An Examination of Developmental Dyslexia among Iranian EFL Second Graders

Dyslexia is a first language learning impairment which is observed among primary students. Despite quite a few researches done in the L1 context, research to examine its occurrence in L2 context is sparse. The aim of the present study is to investigate whether Iranian Dyslexic students have difficulties learning English as a foreign language. Ten Iranian students of the second grade of the secondary school with developmental dyslexia and ten normal students were assessed on a constructed test battery of reading, spelling, and phonological processing tasks. The findings showed that the dyslexic group performed significantly lower than the control (normal) group in all the English measures. Moreover, phonological processing skills were found to correlate significantly with English reading in the dyslexic group. The results support the view that there is relationship between phonological skills and reading ability in both L1 and L2.