 The topic that kind of jumped out at me was something that I was taking for granted. I thought that I had it covered and then I had a conversation about a group of potential students and I realised, maybe realised that I need to rethink it. So, let's start with this question. Are you a stickler? Do you have a show of hands? How many stickers are there in the room? Nobody's going to confess to being a stickler. Oh, there's one down there. Alright. Just one sticker. Okay. Well, how do you feel about this? Oh. Yeah. I kind of think, well, you know, morphological change. If we just had one option, that wouldn't be so bad. Would it? Yeah, definitely a few more stickers then admitted there. Okay. So the question, I'll ask myself that. Am I dyslexic? When I typed this slide first of all, I realised I had written, am I... Dyslexic. This is one of those things that when people talk about it, you kind of go, oh yeah, that's me, oh yeah, that's me. You know, it's kind of like being a Virgo or something like that. You see yourself in it. And I know, from what I know about it, I know that it runs in families. So, my dad's spelling is pretty bad. My mum always has to correct it before he sends any form letters out to anyone. So, yeah, tick the box there, runs in families. Mostly effects boys. Check. Am I boys? Yeah, okay. It slows reading down. I have a friend who's a novelist. And every now and then, he asks me to read something that he's written. And sometimes it's like, you know, I just wrote this great paragraph. You have to read it. And we're sitting there in the bar and he's like, are you finished yet? Are you finished yet? So, yeah, I'm the slowest reader. So, that might be something there. I prefer non-textual input. I am a huge fan of podcasts. I listen to them endlessly. And I'm much more likely to say to you, I heard rather than I read. Because that's where I get my preferred input. Mixing up or missing letters. Well, you've got an email from me. You might have noticed one of these. That I've written not when I meant note or even worse when I meant now. As in, that is not available. Meaning, it's now available. That's the problem with that. Out instead of are. Instead of day. See the problem over there? Yeah, okay. These are things that I know that I tend to make that mistake. But one of the writers I can't see. Oh, yeah. Maybe I'm a little bit dyslexic. Maybe I am. And so, I thought that that was something as a teacher and as a course designer that I was taking into consideration. I was taking allowances for that I had it covered. And then, I was talking to a teacher who wanted to bring a group of students. And she explained it to me a bit differently. She explained it to me about that. She explained that it's a problem of invisible hurdles. That is like students see difficulties where other students don't see them. And there are things there that trip them up. And other students and the teacher as well. What happened? Why did you trip up? There was nothing there. There was no barrier. There was nothing in your way. And through talking to her about whether the course I was running would suit her students, I had occasion to look more deeply into it. And, of course, this issue of difficulty with accurate and fluent word recognition that was something that I had considered that I had thought of. Difficulty with spelling and processing spoken information. And that was something that I hadn't considered. I thought, well, you know, the problem is with text and handling text. So, if instead of that we provide spoken input or we support it with spoken input, that will solve the problem. But this is also one of those hurdles. It influences aspects of producing and using language. So, as evidenced by my emails, that is something that I had also considered and getting formative feedback on your written work was something that I had built in. So, I thought I had that one covered. But this one really took me by surprise. The lower capacity of working memory, holding fewer pieces of information was something that I hadn't considered at all. And so, maybe that links to the processing of spoken information. But that lower capacity of working memory is particularly an issue when it comes to instructions. What do I have to do next? And so, when I'm running a task and trying to run it in a way that fosters autonomy, what I want to do is I want to give the students their instructions and let them go away and work it out. But that means that there tends to be a number of steps to those instructions. And the dyslexic students are going to have trouble holding that in their memory. So, I had not considered that as an issue. They need more in-patterns to remember, they need more practice and repetition. So, here you have the sort of mechanical repetition that suggests the kind of exercises which I tend to dislike. I tend to dislike teaching through mechanical repetition. And so, unless it's a bit of drilling for pronunciation which everybody enjoys, I tend not to do that. So, there is something where I'm not serving those students. The effect on instructions, which I just mentioned. And then, I think people would mostly expect that, to reduce phonemic awareness. And then to come to that in the first language is a challenge. In the second language is a bigger challenge and with that language is English. Because English is particularly problematic when it comes to reading versus spelling. So, mixing up letters and misreading words. Therefore reading more slowly. Difficulties in complementing engine. And problems reading aloud. Now, I don't believe in reading aloud. So, I feel I kind of off the hook for that one. So, I don't... Can you read the first sentence? Can you read the second sentence? Can you read the third sentence? I avoid that, not for these reasons, but because I think students, when they're reading, don't listen or can't understand at the same time as reading. But, I hadn't realised that for these next students it's particularly stressful to have to perform reading in that way. Something that they already find different. So, these are the invisible hurdles. So, I was talking to this... Oh yeah, sorry, this is... I appears to have a series of videos on dyslexic learners in the EFL classroom. And that's where I've got this information. So, it's not an article. It's the video. But anyway... So, I'm thinking, well, if one in ten of my students are dyslexic, my students are either junior students on short courses and thermal courses or training teachers. One of ten of them are dyslexic. Then I need to do a better job for them. I need to try and solve these issues. What can I do to help? So, the teacher that I was talking to specialises in working with dyslexic students, and so she gave me a few pointers. Dyslexic students can only copy down very short, clearly written sentences. Now, my board work is... Yeah, good, but it's not great. And so, I think that that's something that I definitely could be accused of not paying attention to. Often, I use slides and information on slides. Then it tends to be much clearer. But this one, I'm really, really guilty of this. Because I tend to put something up here and add something there. And I like to build up this kind of mind-map kind of a situation as you can imagine. And stand it back and go, yep, that's what we've learned. Let's take it off. And that's terrible. For a sexy student, it becomes a haze. What's important? What's not? So, that's more work. When I'm using a screen to present, okay, again, you do nice, clean slides like this, but if you want to show them something that's on a website or use word reference or something like that, there's lots of stuff going on, there's lots of stuff down the sides, it's not accessible for them. So that's something that needs to be reconsidered. It's hard for them to recall new words, structures and instructions, so they need to get it in chunks and with repetition. Now, I think I'm putting this thing out as a kind of reasonably good at chunking instructions and saying it again and again. Because even to people who aren't my students. But bearing in mind that recall problem, we need to be wary of that one. There's the never read aloud and correct mistakes, but don't cause stress, make it a stress situation. So, I'm giving up on that green, because I think I'm okay on that one. But this one is, I'm terrible in this one. In brainstorming, led by the teacher, they can be a little frustrated unless they avoid joining the others and so I need the advisers don't involve them in this. And brainstorming at the start of a task or briefing, I call it, is a thing that I use a lot. I get everybody around and say this is what we're going to do with these steps. Right, what was the first step? What was the second step? Okay, what do you think we should do next? And all of that, and that technique is a management technique that I use a lot. And I'm being told here that for my dyslexic students, it's not going to work. So, I'm going to come up with something else for them. So, what I am thinking about doing for this one is to provide kind of clean, clear word document with the same steps on it. There's like two spaces between each one that they can refer to as they're going back home. What was the next step? What was the next thing to do? And maybe physically take it off or as I go around to check on progress physically take that off. So, and then images and simple vocabulary to help them put their ideas into words is something that I can do more. Okay, so now I have no minutes left. So I'm going to have to wrap it up. What benefits dyslexic can benefit all? So there are these pieces of advice here which also come from those Pearson videos. You go to show those and you kind of go yeah, all of those things are things we could do and that everybody would benefit from. So, I think we should try and do more of that. And rethink content, delivery and direction of the of the classes. Thank you very much.