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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zafiGBrFkRM.

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https://baesacuk.sharepoint.com/:w:/r/sites/teams/coaching/_layouts/15/Doc.aspx?sourcedoc=%7BE2B561F7-F636-427E-9C94-77C3EDAA2170%7D&file=Dyslexia%20-%20typical%20difficulties%20in%20learning%20(identify)%20(2).docx&action=default&mobileredirect=true

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Recommend  - For consolidation and further info: ​

Helen Arkell YouTube video ‘Understanding Dyslexia and Other Literacy Difficulties’​

www.youtube.com/watch?v=bf3BmKVkEVU​

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Share documents  (all already available on All Staff Documents in Dyslexia folders)​

Dyslexia – Typical Difficulties in the Classroom – both versions​

BDA Adult Dyslexia Checklist​

Education and Training Foundation Resource Guides - 02 Spotting the Signs; 03 Underlying Issues; 04 Exploring the Difficulties; 05 Dyslexia Strengths; 06 Top Tips for Teaching​

Maths and Dyslexia or Dyscalculia​

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Link to supporting documents; typical difficulties in the classroom. ​

https://baesacuk-my.sharepoint.com/:w:/g/personal/gaulte_baes_ac_uk/EXivTV05oMBPpR5GAeqZIf8BAVdMr1DzT9bvY63B5hjQwA?e=bozZoI​

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The most useful fonts for Dyslexics are:

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The most useful fonts for Dyslexics are:

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Page not found - British Dyslexia Association

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The British Dyslexia Association is the voice for the 10% of the population that are dyslexic

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Hi Elaine - thanks for the training session today (10/9/21)  This is the website I was talking about.  You can look up all kinds of spelling issues - the link below is to a quiz about spell checkers.

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Hi Elaine - thanks for the training session today (10/9/21)  This is the website I was talking about.  You can look up all kinds of spelling issues - the link below is to a quiz about spell checkers.

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Johanna Stirling has a very useful website that covers the issue of Etymology.  She came to Brasshouse some years ago to run a spelling workshop at one of our conferences.  This is from her webite  and is a link to her question about spell checker - how helpful is it?  Scroll down and try the quiz or try it with students.

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People have said to me "Why bother teaching spelling nowadays? We all use spell checkers". This not only assumes that all writing is done electronically (which most of it is for some people but not all), but also that people know how to use them well (which some don't). A sentence in an essay from a student of mine started "The main thighbone is ...". I'm not sure what the learner had written but had obviously meant to write "The main thing is...".

I examined a corpus I gathered of 372 spelling errors from adult EFL learners with spelling problems. The mistakes came from handwriting so had not been through a spell checker. But I wanted to find out how useful a spell checker would have been to them. I ran the words through a Microsoft Word spell checker. Some interesting results:

16% of the errors would not have been flagged by the spell checker at all because they were homophones or other real words.

15% were shown as errors but the intended word (as indicated by context) was not offered.

So in over 30% of cases the spell checker would not have helped.
My student who wrote about thighbones probably just took the first alternative offered, without applying any brain cells to the decision. And this is another problem - very often you are offered several alternatives to choose from and the one at the top of the list may not be the one you need. Many of the errors offered up to five alternatives.

Of the 261 errors that were picked up by the spell checker and the right word was offered, 21% required the user to choose a word other than the first one shown, ie the second, third, fourth or fifth word.

So thinking still needs to take place. Some learners have admitted to me that they always take the first option shown. Blind faith!
The good news, perhaps, is that in 51% of the total sample, the intended word was the one offered first. But even then usually there were still other options that the writer needed to discount.

Maybe the easiest is when there is only one spelling offered. For example, a student who wrote 'culdn't' would have only been offered 'couldn't'. There were 62 cases where only one word was offered (16% of the total sample) . But of these 62, 11% didn't offer the correct word, so a writer can't even have complete confidence in this. An example to illustrate: a learner who wrote 'funately' meaning 'fortunately' would only have been offered one alternative, 'finitely', which would have made nonsense of his sentence if he'd accepted it.

So what's my point here? Spell checkers are undoubtedly useful. But if learners are too far from the original spelling or if they confuse two words the spell checker may not be helpful. We need to train these people in the use of them and encourage them to use other strategies too. Like much learner training, there is a danger of patronising learners - many will already know how to use a spell checker well.

An exercise like this may be the answer. Have a go and if it's useful, pass it on (but please link back to here).

There'll be more about using spell checkers and learning from them in my book, coming soon:

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People have said to me "Why bother teaching spelling nowadays? We all use spell checkers". This not only assumes that all writing is done electronically (which most of it is for some people but not all), but also that people know how to use them well (which some don't).

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The link to this video came through my colleague Ozlem Green. Since we can't get dyslexic diagnoses for our ESOL students they might help teachers and students with different strategies.

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Jay Blades, presenter of The Repair Shop, struggles to read. Now he has decided it is finally time to learn.

Jay Blades, presenter of The Repair Shop, has decided it's finally time to learn to read. He has been told he has the reading age of an 11-year-old. Throughout his life he has found ways of avoiding the written word, and this film digs deep into how this has shaped him.

Blades left school with no qualifications and nothing to his name than a reputation as a great fighter. Can he now, in mid-life, tackle what he failed to learn the first time round?

He's not alone in facing this issue. Research findings suggest that a quarter of all children in England leave primary school, like Blades, unable to read to the expected level. More than eight million adults in the UK have poor literacy skills, and half of all prisoners either can't read or struggle to do so.

Using a system developed for use in prisons by the Shannon Trust, Jay commits to learn to read with Read Easy, a charity whose volunteers do one-to-one coaching. Along the way, he revisits key moments in his life that were shaped by not being able to read: the 'learner' class at school, the dead-end jobs he had to take because he had no qualifications, and not being able to read his children bedtime stories. Daughter Zola is now 15, and Jay wants to read her a story before she reaches adulthood on her next birthday.

Following Jay over six months of learning, this intimate and revealing film goes behind closed doors to see how he organizes his upholstery business without the written word, manages on The Repair Shop without scripts and struggles each day with his vowels and consonants as he tries to learn phonics. We meet Jay's girlfriend Lisa, his daughter Zola and his 'adopted' family who all help him with his reading challenge. Jay also meets school pupils and adults who struggle with reading and writing, as he discovers the human stories behind the nation's literacy statistics.

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BBC One - Jay Blades: Learning to Read at 51

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Jay Blades, presenter of The Repair Shop, struggles to read. It's finally time to learn.