A poet slips

[john at research.haifa.ac.il]

Tom,
I've been trying for several years to get Israeli Arabs and Jews to seriously
consider the possibility of educating Israeli Arabs in a written version of
their spoken language, as you suggest, at least through 3rd grade. I can send
you some things I've written on this topic, with a lot of cross-linguistic
data. But thus far, it isn't working. As with most aspects of 'the situation'
here, politically active Arabs think that the solution is to pursue the same
self-destructive strategy which they've been following for almost a century but
with even more vigor and steadfastness (e.g. Masalha points the blame at the
Arab media because they do not 'provide the linguistic richness of formal
Arabic') while Jews are basically content to let the Arabs stew in their own
juices so that they can reap the benefits. There may, however, be hope for the
future in the form of the radically increased usage of written forms of
colloquial Arabic dialects in electronic media such as Facebook, blogs, emails,
etc., by Arabic speakers below the age of 30, which will soon come to seriously
threaten the status of classical Arabic in the same way that the invention of
the printing press overturned the linguistic hierarchy in Western Europe by
overthrowing Latin. I'm working on this too. We'll see what happens.

I realize that Masalha as well as the researchers he referred to don't
necessarily know what they're talking about regarding the brain. But the
general point is still potentially significant--that the connected script which
Arabic uses as well as the multiple forms which many Arabic letters have may be
a significant obstacle to literacy, however this may be related to processes in
the brain.
Best wishes,
John



Quoting Tom Givon <tgivon at uoregon.edu>:

>
>
>                                       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
>




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