Reaching out to students' minds

 

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.