The Barriers That Adult Learners With Dyslexia Can Encounter When Faced With A Writing Task

The primary barrier that an adult with dyslexia can face would be likely to be bad experiences from school that they themselves can only partly recall. Learners might feel threatened by the idea of writing as if their teacher is poised to criticise their spelling and grammar. Dyslexia Action (2019) p5. Within schools boys particularly are likely to consider a good writer someone who writes a lot and writes neatly. Often they are happy to say that they finish their writing as quickly as possible so as to be able to embark upon other tasks. It is this regarding of writing as a means to an end rather than an end in itself which is so difficult to counter but so imperative to address in adult education Dyslexia Action (2019a) p2. Research from 2006 by Conelly, Campbell, MacLean and Barnes suggests that we can usefully divide the writing of all learners into two sub processes. These are text generation, that is the idea of changing ideas into language, and transcri ption which can be described as the conversion of language into written symbols. Although the primary stage of idea generation can produce interesting and imaginative thought it is this second stage at which adult dyslexic writers struggle and may faulter Morken and Helland (2013) p132. In 2009 Richards et al. conducted research into the networks of the brain which revealed different activation in typical and poor spellers. Typical spellers used areas associated with memory to complete this task whereas poor spellers access their cognition facilities Morken and Helland (2013) p132. In short good spellers remember and poor spellers imagine.