"folk" with an L

[victor steinbok]

I've had a number of "Arab" students in various college environments.
Some came from English-speaking families, others from French-speaking
(both frequently making the higher-SES group, except for Lebanese
Maronites whose economic status cannot be determined based on this
criterion alone). Yet others were neither English nor French speakers
when they entered formal education in English, yet, I am not aware of
any of them--admittedly a self-selected group, pursuing higher
education--who had any /particular/ difficulty in learning English.
Sure, many of them had identifiable accents, but why is this news? I
am also not convinced that any of the explanations offered in the
article are even mildly persuasive. In fact, I am rather tempted to
use stronger language in response.

VS-)

On Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 2:39 AM, Tom Zurinskas <truespel at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Arab students have trouble learing English.  Answer, teach it phonetically.
> There is only one phonetic spelling that's English based -truespel.
>
> http://gulfnews.com/news/gulf/uae/education/why-arab-students-find-english-tricky-1.596513
>
> "The way we read words is determined by the sounds of the language or the orthography of different scripts. [This is why] Arab students have such enormous problems reading and writing English," said Randall.
> "In psychological literature people are very unaware that when it comes to linguistics, it isn't universal how brains are wired," said Randall. This is due to the variations in languages in terms of sounds and scripts.
> "[Arab students] have different [word] search patterns because their linguistic language affects their perception," he added.
> He said for native English speakers the letters of an English word identified phonetically formulate a picture in the brain associated with a meaning. However, for Emirati students this is not the case as Arabic spelling does not work in the same way. "Brains do get framed in a different way for other languages [besides English]," he said. "European languages dominate the world and most research is conducted in English so nobody questions ... other languages," Randall added.
...

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