As life is
drawing to an end, one grows desperate about all the facts one has missed and
all the fields of research that one will leave unexplored. But one perforce
also grows aware of how unequal one is to the task of reaching definitive
answers to fundamental questions which have preoccupied one perhaps for as long
as one’s lifetime.
If you
search on the internet about how much we understand of the human brain, you
will find all kinds of answers which actually fail to get to grips with the
real point at issue.
As I have
pointed out in an earlier post, my feeling is that we teachers are not invited or
encouraged to feed our discoveries to the body of research being conducted into
how learners approach learning a foreign language. If science is not empirical,
it is nothing. No matter how scientists would interpret teachers’ observations,
the fact remains that they should capitalise on those very observations.
I will cite
a few examples of observations I have kept a record of and my interpretation of
the mistakes. Note the mistakes were mostly made by dyslexic children and they
involve a mix-up on several levels—phonological, morphological, semantic.
· A student was asked to explain the
meaning of “I miss you” and he came up with the equivalent of “I hate you” in
his mother tongue (Greek).
My interpretation of his answer:
In Greek the word “miss” sounds like the verb μισώ (hate) if you take away the
ending (-ω) for
first person singular Present Tense. He kept the meaning of “you” which was
familiar to him and that’s how he came up with this translation. This is an
example of a mother-tongue-interfering mistake and an ingenious deployment of
all means available to him.
· Another dyslexic student was asked
what “olives” means and he replied with the equivalent of “we all live” in
Greek (όλοι ζούμε). Apparently he broke down the word
to two constituent parts “all” and “live”. It is worth noting that in Greek you
don’t normally use the pronoun (“we”) before the verb as the verb ending
indicates the person and the number, and, needless to say, many students do not
bother with the ending –s for the third person singular of Present Simple.
· Dyslexic students literally hang on
the teacher’s words so that they will make sense of what would be an impossible
task on paper. This means that some misunderstandings depend on how they break
down an utterance into distinct words. Here is an example to illustrate the
point:
I asked a student “Is it raining?”, and his perceived hearing was “Is it
training?” The sentence made no sense in the context but it never crossed the
student’s mind that a neutral “it” could not possibly be training. This didn’t
matter to the student as long as he could provide an answer to the question.
Learners, especially young children, have a way of making of words they
hear what they will—or should I say, what sounds familiar from their exposure
to the foreign language till the encounter with a new word. This time there
were several junior students who contributed to the guessing game – with only
one being dyslexic. They had come
across the word “imagine” before but none of them seemed to remember it. So the
responses I got varied from “magic” to “emoji” and they were based on the
hearing of the word.
My conclusion
Although teachers in our majority do not credit dyslexic students with
abstract thinking or organising the input of foreign language, we are wrong.
They have an amazing ability to structure and restructure the input in order to
decode the message, and they hardly ever give up trying till they (or the
teacher) have the problem satisfactorily resolved.
Here is one more example of highly abstract thinking by another dyslexic
student. He was having trouble understanding a sentence so I asked what
“something” means. His answer was the Greek word for “often”. I racked my brains
to see the relevance and eventually all I
could gather was that this time the student found some hidden semantic
similarity between the two words (“often” and “something”). Let me put it this
way absurd as it may sound: “something” is not “everything” while “often” is
not “always”. On a high level of abstraction the words are comparable.
