Abstract:

The paper presents some findings about teaching EFL vocabulary in a classroom of Italian university students with developmental dyslexia. These students are known to have difficulties in learning foreign language vocabulary, especially when it is implicit and requires mnemonic effort (Crombie, 1997; Ganschow & Sparks, 1987; Ho & Fong, 2005; Noccetti, 2022). Hence the recommendation to use multimodal approaches to teach both grammar and vocabulary (Heikkilä et al., 2018; Laurienti et al., 2004; Sparks & Miller, 2000). A multimodal approach that integrates congruent auditory and visual stimuli was used to teach non specialised vocabulary. More specifically, an adapted version of “Run the RAN” (Pecini et al., 2019) was designed. This tool is based on rapid automatized naming for the memorisation of vocabulary. “Run the RAN” was originally developed for the improvement of lexical retrieval in children with developmental dyslexia. Its use for L2 learning is proposed as innovative. In a first phase, the students trained with the RAN to become familiar with the images and the audio to learn the words. In a second phase, the same words were placed in the context of a story to consolidate their learning. A final test was administered to check whether there had been memorisation of the words presented with the “Run the RAN” tool and whether those same words were used in contexts other than the narrative one used in class. The small number of students and the characteristics of the test do not allow for statistical relevance. However, test results suggest that this approach is effective in terms of word recall and transfer of acquired lexical skills to contexts other than those presented in class.

References:
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Heikkilä, J. et al. 2018, Semantically congruent visual information can improve auditory recognition memory in older adults. Multisensory Research 31 (3–4), 213–225.
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Keywords:

Dyslexia, Multimodal approaches, Rapid Automatized Naming, Second Language Learning.