Another older learner qyestion

BruceM · Post by **BruceM** » Fri Apr 23, 2004 1:43 pm

I teach a refugee class of students from Moldova, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and other parts of the FSU. ONe of my students puzzles me. Filip is 64. In class he speaks a combination of English, Russian and Moldovan. I am not sure he knows the difference

Nightly he writes sentences in "English" that is only partially intelligible---it looks similar to the IPA in some ways. For example, he places what looks like a colon in the middle of some words and he is spelling phonetically what he hears. Any thoughts on what might be happening?
We have a computer lab and I find the same student has an unusual knack for getting into multiple computer programs, like a music, mail, web browsing, Front Page editor, etc. and he has no apparent iterest in thsse activities.
Thoughts?

Sally Olsen · Post by **Sally Olsen** » Fri Apr 23, 2004 5:49 pm

I had a woman student like this who spoke Somali, Egyptian, Arabic and French "English". She was illiterate in all the languages so had nothing to fall back on with the written language. We taught her to write in Somali, her main language outside the school and the English began to come after that. We lent her a cheap camera and got her to take pictures of her life and then wrote stories from that and got vocabulary from that as well with whatever was in the picture. She was so glad to have pictures of herself to send to her relatives and to write a story to go along with it. She was the same as your student on the computer and was adventurous, clicking the mouse on whatever she could find just because it did something and it produced a result. We actually got her hooked on some of the children's games that have fun things to click on. She seemed to like the power of it all. We also had a typing program that did something when you pressed the right letter and also said the letter. We got a volunteer to sit beside her and read to her everything that she was doing and that slowed her down a little and then eventually focused her on doing more what the rest of the class were doing. She is still friends with the volunteer and that made all the difference in the end.

BruceM · Post by **BruceM** » Sat Apr 24, 2004 1:37 pm

Sally,
Your reply is wonderful! You've given me some great ideas on how to work with Filip. I had him write on the computer yesterday and found that many of his problems are just interference from Russian, using B for V, Y for U, etc. so he iis literate and it will just take time. He actually stayed with the task yesterday and I didn't have to wade through 20 windows to find his work!

Roger · Post by **Roger** » Sun Apr 25, 2004 1:42 pm

I enjoyed reading this thread; very sensitive questions, and very sensible observations. I learnt a lot from both of you!

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Another older learner qyestion

Another older learner qyestion

Thanks!