A poet slips

[Tom Givon]

                                      A GREAT POET CAN STILL GET IT WRONG

         I  came  to know of Salman Masalha ("Arabs, speak Hebrew!",  
Haaretz/English, International  Herald  Tribune  9-27-10) accidentally 
by stumbling a on his truly  great quote:
               "All fixed identities are imposed from the outside.
                 Whoever  has a clear identity knows it can assume 
multiple forms".
In the context  of Palestine/Israel, what a breath of  fresh, rare 
clarity.  Still, like the rest of us mortals, a  great poet can on 
occasion get it wrong  too, and Mr. Masalha--may he be forgiven; pun 
intended--surely got only one third of the story right. At first, he was 
led astray be the academic researchers he cited, who claimed that the 
lagging reading skills of  Israeli-Arab students is correlated  to 
lagging  R-hemisphere  activity,  then explained this neurological lag 
by suggesting that the Arab script requires more contextual analysis. 
But  it is the R-hemisphere of the human cortex that is more context 
oriented, less automated. If Arab-reading students required more 
contextual labor, it should have been registered as a higher 
R-hemisphere activity, not lower.
          Works by M. Posner, S. Petersen, M. Raichle and S. Dahane, 
among  many others, have established  beyond  reasonable  doubt  that 
written words in all languages (English, Mandarin, Hindi, Amharic, 
Hebrew, Arabic, etc.) are  decoded automatically in an L-hemisphere 
module on the boundary of the occipital and temporal lobes (just past 
Brodman's Area 19), along the ventral visual object-recognition 
'stream'  that flows  from the back to the front of the L-cortex. And 
the L-cortex is in general responsible for  the more automated--less 
context-dependent--processing of language (as  well as visual, motor and 
other skills). The visual word-recognition module is,  in turn, 
recruited  from  the pre-existing  visual object-recognition 
ventral-stream  module. A considerable amount of life-time practice and  
repetition is required to affect this late-cultural adaptation. The 
human brain is not (yet) genetically configured  at birth for 
visual-word recognition, only for visual-object recognition. A similar 
cultural adaptation, this one for math, has been shown for (Dahaene & 
Cohen, 2007; see recent article in The New Yorker by Oliver Sachs)
in the L-pareita lobe, an area originally configured for analysis of 
object-location in space.
              Mr. Masalha  then, on his own, points out to a more 
plausible right answer: Arab students, in Israel as well as all over the 
Arab world, are  not  taught literacy in  their native language 
(Falastini, Maghrebi, Masri, Yemeni, etc.), but in a frozen literary 
instrument harking back 1,400  years or more. That is, in a foreign 
language. The discrepancy would be  just as great  if  Israeli kids were 
taught  their Hebrew literacy  first in the language of Genesis; or if  
French  students  were taught literacy  first in the language of  La 
Chançon de Roland, Guilhome de Machaut, or Chrê tien de Troyes. Or  
English-speaking  kids in the language  of Beowolf. As far as my frail 
guessing powers go,  remedying the situation would be much easier by 
combining two well-known verities of second language acquisition: (a) 
Teach them  both early, together--'co-ordinated bilingualism'. And (b), 
teach literacy first in the student's spoken native language; only then 
gradually 'stretch' it to more literary genres.  This method, bhy the 
way,  was suggested in the late 1930's by no other than  L. Bloomfield, 
in a book outlining a  'phonics-first ' literacy  program for native 
English speakers. Rather than depriving Israeli-Arab students of 
literacy in their own--equally glorious--native language, just teach 
them smart.
               For  his last culprit, the presumed--tho  hardly 
unique--vulgarity  of Arab media, Mr. Masalha lapses into well 
recognized  prejudices of  the educated classes. While readily endorsing 
his aesthetic sentiments about modern media, I would still like to point 
out that the 'vulgar' genre is  much closer to the Arab students'  
spoken native language, and  if anything should facilitate the easier  
initial acquisition of  native-language literacy. Respectuosamente, 
ma'-salaam,

                                                                                           
                                                      T. Givón