Conference | Life sciences

The ASLAN and CORTEX LabExes are raising public awareness about the challenges of dyslexia at university

On The March 13, 2018

As part of Brain Awareness Week 2018, the ASLAN and CORTEX LabExes organized a public conference evening on March 13 with the aim of learning more about the difficulties that dyslexic students face, as well as their compensation strategies to support academic success.

The early care provided for pupils with specific learning difficulties may have improved considerably over the past fifteen years, but the situation remains difficult for students in higher education.

LabEx ASLAN / Semaine du cerveau 2018
During the evening, we were delighted to be joined by two specialists in the field, Audrey Mazur-Palandre (ICAR Laboratory, ASLAN LabEx) and Eddy Cavalli (EMC Laboratory, CORTEX LabEx) who presented their work and answered the audience's many questions.

Eddy Cavalli, a lecturer at the Université Lumière Lyon 2, focused on explaining the cognitive functions that are particular to dyslexic students. He also demonstrated the differences in how a dyslexic student's brain functions compared to that of a person without dyslexia, to explain the compensation strategies used by these students.

Secondly, Audrey Mazur-Palandre, a psycholinguist at ENS de Lyon specializing in language acquisition among individuals with and without dyslexia, presented the initial findings from current studies led among young dyslexic adults. This work shows that dyslexic students still have real difficulty reading and writing. With the support of the DUNES service at ENS de Lyon and a multidisciplinary pedagogical team, she recently created an online MOOC to raise awareness of the difficulties facing dyslexic students among professors: "Dyslexic students in my lecture: understanding and helping".

► Find out more (in French)