Music, English and Dyslexia. Orchestral and prosodic multimodal pathways to support the second-language learning of students with specific learning difficulties

Learning English as a foreign language, for Italian (or other transparent, romance languages) mother- tongue subjects with Specific Learning Difficulties (SpLD) and Dyslexia, is often hard and unsuccessful. Their oral competence is often very compromised, too: no confidence is achieved on conversational and prosodic behaviour, and huge difficulties are detected when the listening and the comprehension competences are evaluated. The paper presents innovative pathways proposed to students with SpLD by Esagramma, a clinic and educational research centre based in Milano (Italy). Two Esagramma Methodologies® are supporting the pathways : the Orchestral Music Education one (in Italian EMO – Educazione Musicale Orchestrale) and the English Camp Orchestra one (ECO). The paper presents such methodologies and the protocols (based on Computational Linguistics and on Conversational Psychology) used to analyse and discusses the most original results obtained so far.