How dyslexic students learn.

Kate:
What can teachers do to better support you?

Michael Shaw, student, Biosciences:
Well, my tutor, when I used to go and see him about my project I used to tape what he said, and I used to explain to him that I'm a visual person. And what he used to do was do sketches to explain, and I found that really beneficial as well.

He used to draw to the best he can because obviously some tutors can't really do drawings, but he used to keep them very basic and just draw illustrations.

Kate:
Right, so the mix of the audio taping and the visual?

Michael:
Yeah, so I could go away with the audio tape and listen to it and look back on the visual to write it down. And I'd use those visuals in my exams as well.

Christine Carter, Academic Support:
I think in the screening you can start to pick up from the way that they're responding as to whether they are strongly visual, so that when they're talking about their reading they might say, for example "I have to be able to get a visual image otherwise I have great difficulty in understanding it."

So then you start to talk about "How does your subject area lend itself to being visual?", or "Does it lend itself to being visual?", and it's clear that some of the choices they made about that subject are because it is visual.

But it's not always the case - it's often the multi-sensory way of working that is important and a combination of the visual and the auditory that is working, and it can be very variable as to which one or the other might kind of predominate, but both are necessary.

And it's also that certain tasks, if they are so strongly one way or the other, certain tasks don't necessarily lend themselves to their way of being, so it's important to encourage them to have some flexibility in some ways.

Kate:
You mentioned there this bringing together, maybe, of two or more methods. Can you think of any examples where teachers do that for their students - allow them to bring two different forms of stimuli together?

Barbara Taylor, Academic Support:
I suppose one way in which people do it is through lecturing and they're presenting material verbally and they're also presenting pictures at the same time, and there are some lecturers who are really very good at that.

They will produce a diagram and talk about it, and if you've then got in addition the lecture handouts in front of you so you're not worrying about the spellings, you've got almost all you need to be able to make sense of quite complicated material.

So things like that are really very good. I know some students who have been put off by a set of lecturers because they couldn't visualise the word, and if you can't visualise this word you've never seen before you can't possibly write it down. And so having things like a glossary, a list of words, can make things just possible.

Christine Carter, Academic Support:
I think sometimes in the Business School, for example, where they're perhaps working with case studies quite a lot, some students will need the case study…the case study is illustrating a theory, but they're listening for the case study because it's that that's getting them into the theory, and just the abstract descriptions of the theory don't quite hang together.

So it's often a mixture of the practical and the applied, and so with nurses as well you might see that. Some nurses you can start with the theory and then work out how it's applying to the practice, and for others it's the other way around - they can only get the theory once you've talked about the practice, and it's sort of understanding how the student is operating to know which way round to do it, really.

Barbara Taylor, Academic Support:
I suppose one way in which people do it is through lecturing and they’re presenting material verbally and they’re also presenting pictures at the same time, and there are some lecturers who are really very good at that.

They will produce a diagram and talk about it, and if you’ve then got in addition the lecture handouts in front of you so you’re not worrying about the spellings, you’ve got almost all you need to be able to make sense of quite complicated material.

So things like that are really very good. I know some students who have been put off by a set of lecturers because they couldn’t visualise the word, and if you can’t visualise this word you’ve never seen before you can’t possibly write it down. And so having things like a glossary, a list of words, can make things just possible.

Christine Carter, Academic Support:
I think sometimes in the Business School, for example, where they’re perhaps working with case studies quite a lot, some students will need the case study…the case study is illustrating a theory, but they’re listening for the case study because it’s that that’s getting them into the theory, and just the abstract descriptions of the theory don’t quite hang together.

So it’s often a mixture of the practical and the applied, and so with nurses as well you might see that. Some nurses you can start with the theory and then work out how it’s applying to the practice, and for others it’s the other way around - they can only get the theory once you’ve talked about the practice, and it’s sort of understanding how the student is operating to know which way round to do it really.