The eternal sunshine of a dyslexic's mind or lessons out of nothing

The eternal sunshine of a dyslexic’s mind or lessons out of nothing

There are so many things we take for granted as teachers, so many false assumptions, so many wrong or hasty conclusions we reach. Of course, I speak for myself but I can well imagine that many others might feel the same way.

The reasons vary widely. Exams divide people into those who manage and those who don’t – the qualified and the unqualified. A utilitarian attitude towards knowledge, an adherence to rules, and reluctance to deviate detract from the pleasure of discovery and learning.

I used to think of dyslexic learners as people who need my help. After long years of observation and reflection, I have come to think of them as a source of inspiration. When they are trying to read a word, their mind races through so many possibilities – usually guessing what follows from the first couple of letters – that I, as a teacher, would find it impossible to recall at a time.

There is so much poetry in this anarchy of thought, so much effort and eagerness to get it right after all. I would like to focus on an example of mistake made by one of my dyslexic students.

Among others the class had to learn the word “worship”. I was bowled over when I read my student’s version of it. It was no less than “wondership”.

So class, get ready. We are embarking on an adventure. We must all think of a story that will contain the words “wonder”, “ship” and “worship”.

Once upon a time, in the year of wonders my friends and I decided to travel on a ship. It would be our first acquaintance with the whims of the sea by day and by night. We knew that in the old times there was a god of the sea and he was worshipped by ancient Greeks. And Poseidon, the god of the sea, was the one who created horses. And horses are our favourite animals: they teach us how to be free and independent. …

Or

Once upon a time, there was a wondership. It was called wondership because it would take its passengers to lands of wonders – lands where people worshipped the trees and the flowers and the smell of the soil.

My point, as you will have realised, is that there are beautiful mistakes which can act as springboard for further language development if only we teachers took a few seconds to spot them rather than hasten to correct and prescribe.

How practice (mis)informs theory

I feel I have come far enough in my teaching career to be able to raise issues of the interdependence of theory and practice.

When I embarked on teaching, I was fully aware of using a particular methodology and course books based on this same methodology. It gave structure to my teaching and allowed me to feel confident -- safe in the knowledge that the theoretical framework I was using had been tried and tested.

In the course of time I kept up to date with theories of language acquisition and new methodologies. Discoveries in how the mind works perforce involve changes in approach towards language teaching and the development of new methods and materials.

However, what thinking processes come into play while learning defies description, and it is therefore up to the teacher to observe and take note of how the different students respond and which particular strategies they use in order to internalise the rules of the target language.

What I am trying to say is that a teacher may initially come to the classroom armed with method and lesson plans but they will inevitably modify and adjust those to suit their learners’ needs, and in so doing they find themselves  revising or enriching their methods.

I am not sure to what extent teachers can articulate their choices and adaptations so that their contributions can be put to use by researchers and linguists.

My point is that if the person who formulates theories about how people learn is removed from the teaching process and relies on the input of those directly involved in it, there is a deficit in the transfer which cannot be balanced. On the other hand, when a teacher attempts to convey their observations from classroom experience, they are not familiar with the jargon needed to convey them properly though in practice their teaching may have been informed by their experience and adjusted accordingly.

I will cite an example here from my experience. I have been working with several dyslexic students individually or in small groups over long periods of time, which allows me to have a better understanding of some of the difficulties they face and of the multiplicity of factors which interfere with decoding or encoding spoken or written language.

I also have a smattering of various theories about the causes of dyslexia and the ways one can assist dyslexic people. What knowledge I have on this learning difficulty comes from books that I have read and seminars or short courses that I have attended. That doesn’t make me an expert but awareness of the problem goes some way towards helping.

Until recently I had never realised that my “meticulous” way of highlighting information by using italics is totally lost on dyslexic people. I was told so by an adult student to whom I pointed out the highlighted information and I have confirmed it with another two dyslexic students. Perhaps this does not apply to every dyslexic individual but I feel that the information is of relevance when for example creating special fonts designed to help dyslexic people read more easily.

