Reading skills and grammatical competence in Latin of high school students with dyslexia
Nunzia Losito, Claudia Zamperlin, Martina Massini, Enrico Toffalini
In 2014 our research group published a new battery, including a reading task of words and pseudowords in Latin and a grammar Latin task, for the assessment of reading skills in high school students. It was important for us to investigate the learning of Latin, considering as a foreign language (L2), in high school students. The study examined also the case of students with dyslexia, whose difficulties with learning foreign languages have already been documented. Learning Latin can be strongly difficult for these students, because it is a language mainly learned through written exposure. This hypothesis has been confirmed in this paper by the evaluation of reading skills of words and pseudowords in Latin in 32 students with dyslexia. Results showed that the difficulties with Latin seem similar to those found with Italian and emerged even if the use of grammatical rules is less compromised.
Keywords
Dyslexia, foreign language, reading, grammar, Latin.