Teaching specialized vocabulary to dyslexic adult second-language learners: A proposal for multimodal lexical input enhancement

This paper discusses the nature of vocabulary learning and suggests how to enhance lexical input processing in adult students with dyslexia through activities adapted in multimodal and multisensory perspectives. Research on vocabulary acquisition has focused on how lexical knowledge is encoded and stored in the brain (Aitchison 1994, Meara 1997, Jiang 2000). Learning vocabulary results in a complex cognitive operation which involves perception, attention and memory. Learners must be able to select different types of auditory or visual stimuli among a multitude of stimuli, segment units in the speech stream through orthographic or phonological processing, create memory traces, which will then be modified when new input is met. Moreover, once acquired, vocabulary must be consciously retrieved from long-term memory stores. Research on dyslexia has highlighted that this is a condition characterized by biological, cognitive and behavioural differences (Nicolson and Fawcett 1998, Frith 1999). Such differences have been correlated to difficulties in language processing and in the access and retrieval of the lexicon stored in long-term memory. Therefore, second language vocabulary learning, and its use in communication and in text comprehension, might be severely disrupted in dyslexic people. Some multimodal and multisensory activities are used to enhance specialised vocabulary learning in adult Italian students with dyslexia. Two groups of students, an experimental and a control one, were taught new specialised vocabulary using two different strategies. The experimental group received multimodal and multisensory instruction, including an adapted training application to develop first-language lexicon used with dyslexic children. The control group, instead, was taught following the guidelines discussed in the literature on foreign language teaching to dyslexic learners (cf. Nijakowska 2010, Kormos and Smith 2012).. Three final tests were administered to the two groups. A text-comprehension reading task and two lexical retrieval tasks, a matching task and word recall task. The experimental group performed better than control, and was particularly better in the word recall task. The results of this preliminary study seem to confirm the beneficial impact of multimodal and multisensory teaching methods for specialised vocabulary acquisition in learners with dyslexia.