There is a couple of students in the school that I currently teach who exhibit obvious symptoms of dyslexia the one and the other with ADHD; they are both diagnosed by experts and they receive about eight to ten hours special teaching in the school, beside the ordinary programme with the rest of the class. My initial reaction to these two students, I must admit that, was rejection and somehow isolating them from the rest of the class. Of course I don't mean that I was rude or offensive towards them, not at all, but inside me I felt that they were helpless.
Especially with the student that has a serious form of dyslexia, I gave up very quickly every effort to teach him, when I saw that he could not even copy the english letters! I thought that he was merely being lazy and ever since this boy is just attending my teaching , just staring the others without participating at all. I found out by his special teacher that he makes a very slow progress in the L1, and at lest he managed to be able to read essentially.
With the other student I did more things; he can read and write all the english letters and learn new words, but he easily forgets them and makes a lot of mistakes. This boy with the ADHD can learn in a sufficient way, the main problem is that due to his distractibility he does lots of noise, he is easily tired and looses his motivation to complete tasks. I help him with dictation and tests, I am more tolerant to his mistakes but still I cannot cope with the trouble he causes because he influences the other students in a negative way, they get noisy!
The other students fortunately are totally neutral towards these two students. I never heard anybody mocking them or trying to hurt their feelings. The boy with dyslexia is certainly isolated, the others just let him doing nothing during my teaching, but they talk to him properly during breaks or other activities. In the same way they treat the boy with ADHD as being a normal kid, sometimes even trying to imitate his noisy making behaviour!
Certainly the new knowledge that the DYSTEFL seminar offers me can make me understand much more about their learning incapability; but still I believe that I could not do a lot of better instruction for the dyslectic student because I have to take care of 16 other students at the same time of the 45 minutes hour. This kid definitely needs private tutoring in L2 aswell, apart from L1. For the other student I think I can make a more alternative teaching, giving him oral exercises with repetition of words and non-words, and try to prepare some extra activities that keep him more concentrated.