Education of Children with Dyslexia in Croatia: The Role of Easy Language

Proceedings of The 4th International Conference on New Trends in Teaching and Education

Year: 2022

DOI:

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Education of Children with Dyslexia in Croatia: The Role of Easy Language

Mirjana Lenček, Jelena Kuvač Kraljević

ABSTRACT: 

Educating students with dyslexia is a particularly challenging process. In order for it to be successful it is necessary to implement all forms of adjustments, especially linguistic and visual. Adjustment of language or so called easy language in Croatia is defined according to IFLA guidelines – linguistic adaptation of a text that makes both reading and comprehension easier (Lenček and Kuvač Kraljević, 2021). Although the term is relatively new, the need for linguistic and graphic adaptations of the written text for people with dyslexia has been emphasized for much longer in the educational context (Lenček, 2008) and is increasingly being researched in recent times (Matić, Kuvač Kraljević, Lenček and Vuk, in press). The aim of this paper was to investigate the characteristics of the adjustment of questions from written exams for nature sciences for children in grades 1^st to 6^th. The questions were adjusted into easy language with the purpose of generalizing the procedure in relation to the semantic, syntactic and graphic adjustments. Randomly selected several exam questions to which children are exposed in each of the classes during nature sciences courses were analyzed. The data analysis showed that the highest percentage of adjustment is implemented at the syntactic level. In addition to need for lexical and syntactic adjustments there are often redundant parts of texts that are not informative for solving the task. Moreover, the visualization, which should serve in the function of the text, sometimes is not adequate too.

keywords: dyslexia; easy language; graphic adjustments; linguistics adaptations; nature sciences.