The Nine Lives of "Linguistic Deficiency"

[John McCreery]

On 2/8/07, Alexandre Enkerli <enkerli at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> I'm mostly thinking about a student my father had, a number of years
> ago (7th grade class for students with learning disabilities, tough
> environment in a suburb of Montreal). Officially labeled as having
> some intellectual deficiencies (actually, like myself, at birth).
> Deemed to be doomed. Came from a nurturing, peaceful, working-class
> environment. Had been sheltered all his life. Somehow, my father
> (trained in dyslexia) noticed that his main problem had to do with
> reading skills. He could read but didn't understand much of what he
> was reading. Turns out, his skills in maths were well above par. But
> because many math problems were spelled out as "practical exercises,"
> he couldn't shine. So my father took it upon himself to make sure this
> student would improve his reading skills, which was relatively easy,
> with a few simple methods. In the end, this student became a college
> professor after having done some training in forestry and finished
> graduate school in Fine Arts.
>
> Sure, anecdotal. Statistically insignificant. Blatant plug for
> dedicated teachers in tougher neighbourhoods. But the point is: are
> education-minded people (journalists, parents, government officials,
> teachers) counting on language too much?


Doesn't the anecdote make precisely the opposite point, i.e., that a
dedicated teacher noticed a student with promise, who seemed to have a
specific problem. The teacher then addressed the problem by adding to the
student's repertoire of language skills, thus enabling the student to meet
society's demands. Nothing in the anecdote as told suggests that the teacher
started a crusade to eliminate word problems from math textbooks on the
grounds that such problems discriminate against dislexic kids.

In my family we had a similar experience. When my daughter, who had gone to
Japanese kindergarten and three years of Japanese public school before
transferring to an international school where instruction was in English,
she could speak and read English fluently. She was lucky to encounter a
fifth-grade teacher who, confronted with an essay that looked illegible, had
the presence of mind to ask my daughter to read it to her, which the
daughter did. Her reading revealed a vocabulary and composition skills well
in advance of her age level. Her problem was that she had learned to write
in Japanese, starting with kana, the Japanese syllabary that phonetically
mirrors spoken Japanese. She had started her English-speaking school as an
unwitting disciple of George Bernard Shaw, writing English phonetically as
she heard it. The teacher worked with her and managed to improve her
spelling to the point that she graduated top in her class.

But here again the anecdote points in a different direction than the one
Alexandre suggests. The teacher didn't launch a campaign to reform English
spelling on the grounds that a more purely phonetic approach would be fairer
to people like my daughter. Neither did she spend her time preaching to my
daughter that the way she had learned to spell was a natural, logical and
rational one. She taught my daughter how to cope with the historical
arbitrariness that makes learning to spell English more like learning to
write Chinese, with its thousands of different characters, than the
relatively simple process the alphabet suggests.

Given the choice between taking steps suggested by the language ideologies
now current among linguistic anthropologists and the future welfare of my
daughter, this conscientious teacher did what Alexandre's father did, chose
to focus on the future welfare of the child for whom she felt responsible. I
am grateful to her for that choice.




-- 
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
http://www.wordworks.jp/
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