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SIOP plan for Science

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Assisting Students Struggling with Mathematics- Response to Intervention (RtI) for Elementary and Middle Schools 

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Mathematics Instruction LD Guide for Teachers

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SIOP Lesson Plans and Activities

Our collection of SIOP lesson plans and activities includes exemplary SIOP lesson plans developed by teachers who were involved in the foundational SIOP research study, as well as new updates from our current research and professional development projects. We invite you to read these lesson plans and activities individually or with your colleagues in order to learn more about the SIOP Model. You may want to discuss why these lessons are effective for English learners or how to incorporate the SIOP strategies these teachers used in your own lessons.

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Spotlight

CAL was a partner in the Center for Research on the Educational Achievement and Teaching of English Language Learners (CREATE). CREATE researchers developed curriculum to build the language and literacy skills of English learners in the middle grades. Lesson plans and materials were infused with instructional features of the SIOP Model including language objectives, explicit vocabulary instruction, student interaction, building background knowledge, and comprehensible input.
Learn more.

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Our collection of SIOP lesson plans and activities includes exemplary SIOP lesson plans developed by teachers who were involved in the foundational SIOP research study, as well as new updates from our current research and professional development projects. We invite you to read these lesson plans and activities individually or with your colleagues in order to learn more about the SIOP Model.

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SIOP Plan for PE

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Teaching Mathematics to English Language Learners

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THE DEVELOPMENT OF ADAPTIVE LEARNING APPLICATION TO FACILITATE STUDENTS WITH DYSLEXIA IN LEARNING MALAY LANGUAGE

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Phonological Awareness in Young Bilingual Dyslexics in Malaysia

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Dyslexia in Chinese language An overview of research and practice

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DYSLEXIA IN THE ASPECT OF MALAY LANGUAGE SPELLING

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DYSLEXIA IN THE ASPECT OF MALAY LANGUAGE SPELLING

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Characterizing the Overlap between SLI and Dyslexia in Chinese:
The Role of Phonology and Beyond

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Characterizing the Overlap between SLI and Dyslexia in Chinese- The Role of Phonology and Beyond

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(Dis)connections between specific language impairment and dyslexia in Chinese

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Published online 1 September 2004 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news040830-5

News

Brain regions behind reading difficulties differ between cultures.

Chinese children with reading difficulties have problems converting symbols into meanings, rather than letters into sounds.

There is no one cause for dyslexia: rather, the causes vary between languages. So conclude researchers who have found that Chinese children with reading difficulties have different brain anomalies to their Western counterparts.

The finding explains why one can be dyslexic in one language but not another. The team also hopes the work will aid the design of culturally specific strategies for learning to read and write that could benefit everyone.

People with dyslexia often find it difficult to recognize and understand words. Speakers of alphabetic languages, such as English or Russian, can have a problem converting letters into sounds. Dyslexics in these languages have reduced activity in a brain region called the left temporoparietal cortex.

But Chinese readers must learn the meanings of around 5,000 different characters, each corresponding to a word. Instead of letter-to-sound conversion problems, Chinese dyslexics have difficulties extrapolating from a symbol's shape to its sound and meaning.

Throwing shapes

Neuroscientist Li Hai Tan from the University of Hong Kong, China, and his colleagues speculated that dyslexia in Chinese readers might affect a different brain region. They used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to monitor the brain activity of eight impaired and eight normal readers as they performed two language tests.

In the first task, the children were asked whether two Chinese characters had the same pronunciation. In the second, they were shown one real and one bogus character, and asked about their meaning.

People with dyslexia often find it difficult to recognise and understand words.© Punchstock

The dyslexic children performed worse, but both groups showed the same activity in their left temporoparietal cortex. Instead, children with reading difficulties showed less brain activity in another region, the left middle frontal gyrus. This area helps to coordinate shapes, pronunciation and meaning, says Tan. The results are reported in this week's Nature.

Most people thought that dyslexia is rooted in one brain region, Tan says. "But previous studies never looked at Chinese children."

"The study shows that the neural basis of reading is complex and differs depending on the nature of the writing system," agrees Guinevere Eden of Georgetown University, Washington, who studies dyslexia.

Twisted tongues

The finding could help researchers develop treatments for dyslexia that target the relevant problem, such as converting characters into meanings, or letters into sounds. Similar approaches could help non-dyslexics to read better, or benefit those learning a second language.

"We need to be more open minded about diverse treatment approaches for different aspects of the reading process," says Eden.

The finding could also explain the rare cases of people who read normally in one language, but are dyslexic in another. For example, one bilingual boy has reading problems in English, but none in Japanese.

