CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF THE GREEK, GERMAN AND ENGLISH LANGUAGES TRANSPARENCY AND DYSLEXIA

This paper focuses on three language systems: the Greek, the English and the German languages, which we will examine as to their transparency. This contrastive analysis was undertaken in the context of my doctoral research with the subject “Teaching spelling to learners with dyslexia learning German as a second foreign language in primary education” (Tsakalidou, 2020). These language systems were analysed in detail, due to the fact that we examined the spelling difficulties of learners with dyslexia and created the theoretical framework as to the three languages involved in the research. The learners, who took part in this research (95 learners between the ages of 10 and 11 years, 20 of who had dyslexia), had Greek as their first (mother) language, English as their first foreign language and German as their second foreign language. Research of various language systems has shown that dyslexia is recorded equally in all language systems, however, the difficulties that dyslexic learners face are increased in opaque orthographic systems (for example English).