Academic Writing New Groups

Congratulations on finding your way to the right place. I'm posting below the full text of an article about language learning. The essay question you get will not be strictly 'methodology' so don't worry if that's not your strong point. You may just read and reflect or print out and make a few notes to bring with you to class, as you wish. Quotations, however, will be appreciated.

Learning Disabilities and Foreign Language Learning

By: Robin L. Schwarz (1997)

Foreign language study is an increasingly prominent part of education everywhere. Not only are high school students nearly always required to study a foreign language, but many lower and middle schools have added foreign languages to their curricula, whether as an enrichment or a requirement. Foreign language "magnet" schools have been created in some school districts and seem to be very popular. And of course, it's more common than not that colleges and universities require foreign language study for graduation. For the student unencumbered by a learning disability, foreign language study is indeed an enriching and rewarding experience. For the learning disabled student, however, it can be an unbelievably stressful and humiliating experience, the opposite of what is intended.

While it has long been recognized in the learning disabilities field that foreign language study would be a terrific challenge to learning disabled students, somehow this fact has been widely ignored in the field of foreign language instruction and in schools in general until very recently. Teachers of ESL students have also recognized that there are students who have great difficulty mastering English because of learning disabilities. This fact has added some urgency to the need for recognition of this problem. As more research is being done and more teachers are recognizing the problem, more solutions are being created for the student facing the challenge of learning a foreign or second language and the teachers who teach them.

How can learning disabled students be taught foreign languages?

Once they had pinpointed what they felt was the root of the foreign language learning problem, Ganschow and Sparks began investigating ways that learning disabled students could be helped to learn a foreign language. At least two approaches to foreign language instruction different from "normal" or traditional language instruction have emerged as being effective.

The first and most researched approach is a response to Ganschow and Spark's findings that many, if not most, students having trouble with foreign language acquisition have phonological deficits in their first language. Ganschow and Sparks theorized further that to help these students, the sound system of the target language must be very explicitly taught. In order to test this theory, Ganschow and Sparks collaborated with a high school Spanish teacher who had learned about the Orton-Gillingham method of teaching phonology, reading and spelling to very significantly learning disabled students. In this method, sounds are presented in a highly structured fashion with a great deal of visual, kinesthetic and tactile practice and input. The Spanish teacher, Karen Miller, has tested the effectiveness of teaching Spanish to learning disabled students using the Orton-Gillingham approach. The research on her students has shown quite conclusively that LD students taught Spanish in this way have been able to learn and retain it. Another collaborator, Elke Schneider, has had similar results teaching German to LD students.

In their studies on Karen Miller's students, Ganschow and Sparks found that by being taught phonological skills in one language, the students improved their phonological awareness in English also. This finding has led to a variation on the method of teaching phonology in the target language: teach the fundamentals of phonology in the student's native language before foreign language instruction begins. That is, students are taught to recognize phonemes, to decode, or read words, efficiently and to encode, or apply the sounds to the written language. Basically, they learn what language is and how its sounds and parts function. Application of this knowledge to the language they are trying to learn is the next step. This has proven an effective remediation as well. In fact, so strongly do Ganschow and Sparks believe this, they now recommend very strongly that such phonological skills be much more heavily stressed when children are learning to read. They feel students' reading and language skills will be much stronger, and future problems with foreign language acquisition will be headed off for many.

The second approach to language instruction which has been effective has been to adapt the foreign language courses according to principles of instruction known to be effective for LD students. This means making such changes as reducing the syllabus to the essential elements, slowing the pace of instruction quite considerably, reducing the vocabulary demand, providing constant review and incorporating as much visual/tactile/kinesthetic (i.e. multisensory) stimulation and support as possible. Many of these course adaptations were also responses to the specific complaints and requests of foreign language students having trouble in their classes. Furthermore, in some schools there are courses designed for the student strong in listening and speaking skills but weak in reading and writing, and vice versa. The University of Colorado at Boulder has shown this latter approach to be effective in Latin and Spanish courses adapted for LD students. A phonological component is part of this adapted curriculum.