore must work for others too, even if they have other or no learning problems, would be pretty naive. On the other hand, the chance that it can benefit other learners is big enough to try and see if it does. That's why I started to use those things which were helpful for me to learn languages in my teaching, even with pupils who have no apparent learning difficulties. And of course I check how well it works.
It is good to see that most of those things I tried like this were beneficial to my learners, including to the rather normal ones.
This part is meant to be about why or how I developed my own teaching resources. Here I use the word resources in the sense of everything one can have available for teaching. This goes from handouts to how one thinks about teaching. After all, everything is related. The choice of a piece of text to be used depends on how I want to use it to teach and this depends on how I think about teaching. Having to bother about the difference between a teaching technique, method, methodology or approach is also avoided.
More explanations will be added bit by bit.
Resulting handouts can be found on this page.
Here are a few ways in which I tried to use my experience as a dyslectic learner to better help my pupils with their learning.
Things I have developed because of being a dyslectic language teacher.
There doesn't seem to be a clear link to my learning difficulties for following things I developed.