Abstract:

Dyslexia is considered a cognitive disability and is the most common language-based learning disability. In the Philippines, the number of dyslexics have increased dramatically over the years. Having such condition affects a person's ability in terms of his learning skills such as reading, writing, processing information, and understanding. These disabilities can further interfere with higher level thinking skills such as abstract reasoning, planning, organizing, memory and attention. This resulted to only few of the students with dyslexia being able to reach secondary education or even graduate in college. This project explored the use of ICT in helping the students cope with the difficulties brought about by dyslexia. Such technology allows for the individualization of teaching and learning materials, making learning more focused rather than grasping from a typical classroom setup of one teacher to many.

Wordlab school is an institution which caters to students who have dyslexia while maintaining compliance with the Department of Education’s K-12 curriculum. The thesis project involved the development of a mobile application that addresses the learning problems of the dyslexic students of Wordlab’s Sling Class tutorial program. Aside from the innate problem of dealing with letter reversals, other challenges in learning include difficulty in spelling and placing phonograms in words correctly and the lack of learning tools in teaching the spelling and decoding class in Filipino.

Flippino is a mobile application that will aid students in Grades 1 to 3 in recognizing the different letters and sight words that make up the Filipino vernacular as well as to help these students in formulating basic Filipino sentence construction. The instructional design of the mobile application is based on the Madrasa, Slingerland, and Davis Dyslexia approaches, incorporating various multimedia elements and interactivities to enhance the learning experience, including demonstrations through animation, audio-visual letter sound associations, letter tracing, interactive storybook, and simple voice recognition. Dyslexic students are “picturethinkers”, hence using visual aids would help address disorientation and help them easily recall lessons. Means to allow for teacher interventions in the mobile app were also integrated. Additionally, the Gamification Theory was used for the design of assessment and evaluation activities in the application to further increase student motivation and lesson retention.

The ADDIE model was used throughout the project as the methodology for instructional systems development: from the Analysis Phase, where the proponents identified the learning problems, to Implementation and Evaluation, where positive feedback were gathered from the mobile application's intended users through user's acceptance testing.

Keywords:

Dyslexia, mobile application, courseware, language learning, Filipino.