The effect of read-aloud assistance on the text comprehension of dyslexic and non-dyslexic English language learners

Abstract

One of the special arrangements in testing contexts is to allow dyslexic students to listen to the text while they read. In our study, we investigated the effect of read-aloud assistance on young English learners' language comprehension scores. We also examined whether students with dyslexia identification benefit from this assistance differently from their peers with no official identification of dyslexia.Our research was conducted with young Slovenian learners of English who performed four language assessment tasks adapted from a standardized battery of Slovenian national English language tests. In a counter-balanced design, 233 students with no identified dyslexia and 47 students with dyslexia identification completed two language comprehension tasks in a readingonly condition, one task with read-aloud assistance and one task in listening-only mode. We used Generalized Linear Mixed-Effects Modelling (GLMM) to estimate accurately the effects of Article Language Testing 36(1) the mode of administration, dyslexia status, and input text difficulty, while accounting for error variance owing to random differences between students, texts, and questions.The results of our study revealed that young L2 learners with no dyslexia identification performed similarly in the three conditions. The read-aloud assistance, however, was found to increase the comprehension scores of dyslexic participants when reading difficult texts, allowing them to perform at the level of their non-dyslexic peers. Therefore, our study suggests that this modification of the test administration mode might assist dyslexic students in demonstrating their text comprehension abilities.

Assessing Second Language Listening Over the Past Twenty Years: A Review Within the Socio-Cognitive Framework

“…In some countries, there is a legal requirement that test takers with specific learning difficulties such as dyslexia should be accommodated ( Weir, 2005 ). However, it is controversial as to what special arrangements should be offered to test takers to make tests assess abilities rather than disabilities, ensuring fair tests for every test taker without compromising test validity is challenging to test developers ( Kosak-Babuder et al, 2019 ).…”

Dyslexia in the context of second language learning and teaching

“…Csizér et al, 2010;Kormos and Csizér, 2010;Kormos et al, 2009;Piechurska-Kuciel, 2008;Sparks, 2013), foreign language teaching practices with dyslexic students and effectiveness of instructional programmes designed especially for dyslexic learners (e.g. Košak-Babuder et al, 2019;Nijakowska, 2008;Pfenninger, 2015), identification of dyslexia in multilingual speakers (Geva and Wiener, 2015;Martin, 2013) and assessment of the L2 skills of dyslexic learners (Tsagari and Spanoudis, 2013;Tsagari and Sperling, 2017) as well as L2 teacher knowledge and training (Kormos and Nijakowska, 2017;Nijakowska, 2014;Nijakowska and Kormos, 2016).…”

Perceiving and remembering speech depend on multifractal nonlinearity in movements producing and exploring speech

“…We enlisted a human speaker and a text-to-speech synthesizer to pronounce each word of a narrative separately but in sequence. Despite being an effective learning tool for students with difficulty reading by sight [58,59], text-to-speech synthesizers can require more time for listeners to process the unfamiliar speech-production style [60–62]. Because of the potential role of multifractal nonlinearity in supporting expressivity, we predicted that multifractal nonlinearity in speech would speed the word-by-word response in self-paced listening (Hypothesis-1a).…”