STRATEGIES FOR THE MOST COMMON SPELLING MISTAKES: THE SCHWA [Premium]

STRATEGIES FOR THE MOST COMMON SPELLING MISTAKES: THE SCHWA [Premium]

Once you learn how to recognize the ‘schwa’, you’ll start recognizing them everywhere! In linguistics, the schwa sound is represented by an upside-down ‘e’ and the mouth position is a lot like the ‘uh’ sound in ‘butter’. It contributes to lots of misspellings in dyslexic students (and actually non-dyslexic students too) so recognizing the patterns can significantly improve all-round spelling performance. STRATEGY 1: EXAGGERATE / MISPRONOUNCE THE SCHWA One surprisingly easy strategy is to exaggerate and deliberately mispronounce a word in order to remember the correct spelling. For instance, the-thee reminds you that the schwa is spelled with an ‘e’. Look at the following 3 objects: monitor, computer, and calendar. To remember -or, -er, and -ar, a student can pronounce monitor as mon-i-TOR, exaggerating the […]

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DROPPING OUT BECAUSE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE [Premium]

DROPPING OUT BECAUSE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE [Premium]

  At Harvard University in the 1970s, a clinical psychologist made a startling discovery. Intending to study the emotional problems that caused students at one of the world’s elite universities to drop out of school to drop out, he found out instead that the most common reason students dropped out of their degree programs was that they were unable to satisfy Harvard’s foreign language requirement. “Dinklage described three groups of students who were otherwise, bright, gifted, and highly motivated, but who remained unsuccessful in the foreign language classroom. He reported that these students were not helped by merely improving study habits or by adjusting to postsecondary demands.” The 1st group of students demonstrated problems in written language that were most apparent in “the student’s reading […]

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[PREMIUM] Tips from a Dyslexic World Memory Champion

[PREMIUM] Tips from a Dyslexic World Memory Champion

When people say they would like to ‘brain train’ or get smarter for school, they often mean they want to make their brains more efficient – so they learn more, but also work less. One of the most straightforward ways to do this is to boost memory – and for most dyslexic people, the way you train may be more important than how hard or how much. We talk about memory trade-offs a bit in our book, The Dyslexic Advantage, but briefly, in general, dyslexic people of all ages tend to show a preference for personally-experienced memories rather than dry facts that need to be memorized by rote. A trick for memorizing more efficiently is to take the dry stuff and transform it into something […]

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Memory: Why Drill Can Kill – and What to Do Instead [Premium]

Memory: Why Drill Can Kill – and What to Do Instead [Premium]

It would almost seem without question that repetition should be helpful for learning, but researchers have found that if  repetitions are too much and too long (longer than 10 seconds in one paradigm), further repetition caused poorer memory and word retrieval rather than better! From one of the papers below: “Both Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated a striking and clear violation of the memory benefits typically associated with repetition. Specifically, increasing the rehearsal time of a word did not yield a straightforward monotonic increase in performance on a later free association test; rather, it led to a nonmonotonic effect, with performance initially increasing, but then declining with longer repetition durations.” The reason for this effect is currently being studied, but the researchers speculated that the increased forgetting […]

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[Premium] What to Do If a Reading Curriculum Doesn’t Work

[Premium] What to Do If a Reading Curriculum Doesn’t Work

It happens to everybody. You research a curriculum thoroughly or it gets through several levels of a review and then you put it into action and… it just doesn’t connect. What do you do? There are several common reasons why a curriculum doesn’t connect with a particular student – and so some trial and error and modification need to take place. The most common reasons that certain curricula fail for a particular student include: 1. Going Too Fast   Because there can be difficulty registering information accurately (sounds, letters, words), a student may need to slow the pace down considerably if the lessons aren’t sinking in. It may seem counterintuitive if you feel a student is slipping farther behind, but reducing work and simplifying as much as […]

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Shakespeare and Dyslexia – Making Words Physical [Premium]

Shakespeare and Dyslexia – Making Words Physical [Premium]

Today is National Shakespeare Day, and dyslexia and Shakespeare have been on our minds. We recently mentioned that Lloyd Everitt (yes, he’s dyslexic) is the youngest actor to play Othello at Shakespeare’s own Globe Theater. But we’ve also been thinking about Shakespeare recently because, on our trip down to California, we had the pleasure of stopping by the Oregon Shakespeare Company’s Rebecca Carey, the head of Voice and Text. Rebecca has  an accomplished career that includes acting herself as well as teaching and consultant roles with the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Oxford School of Drama, Broadway, and American Repertory Theatre. Rebecca is also co-author (with her husband, David Carey) of The Shakespeare Workbook and Video, a brilliant practical course for actors that includes such topics […]

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The Truth About Multi-Tasking | Premium

The Truth About Multi-Tasking | Premium

Are you a good multi-tasker?  If you answered ‘yes’, scientists at Stanford might disagree with you. When students from Stanford participated in a multitasking experiment with color bars, those who multitasked with more media had more trouble ignoring irrelevant stimuli. Multi-Tasking Has Its Costs     From the report: “Heavy Media Multitaskers have greater difficulty filtering out irrelevant stimuli from their environment..and they are less effective in suppressing the activation of irrelevant task sets (task switching). Dyslexics as a group are more sensitive to visual and auditory distractions As a group, dyslexic people are more likely to be sensitive to distractions (both visual and auditory) which is why some students request and receive small group testing accommodations for high stakes tests.  To learn more about trouble […]

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