Dyslexia is a learning difficulty affecting reading and spelling. Multisensory teaching methods enhance learning for dyslexic students by integrating visual, auditory, and tactile elements. Strategies like visual timers, graphic organizers, and multisensory activities support their education and engagement, benefiting all learners.

What is dyslexia?

Dyslexia is a learning difficulty that primarily affects the skills involved in accurate and fluent word reading and spelling (Vellutino et al., 2004; Snowling , 2008; Snowling et al., 2007).

When it comes to learning a language, students with dyslexia can have difficulties with phonological awareness, verbal memory, verbal processing speed and decoding (e.g., Byrne, 1998; Muter et al., 2004; Bowey, 2005).

Dyslexia is not linked to a person’s intelligence so it occurs across a range of intellectual abilities. Learners can be more or less severely dyslexic as dyslexia is a continuum.

Dyslexia can also impact executive function, particularly in areas like working memory, attention, and inhibition, because of how the brain processes information. These executive function challenges can make reading, decoding, and comprehension more difficult, and can impact daily tasks like planning, organizing, impulse control and self-monitoring.

How do students with dyslexia learn?

Learners with dyslexia benefit significantly from multisensory teaching, which uses visual, auditory, and kinesthetic-tactile pathways simultaneously to enhance memory and learning. This approach strengthens the brain’s ability to form memories by involving more senses, such as touch and movement, to help students learn to read, spell, and retain information more effectively. Organizations like the British Dyslexia Association recognize and promote this method as a key strategy. 

Also, like any other learner, dyslexic students will also benefit from classroom strategies that support their executive functioning. Some of these strategies will be: externalising (or making visible) key information, time and problem solving. Which, in a language class will mean making grammar and word formation more visual and designing activities that learners can touch and experiment with.

Strategies to make your classroom dyslexia-friendly

Bearing all of the above in mind, these are some strategies that can make your classroom more dyslexia-friendly and that can be used with all of the learners.

Externalising key information and processes

• Visual class menu, instructions, success criteria. As learners with dyslexia can have issues with working memory, making key information visible and available for them during tasks will free up their working memory to focus on the task. The class menu, instruction and success criteria (what I need to do to do well), should be simple, short, staged and supported with visuals. Try asking ChatGPT to produce a simpler version of your instructions.

• Sight words. Students with dyslexia can have difficulties remembering sight words which are common in English (i.e.: the, I, with, which). Being able to recognise these words without sounding them out can speed up a reader’s fluency. Having a poster of these words (or the ones your learners struggle with) up on the wall will allow them to consult it when they have to write them and will make them more autonomous and confident learners.

• Visual timers. Our students might have difficulties understanding time even when they’re old enough to tell the time. Speaking of tasks instead of minutes will help them understand how much time there’s left before the break, for instance. Additionally, using visual timers like these ones will transmit time in a way that’s easier to understand for them.

• Word banks. Again, in order to reduce the amount of information our learners have to hold in their working memory while working on a given task, we should provide them with the key language they are going to need during it. This can be vocabulary, sentence starters or longer language chunks.

• Graphic organisers. Some examples are mind maps and writing frames. These will help learners organise, structure and sequence their ideas. Using these or a scaffolded version of the final task will make it accessible and more manageable for learners. HMH offer an array of graphic organisers for different writing tasks. The Bell Foundation provides guidance on how to use graphic organisers for speaking and writing tasks.

• Using visuals throughout the learning process. These can be photographs, drawings, pictograms, videos, modelling and other visual resources like the graphic organisers already mentioned. The Bell Foundation provides guidance and ideas on how to incorporate them into our teaching.

Making learning multisensory

It is always possible to incorporate multisensory learning strategies into our teaching although the kind of activities will depend on the age group. Most multisensory learning activities are directed to early years. However, a lot of them can be easily adapted to other age groups.

• Using Legos to learn grammar. Duplo or other building blocks can used to represent different parts of speech that can be coded in a different colour. Students can easily move around the pieces and experiment with the result without trying to picture it in their head. Lego Classic can also make the learning of prepositions or giving directions more visual and meaningful.

• Drawing (the students own or the teachers): to illustrate vocabulary, expressions or to represent patterns like the ones in irregular verbs.

• Student or teacher-made flashcards for single words or to play and experiment making sentences.

• Flaps or post it notes. To learn and practice word formation. It will help learners understand how prefixes and suffixes change.

• The students own body. It can be used in many ways to make our learning kinaesthetic as well as visual or auditory. For instance, clapping while saying a sentence to practice rhythm, playing ‘Simon Says’ to learn directions (Simon says turn left), or to learn actions (Simon says jump), jobs (Simon says be a painter), or emotions (Simon says be surprised).

Movement can also be incorporated into many activities even at higher levels. Some easy to implement examples are: wall reading or listening activities in which learners have to go around the classroom or corridor walls to complete the activity or corridor races in which learners have to run and fetch some key information and bring it back to the classroom. This can be parts of a sentence, flashcards with the translation of some new vocabulary or the questions or answers in a task.

Needless to say, that all of these activities are highly engaging and will benefit every learner in the class and not only those with dyslexia or another type of neurodivergence.

Learners with dyslexia and other reading difficulties will also benefit from certain adaptations in reading tasks and support before and during them. You can read more about it here.