Identifying Dyslexia in ESL Students
admin | Sunday, September 28th, 2008 | No Comments »
Betty Kosel, VSB ESL Consultant and Dr. Winnifred Tang at the Kirin for a “working lunch” in the fall of 2007
Last year, I accepted an invitation from Betty Kosel, ESL Consultant at the Vancouver School Board, to give the keynote address for the ESL teacher’s section on their Teacher’s Professional Development Day. The planning was done in October of 2007 and the talk was in February 2008. You can see us, Betty and I, in the photograph at the right, enjoying a “dim sum” lunch at Kirin Restaurant while discussing details of the presentation.
It was a pleasure for me to host lunch for the occasion. Betty shared with me the joys and challenges of being ESL teachers in Vancouver. Vancouver teachers work very hard and we need to give them all the support we can. Each year, I accept one or two speaking engagements, which I do for free as a way of giving back to society. I was an ESL student many years ago when I came here as an immigrant child who had just finished grade 4 in Hong Kong. Without the help of my teacher, Mrs. Blackmore, who took an interest in the ESL children in her class, I would have been one grade behind from the other Canadian children my age. Thanks to my kind and resourceful teacher, I was able to catch up to the grade I should have been in and as a result my learning experience in Canada was a positive one. Mrs. Blackmore was able to spend extra time with me because she had the support of the school; we need class sizes that are manageable. Teachers cannot do what is needed for their students to help them succeed if the class sizes are too impossibly large!
These beautiful flowers were presented to me after the talk in February around the time of Chinese New Year. What a burst of colors!
One of the big concerns that had emerged amongst ESL teachers in Vancouver is that of diagnosing ESL students with learning disabilities. That is, when a student has been in Canada for a few years and still lags behind in English language, is it possible that this student is not just experiencing the average second language acquisition challenges but is in fact suffering from a language-based learning disability such as dyslexia? My talk for the Teachers’ Professional Development Day keynote address spoke to that issue and I am sharing my slides for the talk with you here: vsb-pro-d-day_-feb-2008. Notes capturing the main focus of my talk is available in the form of a wiki at http://vsbtangfeb08.wikispaces.com/
Enjoy!