Children do not think about the way they
speak. They can learn one or two and even three languages
quickly and manage to use them more or less correctly in
different situations. However, their needs are not very
elaborate and they do not use a large vocabulary. Before the
child starts school, parents are delighted with his verbal
skills and appreciate the fact that he is intelligent.
Then the child starts school and is exposed
to an entirely new language. Both parents and teachers are
convinced that the child will "pick it up easily" and that he
will be chatting away within three months. Their predictions
are proven correct, and the child displays an astonishing
surface fluency as he plays with his peers. Unfortunately,
neither parents nor teachers realize that there are many
words missing from his vocabulary. Many difficult words will
be explained and elaborated on by a good teacher. (Although
young teachers often do not realize how their words are
misconstrued or taken out of context. Most parents have some
anecdote of a funny malaprop which the child insists the
teacher had said.) But adverbs, adjectives and prepositions
are assumed to be part of a pre-school child's vocabulary,
and neither repeated nor stressed. Words like over, behind,
between, under, wide etc.
The child begins to underachieve and is
`assessed'. He is withdrawn into a smaller group for
individual attention and seems to do better. He is returned
to the classroom and is still below average. Besides which,
the results of his assessment are often far below his actual
ability. The child senses that he is not doing well and feels
himself a failure. He does not even attempt much of the class
work, and begins to misbehave. The teacher labels him as slow
and does not give him as much attention in the classroom as
he gives the bright, more confident children. Teacher
expectation is often an additional cause for a child's
failure, but that is not the subject under discussion here.
All the above applies not only to a bilingual
child. It also applies to a child who begins to speak a good
deal later than other children. A child with normal hearing
and intelligence, can simply be a late speaker. By the time
he is five, his vocabulary will be less advanced than that of
his peers, and like the bilingual child, he may need help.
Not just help in the subjects in which he is weak, but help
in language. His school vocabulary is deficient.
This brings me back to assessments.
Educational psychologists who administer these tests are
beginning to realize that the tests, while tried on thousands
of children and standardized, are geared to a certain
culture. For example, a child is shown the picture of a bowl
of fruit consisting of peaches, apricots, strawberries,
oranges and plums. He is meant to pick the odd one, which in
this case would be oranges, as they have an inedible peel. A
Jewish child may suggest strawberries as the odd one becasue
they have a different blessing! A few wrong answers, for
whatever religious reason, can consideably lower the child's
score. [For example, he may not even recognize a fruit that
is not eaten in his home because it is usually worm-
infested.] On non-verbal tests, where he has tasks to test
his intelligence without having to speak, the child does
extremely well, often well above the average standardized
score. In the Warnock report on education in England in 1978,
there is one clause: "Whenever a child's first language is
not English, at least one of the professionals involved in
assessing the child's needs should be able to understand and
speak his language."
Feuerstein claims that negative findings in
assessments are often the result of ineffective attitudes,
faulty work habits and inadequate modes of thinking. He
argues that children of low level functioning, who had been
diagnosed as learning disabled by conventional assessment
procedure, when provided with appropriate intervention can
achieve normal levels of academic and intellectual
functioning.
I saw a child of seven and a half in Israel
recently who had been recommended for a special school. He
was from an English speaking family, but had been born in
Israel. His English was remarkably pure and when I questioned
this, the parents admitted that he had been in America for
five of his seven years. Then he had been sent to a
cheder. His reading was poor, and he was still
confusing several letters and sounds. His basic number
concepts were non-existent and even in non-verbal tasks, he
did not achieve high scores. I had the feeling that he had
just stopped trying. After only four weeks of daily one-on-
one tutoring, he was a changed boy. Happy, confident and
participating in the classroom instead of being disruptive.
Not all children are transformed so quickly.
And many definitely are not capable of doing as well as the
parents think they they should be doing. But I am speaking of
those children who have the ability and not the language. If
parents understand that a child does not master the new
language fully, as quickly as they think he does, they will
be more tolerant of his lack of ability for the first few
years of school. He must not be allowed to lose confidence in
himself, as this is very difficult to overcome. If s/he is a
monolingual late talker, s/he probably needs help for a year
or two.
Some parents change their minority language
in the home, and now begin to speak the language of the
school only. The opinion of researchers the world over seems
to be that bilingualism is a definite advantage. Findings
suggest that it is ill advised for educators of children who
seem to have potential learning difficulties, to switch to
the majority language in the home. For parents, it is their
weaker language, and it may lower the quantity and quality of
interaction with the children.
*
Your English Family editor has raised a Sabra
family with Hebrew as the home language, mainly because the
first child was a late talker. In the early grades, teachers
used to complain that the girls' vocabulary was somewhat
lacking, that it was not rich enough, compared with their
peers who had Israeli-born parents. To remedy this, I took to
reading to them at night, at first simple stories, and later,
more complex ones. I would explain certain difficult words as
we went along, but made sure to pick interesting stories to
whet their appetite for eventual reading on their own. When
they reached this stage, I encouraged it very much and did my
best to provide literature for them. We also used to play
word games frequently.
It was interesting to note the trilingual
development of the boys in the family who went to a Yiddish-
speaking cheder. The exercise seemed futile in the
beginning, since they were translating chumash words
they already understood, more or less, into a language which
they didn't understand. Bereishis - in onheib... (We
had a great time with "Noach, Noach" - Noach, Noach.)
But months later and a few parshiyos down the road,
they had caught on and were able to converse. This is because
the rebbe persevered. In later years, this cheder did
not insist as strongly upon the Yiddish, and the younger boys
are far weaker in it, while the older ones are able to give
shiurim in that language. The bonus here was that the
similarity between Yiddish and English - which I always
pointed out to them - helped, in the end, to make them
trilingual, at least in understanding.
We would be very happy to have our readers
share their insights and experiences on the choice of mother-
tongue or step-mother-tongue, as I call it. Our FAX:02-
5387998.
