Colours and symbols to support dyslexic students
In the very first Korean class that teacher Eun-ju Kim taught, there were already students with dyslexia. With a background in special education and clinical developmental psychology, she developed a new method to help them, partly based on teaching methods from Dutch first language education.
‘Many dyslexic children hardly enjoy reading a book in their mother tongue, but they become interested in Japan or Korea through manga or graphic novels,’ says Kim. ‘There they can follow the images, which suddenly allows them to follow the story much better.’
Some of them become so intrigued by the world of these stories that they want to learn the original language. Years later, they end up in language classes in university, only to be confronted with their dyslexia all over again. ‘When you have dyslexia, it’s difficult to connect sound and image,’ Kim explains. 'A dyslexic student who hears the word “apple” often does not immediately connect it with a representation of an apple. In a similar manner, this also makes it difficult to connect words to characters or sounds to letters.'
Because Japanese and Korean writing is so different from the Roman alphabet, some dyslexic students encounter the same problem all over again. With a Comenius grant and money from the JEDI Fund, Kim therefore decided to develop a new method, based on support methods that are already familiar to most students.
Dutch method as inspiration
‘In the Netherlands, children with dyslexia often learn to read with symbols,’ says Kim. 'For example, the word “hond” (dog) consists of a consonant, vowel, consonant, consonant. Children learn to spell this out with symbols, for example a < for consonants and - for vowels.'
It becomes more complicated when a letter is pronounced differently from how it is written. In Dutch, the ‘d’ in ‘hond’ sounds like a ‘t’. ‘In the Netherlands, this is indicated with colours,’ says Kim. The ‘t’ is given a different colour than the ‘d’. I adopted that for Korean and Japanese.'
In Kim's model, the teacher reads the word aloud, the student repeats it and chops it into syllables. The student then uses coloured magnets or symbol cards to indicate which sounds they hear and which letters differ from the pronunciation. They write down the word and read it again for verification.
Colours for writing direction
Many students struggle with the correct writing direction, the order of character components, or they mirror the characters. This does not improve just by studying longer or harder. Kim has also found a solution for that. ‘In 2010 a Japanese brain specialist developed a method to teach children with Williams syndrome to write.’ Children with this developmental disorder often find it difficult to correctly estimate the position of objects in space. When they write, this causes letters to end up anywhere and everywhere and they do not necessarily form legible words running from left to right. By contrast, their colour recognition functions as it should.
‘That's why the four-colour square was developed,’ says Kim. ‘If children learn that the long, vertical part of a character is in the blue part of the square, they can copy it correctly much more easily.’ A similar result emerged for students with dyslexia, for whom the spatial cognition in letters and characters often poses difficulties: after a relatively short training of about six weeks, they become able to better remember the correct writing direction and order of components in a character by using the colour square paper. Upon going back to regular white paper, the same errors resurface. This specific problem for students with dyslexia could be solved by using the colour paper in writing exams.
Does it also work for Dutch children?
‘I am now in contact with the Rudolf Berlin Center at the University of Amsterdam, where research on dyslexia is conducted as well,’ says Kim. 'I think it would be interesting to test whether the colour square also works for Dutch children. Learning that the vertical line of a ‘b’ is always starts in the blue part of the square and a ‘d’ in the yellow one might make learning to read easier.'