Luqman Michel
The problem with dyslexic children is that they find it difficult to read an orthographically inconsistent language like English. One way of helping dyslexic children to read is to teach them in an appropriate manner like I explain in my blog. Here are a few other solutions to improve the literacy level.
One solution that I can think of to make it easy for dyslexics to learn the English language is to have additional letters to represent the different sounds of vowels and some of the consonants. After all the Tamil language has 247 alphabets and Hindi has 58.
Read the following and if you would like to help dyslexic children ask your politicians or minister of education to incorporate accent marks in the books for the kindergarten and first 2 years of primary education.With millions being spent on grants to study dyslexic you should be able to get your politicians to get these books published.
Another solution that I can think of to make it easy for dyslexics to learn the English language is to have accent marks like they have in French for all letters that have different sounds. For instance retain the current letter “A” for one of the sounds it represents and have accent for the other sounds that 'A' represent. Have special books using this accent marks for dyslexic kids. This is only as a crutch during the initial year or two. I am very sure dyslexic kids will have no problem learning the English language once this is incorporated. With these accent marks the dyslexic kids will know why 'a' sounds the way it does. They will not be puzzled and will be able to read well.
The US government and UK government are spending millions of dollars on grants.If some of that money is channelled into producing books with accent, for dyslexic children to use during their first two years of school, literacy level will increase. This accent will only be necessary during the initial years as a crutch. My son, Hakim (who studied Arabic for three years in high school and learned to read and write Arabic from young) will write below on how the Arabic language is written without vowels:
In Arabic, there are long and short vowels. To briefly explain long and short vowels: Long vowels are vowels whose sound is pronounced for a longer time when spoken as compared to short vowels. Vowel length is not distinctive in English, but it is an important feature in many other languages.
The terms long and short vowels are also used in English, for example to differentiate between the word moon (which has a long vowel sound) and book (which has a short vowel sound).
Alright, now that we have that clear, it’s worth noting that in written Arabic [link to Wikipedia article] usually only the long vowels are written, but the short ones are omitted. This means that the reader must be familiar with the language to understand the missing vowels.
Since it would be difficult to read text which has no vowels, the Arabic education system, especially Arabic language classes, use diacritic marks to mark the vowels, since they are crucial to the grammar. An Arabic sentence can have a completely different meaning by a subtle change in vowels, for example:
qlb (قلب) can be read as qalb (which means “heart”) or qalab (which means “he turned around”)
This is why in important texts, such as the Qur’an, the vowels are mandated.
Important texts aside, it is true that in daily life, short vowels are omitted from written Arabic. If you find this difficult to imagine, let’s go off on a short tangent and take a look at text speak, or, if you will, txtspk. Take for example, the following sentence:
Ystrdy he gv me a dctnry fr my bday. I wntd a kybrd! He rly doesn’t knw me vry well. He shld aplgze.
I’m pretty sure that any of you who are accustomed to sending SMSes or who chat online will have no problem reading that sentence, even though a lot of the vowels are missing. In fact, even those of you who don’t use abbreviations in text messaging should be able to understand it easily enough. (Ok, maybe “aplgze” is pushing it a bit far, but you still get my point)
Of course, though we can make do without the vowels, it would be difficult to learn English that way. Similarly, when learning Arabic, vowels are written using diacritic marks.
Now that it’s been demonstrated that we can still read words even when we take out the vowels, let’s continue with Arabic.
In the Arabic writing of everyday use, in general publications, and on street signs, short vowels are typically not written. On the other hand, children's books, elementary-school texts, and Arabic language grammar books in general will include diacritics to some degree. These are known as "vocalized" texts.
When I was taught Arabic for three years in school, the diacritic marks were used the whole time. They never taught us to read texts which did not have the vowel markings, yet when I see an Arabic word-without accent marks- which consisted of familiar consonants, I know at once how to pronounce it, with the correct vowels for each syllable.
For example when I see the letters ALHMAM (الحمام) I know it’s pronounced al-hamaam and not al-humaam or al-himaam. (there’s the letter alif for ‘A’ in the word al-hamaam because it’s a long vowel – hence the doubled ‘a’ in the transliteration)
Referring to the simple example I’d given above about the issue of ambiguity, this is how the word qlb would be written using full vocalization to avoid ambiguity:
For the word qalb which means “heart”: قَلْبْ
For the word qalab which means “he turned around”: قَلَبْ
And that is how I learned to read Arabic, with the vowel marks to guide me initially, which I eventually no longer needed.
Examples of accent marks or diacriticals:
é – Acute
ç – Cedilla
â – Circumflex
è – Grave
ñ – Tilde
ü – Umlaut/Diaeresis
Parents could possibly add these accents on the books that their children are using. This is all the dyslexic child needs. He won't be baffled with the different sounds of 'A'. The same should be done for all the other vowels and consonants that have more than one sound. We could incorporate the French letter ’Ç’ for the 's' sound represented by the letter 'c' as in 'city'.
Another idea is for a computer expert to design a programme which could convert existing story books for children on the computer into letters with accent marks as described above. Let us hope that someone from Microsoft will read this and get this programme done.
As I have mentioned earlier dyslexic kids will not have much of a problem with consonant blends. So, teach them consonant blends as they arise.
Photo:
http://www.prlog.org/
