French/ Spanish for dyslexic secondary school children

[smogsville]

DD12 in Y7 is struggling with French and Spanish. Spanish more so as she had no prior experience of learning whereas she'd done some Fr at primary and has been there numerous times on hols.

We anticipated these challenges and I'm an MFL grad so am well placed to help from a knowledge/ understanding of the subject matter point of view.

What I'm looking for are any learning tips that have helped other children with dyslexia to get a handle on MFL and not dread/ hate them. She's not going to be a linguist, that's fine, she's great at stuff like maths, science and art which will remain forever a mystery to me but I'd like to help to be the best she can be if I can.

Any tools/ resources/ tips of any sort would be gratefully received.

Thanks in advance.

How has MFL worked out for your daughter?
I just found your thread as am in a similar situation: you could be describing my DD! I've just been browsing the British Dyslexia Association's website where it states one option is to disapply the child from foreign language study, but it feels drastic. Although, on the other hand, the anxiety and panic DD feels about her MFL lessons is starting to colour her whole week and impact her love of learning in general. It's such a pity, as we've worked so hard to overcome considerable barriers in plain old English lessons and have just about started to feel OK about reading and writing, despite every sentence -read or written- being a challenge.

Hi @WarmthAndDepth, sorry to hear that. DD is quite lazy about things that don’t come naturally but I wouldn’t say it’s affecting her confidence as such, she’s just quite dismissive of it. Undecided yet as to whether to go ahead with the GCSE. She could certainly pick other things she would prefer and be better at. Only in Y8 at this stage and at her school they don’t choose until next year so we’ll watch and wait…

It sounds as if your DD has found a way around feeling stressed about it: I'd be pleased if mine developed a more 'whatevz' attitude to MfL. Alas, she holds herself to unhelpfully high standards, which just makes it worse. It's a work in progress...

If DD would prefer to take another subject at GCSE, I wouldn’t have a problem with that.

Hi my DS with dyslexia detested the foreign language he had to do for gcse and it was ruining his school week just the thought of going to the lessons. We met with the school to ask them to let him drop it in view of his then recent diagnosis but they completely refused to budge. (This was a few years ago though and I know that the emphasis on having a MFL isn’t necessarily the same now as most universities have dropped it as a requirement.). What he did though was find a vague friend who was excellent at languages but struggled at maths which he was very good at. They met for an hour a week for about 10 months coaching each other. The result was that amazingly they both got very decent passes and made close friends. Wishing you lots of luck.