It is not hard to demotivate somebody with dyslexia — just teach them a foreign language and watch them flounder. Dictation tests were the ultimate torment — a teacher would read some incomprehensible French and you where meant to write it down — your mark was calculated by subtracting the count of your errors from 30 — I often reach minus 30 or less — now I suspect that my real mark was probably worse and that my teacher at some point gave up deducting points either out of pity or frustration. If I remember correctly my highest ever mark was 0. Not exactly thrilling way to motivate a 14 year old.
Now the hard part, to come up with some scenario that would have alleviated this situation. Put another way, how do you teach somebody who is and who also believes that he is totally unable to reach a required level of proficiency in the required amount of time under normal teach conditions. One obvious answer would have been to stop French but that was not an option at the time. Looking back now I believe that the school actually took a reasonable approach once they understood the situation, although I only realized this while writing this piece. They put me in a small remedial class with similarly hopeless cases — getting a miserable mark hurts less if everybody gets a miserable mark. They gave us a sympathetic teacher — and I laugh as I write this — he taught to the test — the heresy of it. And somehow, with his help, I actually finally passed my O-level French. Not surprisingly, after such a long and unpleasant time learning French, it has taken me a long time to come around to the idea that I could actually learn another language.
So the obvious take home message is, if you don’t match teaching expectations and actions to students’ abilities, motivation will decline — conversely if you do match them motivation will probably rise. A more controversial conclusion is that sometimes you need to be pragmatic and just get people through a course using what ever legal means possible.