Japanese is a halfway house between alphabetic languages and Chinese. Readers often have to match shapes to syllables, a different task that is likely to involve a third, as yet unidentified brain region. So the boy's left temporoparietal cortex was probably under active, whilst the unknown Japanese language-related area was fine, says Eden.

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Chinese dyslexics have problems of their own

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Published online 1 September 2004 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news040830-5 News Brain regions behind reading difficulties differ between cultures. Chinese children with reading difficulties have problems converting symbols into meanings, rather than letters into sounds. There is no one cause for dyslexia: rather, the causes vary between languages.

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This article attempts to explain why dyslexic students experience difficulties learning written Chinese. We do this by linking some of the inherent difficulties faced by dyslexic children with the nature of the Chinese script.

Nature of the Chinese Script

Each Chinese character is made up of different strokes. The visual complexity of a Chinese character can be measured by its number of strokes. The number of strokes can be arranged from just one to over 20. A stroke in a Chinese character is similar to a letter in an alphabetic writing system as a change of a stroke changes the meaning and the sound of a character.

For example:

A stroke by itself does not carry any information on the meaning of sound of the character but different combination of strokes make up different stroke-patterns or radicals. The same radicals could appear in different sizes at different locations of different characters such as 今 in 岑 or 念. It is estimated that there are around 600 radicals. Radicals carry information on the meaning or sound of a character.

Chinese characters often contain a phonetic radical which provides the sound and a semantic radical which represents the meaning of the character. For instance, in the character 燈 [deng] or lamp, 火 or "fire" is the semantic radical providing a clue to the meaning of the character while 登 [deng] is a phonetic component which has the same pronunciation as the whole character. Similarly in the word 蚊 [wen], the radical on the left side of the character denote meaning (insect) whilst the right side of the character gives the sound of the word.

Difficulties with Written Chinese

Dyslexic children usually have difficulty processing sound/symbol relationships

There are a large number of visual symbols in Chinese. The Chinese language is also tonal. Although there are some script-sound regularities in Chinese, Chinese children need to learn a lot more symbol-sound association than in English (Ho and Lai, 1999).

Dyslexic children have memory problems

Research by Ho, Law and Ng (2000), suggests that Chinese with dyslexia have difficulties in keeping sounds in their short-term memory, especially unfamiliar sounds. This adds to the difficulty in learning symbol-sound associations.

Chinese characters are also similar in appearance and may differ by simply adding or deleting a single stroke. Dyslexic children may find it extremely difficult to remember the slight differences between Chinese characters.

The fact the Chinese radicals can occur in different sizes at different locations in different words makes the task of remembering characters even more complex.

Dyslexic children may become tired easily after reading for a short time

Reading Chinese characters requires the ability to identify the stroke pattern in different characters. The visual complexity of Chinese characters and differentiating between similar-looking characters may tax the processing powers of dyslexia.

Dyslexics may have word-retrieval problems

Ho and Lai (1999) have found in their research that Chinese dyslexic children seem to have some generalized deficits in the speed of access to their store of Chinese characters. This was demonstrated at the basic level of naming discrete items as well as at the complex level that required scanning and sequencing strategies. This deficit may also explain why reading Chinese characters is taxing for dyslexics.

Dyslexic children may have left/right confusion or directionality problems

It is likely that left/right confusion or directionality problems add to the difficulty of dyslexics in remembering Chinese characters. Dyslexic children may also transpose or reverse radicals when they write them.

This article only explains some of the reasons why dyslexic students feel so frustrated learning written Chinese. More extensive research needs to be undertaken to fully understand what happens when dyslexics process and learn second languages like Chinese and to discover what can be done to help them perform this task less painfully.
References

Ho, Connie S-H. & Bryant, B. (1999). Different Visual Skills are important in Learning to read English and Chinese. Educational and Child Psychology, Vol. 16(3).

Ho, Connie S-H. & Lai, Daphne Ngar-Chi (1999). Naming-Speed Deficits and Phonological Memory Deficits in Chinese Developmental Dyslexia. Learning and Individual Differences, Vol. 11 (2).

Ho, Connie S-H, Law, Teresa P-S & Ng, Penny Man. (2000). The phonological deficit hypothesis in Chinese developmental dyslexia. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal 13.

About the Author:
Liu Yimei
Assistant Director, SpLD Assessment Services
Rex House Learning Centre
Learn more about Yimei
This article was first published in FACETS

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Why is Learning Written Chinese so Difficult?

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This article attempts to explain why dyslexic students experience difficulties learning written Chinese. We do this by linking some of the inherent difficulties faced by dyslexic children with the nature of the Chinese script. Each Chinese character is made up of different strokes.

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Taking the Guesswork out of Locating Evidence-Based Mathematics Practices for Diverse Learners