Abstract:

Educational and psychosocial functioning of a student with dyslexia in school is riddled with difficulties. In the field of educational problems, those are, for example, difficulties in reading, writing, understanding the read commands, organization of work or performing some complicated, multi-stage tasks. Different quality of work of a student with dyslexia, often slower and with more errors, translates primarily to how the student perceives their own person. Over time, educational failures can be translated into psychosocial functioning. The conducted research has shown that dyslexic students have lower self-esteem (Gindrich, 2004), inadequate perception of their person in relation to their abilities (Gindrich, 2004; Bogdanowicz, 2011), they do not recognize their strengths and they remember mostly failures and hardships ( Monteiro et al., 2018), they also have a lower assessment of their social competences (Kucharczyk, Dłużniewska, 2017).

Frequent experience of educational failures, as well as the awareness that despite the large contribution of work, the effect will still not be satisfactory, results in the student treating dyslexia as a problem that hinders their life in various areas, above all, in education. To make it easier for them to function as a student and carry out educational tasks, they should receive adequate support, first from the teachers. The aim of this research is to recognize how a dyslexic student perceives dyslexia and support received in the school environment. To achieve this goal, 5 partially structured interviews were conducted with students aged 13-15.

The analysis of interviews shows that the studied students perceive dyslexia primarily as educational problems (reading problems, problems with reading comprehension, problems with concentration, when there is noise in the classroom, problems with longer tasks). They have the feeling that their educational situation depends primarily on themselves, on their work, and at the same time indicate that due to their dyslexia, their educational opportunities are smaller compared to other students without this disorder. They yearn information about their successes and praise. They emphasize that praise is very motivating for them. Most of all, they expect teachers to understand that when handling many tasks, students with dyslexia feel tired faster than students without dyslexia. They also want acknowledgement of even small successes as the bigger ones, as they say, “often are impossible”. They care about the acceptance of a peer group and to be able to feel the same as others do.

Keywords:

School milieu, social support, dyslexia.