Multisensory Approach and Total Physical Response in the EFL Support Lessons for Students with Dyslexia. Building sentence structure awareness.

Abstract

The present issue of this final dissertation focuses on the efficacy of the Multisensory Approach and of the Total Physical Response on the learning process and on sentence structuring concerning English as a foreign language in the Italian school scenery, specifically with a student with dyslexia attending middle school. The effects of the application of these methods can be seen at the level of EFL sentence creation and also on the attitude of the learner towards the foreign language which have highly improved thanks to these methods. The first chapter is centred on the origins, features, efficacy and uses of the Multisensory Approach and of the Total Physical Response in the EFL learning process: the focus is on the application of these methods in the educational setting, specifically related to dyslexia. The second part of the chapter provides an overview of dyslexia and its relationship with foreign language learning: in particular it focuses on the areas affected by dyslexia (i.e., phonological processing, working memory and processing speed), and the cognitive load and the emotional sphere are analysed, informing also the readers on the teaching support that can be used in the FL educational setting for learners with special needs. The last chapter of the dissertation is about the case study of the tutoring lessons with an Italian middle school student with dyslexia; in this setting, EFL sentence structure awareness is learnt through the acquisition of present simple, present continuous and past simple tenses, which is fostered by the application of the Multisensory Approach and of the Total Physical Response and it is sustained also through vocabulary instruction.