My suggestion – slightly wacky, but not unfounded – is that there should be university “banks” of contributions from teachers if we really want to claim that teaching practice informs theory and new theories are ploughed back into teaching. Brain scans and discoveries about how the brain works by implication (how a damaged area of the brain affects speech or language production, for instance) may simply not be quite enough.

In a nutshell, let’s apply the bottom up approach and see where it takes us. Nothing to lose there.

Activating the mind

In our fast-paced world we have found quick ways of accomplishing tasks. Technology has been put at our service but I often feel that we end up serving rather than employing it for our purposes.

 Performing tasks with or without technology requires different thinking processes and in teaching or testing language it may make all the difference. I often see students become more absorbed by the medium used than the contents presented.

I must admit I am a latecomer to technology, but that doesn’t mean to say that I don’t see the enormous benefits that can be drawn from it. I can open different dictionaries at the same time, I can find all kinds of teaching material, I can use different programs to make my presentations more challenging or to create all kinds of exercises and texts.

Universities testing English have standardised their exams and assigned the correction of most tasks – with the notable exception of writing -- to computers. This has cut the cost of correcting exam papers significantly though I am not sure it does provide equal opportunities for everyone.

Multiple-choice questions, one-word answers and closed transformations do not necessarily do justice to a candidate’s ability and knowledge. I have taught many students who can articulate their views and communicate effectively but are stumped by standardised tests. And this brings me to the next even more serious mistake of limiting yourself to the types of exercises that are used in the exams. Most course books starting at level A1 include tasks which students will have to do in exams years later. How can we interpret this? Should teachers confine themselves to or even content themselves with these specific types of tasks? Are students’ minds “wired” to learn with so little variety and such poor stimulation?

As a teacher I try to use materials that will stimulate my students’ interest and will engage different parts of the brain. I often create exercises that are designed to slow down their reading so that they will focus longer on each part of the text. One simple way of doing this is by getting them to fill gaps in the text with words which have been removed and jumbled.

I am providing here an example of tasks that I assigned on a recent scientific article that I found on BBC. It contains an open cloze exercise, a few questions on the text which are intended to provide a deep understanding of the processes described in the article and a sample of two multiple-choice questions. Of course, in a real class you would not want to use all three of them, but I am juxtaposing them so that one can judge for oneself whether multiple-choice questions in fact facilitate understanding.

Needless to say, my stand is that as teachers we have to create our own ways of making sure that the text is treated as a vehicle of meaning and not as a point of reference for working out the right answers to multiple-choice questions, mostly by the method of elimination. The latter is an intellectual exercise but does not promote real learning or understanding; it does not even fulfil the actual aim of reading, which is to inform or entertain oneself depending on whether one reads factual or literary texts.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-JgIA9pNw-KbDhWanVnSnVlRWM/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-JgIA9pNw-KTDN1OEtCb1Y0RzA/view?usp=sharing

Winter night

With icy weather hovering over our part of the world, winter gets almost painful, and I long to feel the life-giving warmth of the (our) Greek sun, to bask in its embrace.

The following is a poem I wrote on a wintery night a few years back.

Teaching and exams or the exam dilemma

I intend to raise some questions this time, which I am certain many people in the teaching profession have asked themselves and not only those teaching languages. Even though these issues concern instruction in other subjects too, I will confine myself to English as a foreign language.

As far as I am aware, there is research going on constantly into how people acquire language – both the mother tongue and foreign languages. The results of the research may have value as such but they are also meant to assist in developing methods of teaching which will be more efficient and will suit learners with different approaches to learning.

Furthermore, in our days care is being taken so that individuals with learning difficulties, especially dyslexic students, can benefit from customised teaching, and there is even a dyslexie font specially designed for dyslexic readers.

