Abstract:

People with developmental dyslexia (DD) present numerous deficits which hinders the acquisition of both the first and second language (see for example Vellutino, 1979; Baddely et al., 1998; Wolf & Bowers, 1999; Reid, 2009; Szmalec et al. 2013; Baddely, 2015, Cappelli & Noccetti 2016, Cappelli, Noccetti el al., 2018).

In general, students with DD experiment difficulties in learning new words and the morpho-syntactic features of the L2. Due to the characteristics of their condition, they need more time, more training and form focused instruction.

It is believed that multisemiotic material and multimodal techniques enhance lexical input and seem to overcome the difficulties observed in students with DD (Cappelli & Noccetti 2016). Schnotz and Baadte (2008: 27) believe that diverse «external representations as information sources […] construct internal (mental) representations of the learning content in working memory and store those representations in long-term memory». Namely, the use of multiple semiotic resources in language teaching provides a useful tool for students with inefficient memory systems. Recently, it has been confirmed that cross-modal teaching enhances cross-modal working memory binding, which strengthens lexical development and promotes language learning (Allen et al., 2009; Wang et al. 2017).

A group of Italian adult students with DD was instructed using multisemiotic material to teach L2 words (for example images with audio) in a richly informative context by means of multimodal techniques to verify the advantage of such methods over a traditional mono-semiotic and mono-modal input.

The scores of the test administered at the end of the training to the learners with DD confirm that multisemiotic presentation and multimodal techniques can positively affect language learning and vocabulary storage.

Keywords:

Dyslexia, Vocabulary learning, Multimodal Techniques, Visuals.