Despite acknowledging the plain fact that people access knowledge in different ways, language exams remain invariably static, out of step with developments in teaching methodology.

Dyslexic candidates are simply given more time to process texts when it would have been far more effective if they were given shorter texts with spaced out lines.

There are certain exams which are limited to multiple-choice questions in order to test reading comprehension, grammar and vocabulary. Students who are more creative and less analytical are evidently at a disadvantage. Often working out the right answer by ruling out the incorrect options is a matter of logic but does not necessarily indicate a thorough understanding of the text itself.

 In my experience many a time students who have a good command of both written and spoken English fail to fulfil their potential in either the written or oral examination. Challenges that candidates have to meet include writing two compositions in a limited amount of time or answering questions for the listening part after having heard the conversation only once. In real life people are not required to produce two samples of writing in a row and of course when we haven’t heard well we can always ask again. Besides everything that we teach our students about planning their writing and checking for mistakes on completion of the task simply go out of the window when there is hardly any time to write as you think – let alone prepare a draft.

Many of us teachers find ourselves wasting a lot of valuable time teaching strategies rather than language. Personally I find this frustrating, and I wonder whether exam creators should invest as much effort and money into updating exams as is spent in enhancing methods of teaching so as to reach out to all types of learners.  

Leaves

Back to the theme of trees: this time it is leaves.

Leaves come in all shapes and hues; they are flexible; they produce all kinds of music depending on the intensity of the wind and they are constant reminders of the cycles in nature and by extension of those in our lives.

Whether attached to the branches or lying on the ground they brighten our space and are a wonder to look at.

To my mind leaves are in eternal communication with each other not only while inescapably attached to the tree but also when they begin their downward or, the wind willing, occasionally upward journey.

This end of cycle may serve as a way of introducing young children or people in their early teens to the transience of human existence.

I, therefore, composed a visual “conversation” between two leaves setting off on this last journey.

Trees: an inexhaustible source of teaching material

Working on a theme is a challenge for me as a teacher. It is a challenge in that you can never exhaust a theme plus you need to produce material on different levels. Some themes will recur ad infinitum, which is daunting when you set out to work on one of them in the knowledge that you will need to revisit the theme again and again.

Trees are one of my favourite themes not least because personally I find them fascinating -- from the stunted ones with their bare branches hanging low to the evergreens with their thick foliage on display throughout the year, a standing provocation for the elements.

 What follows is simply a suggestion on how to approach such a multi-faceted theme. At an elementary level I prefer to start with some vocabulary work on the parts of the tree. One can find plenty of images by way of introduction to basic vocabulary. For instance the following image would serve the purpose quite well.

At an intermediate level, one might need to revise and enrich the vocabulary related to trees but also fire the imagination with one of the many beautiful poems written about trees.

Joyce Kilmer’s poem is a celebration of trees:

Trees

I think that I shall never see   

A poem lovely as a tree.   

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest   

Against the sweet earth’s flowing breast;   

A tree that looks at God all day,

And lifts her leafy arms to pray;   

A tree that may in summer wear   

A nest of robins in her hair;   

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;   

Who intimately lives with rain. 

Poems are made by fools like me,   

But only God can make a tree.

Personifying trees can have a more lasting impression on students.

 Trees, like animates, are associated with tradition and popular

 wisdom, and stories abound.

One might even find stories about individual trees such as the

 one of the American environmental activist Julia Lorraine Hill, 

who lived in a 55-metre 1,500-year-old redwood tree in California

 for 738 days between December 1997 and December 1999 to 

stop Pacific Lumber Company loggers from cutting it down.

Alternatively one could relate the story of the collapse of Sydney

 University’s jacaranda tree, which was “steeped in superstition.

 A popular myth asserted that undergraduates would fail their

 exams if they neglected to study before the tree's first bloom, 

typically in October or November.” 

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-37819712

The possibilities are endless and there will be more talk of 

trees in the near future.