Wednesday, September 21, 2005
Something for the Social work from my experience
Brain research, dyslexia, dysgraphia and other Anomalies
this paper is just my translation of my previous post in German
Today I have decided to write about an interesting observation I have made. At the vocational school were I teach now I have a young boy of 15 who speaks fluent German and even his English is quite ok, and he wants to study some other languages; he mentioned Russian. The unbelievable about that is that the young boy has huge problems in the Czech language, und he was diagnosed as having dyslexia.
Then I have realized that I had seen similar cases already before. I have already seen such language problems several times in my life.
Once it was a lawyer, who stuttered always only when reading an English text or speaking English, when he read or spoke Czech he did not stutter at all. Many years later, when I taught English evening class for adults in Germany, I had there a woman who had some similar problems: her pronunciation in English was extremely poor, but she had a huge active vocabulary in English as well as a perfect knowledge of English grammar. I tested her a bit: I tested her pronunciation in other languages she spoke. In this case her pronunciation was perfect. So this dysfunction in pronunciation was linked only to the English language.
So I have three cases, one lawyer, who stuttered when speaking English, one woman who had poor pronunciation only in English and a young boy who cannot write properly in Czech but he can write without mistakes in German, spite the fact that he is a Czech. I think that these three cases are extremely interesting and it surely would be worth a while to study these cases of dysfunction in a language more in depth.
This kind of dysfunction is most probably caused by some specific emotional disruptions. I can be that the parents or the teachers put too high performance pressure onto these persons, which in turn caused the specific dysfunctions in the respective person due to disturbed emotions, e.g. offending, calling names or degrading remarks.
In the case of that lawyer I do not know why he stuttered when speaking English and did not when speaking Czech. The woman with the poor pronunciation in English was offended and degraded by her English teacher at school. I made this assessment based upon what she told me. I do not know where the dysfunctions in Czech and nearly perfect German come from by the young boy I teach now, but I hope to be able to find this out.
this paper is just my translation of my previous post in German
Today I have decided to write about an interesting observation I have made. At the vocational school were I teach now I have a young boy of 15 who speaks fluent German and even his English is quite ok, and he wants to study some other languages; he mentioned Russian. The unbelievable about that is that the young boy has huge problems in the Czech language, und he was diagnosed as having dyslexia.
Then I have realized that I had seen similar cases already before. I have already seen such language problems several times in my life.
Once it was a lawyer, who stuttered always only when reading an English text or speaking English, when he read or spoke Czech he did not stutter at all. Many years later, when I taught English evening class for adults in Germany, I had there a woman who had some similar problems: her pronunciation in English was extremely poor, but she had a huge active vocabulary in English as well as a perfect knowledge of English grammar. I tested her a bit: I tested her pronunciation in other languages she spoke. In this case her pronunciation was perfect. So this dysfunction in pronunciation was linked only to the English language.
So I have three cases, one lawyer, who stuttered when speaking English, one woman who had poor pronunciation only in English and a young boy who cannot write properly in Czech but he can write without mistakes in German, spite the fact that he is a Czech. I think that these three cases are extremely interesting and it surely would be worth a while to study these cases of dysfunction in a language more in depth.
This kind of dysfunction is most probably caused by some specific emotional disruptions. I can be that the parents or the teachers put too high performance pressure onto these persons, which in turn caused the specific dysfunctions in the respective person due to disturbed emotions, e.g. offending, calling names or degrading remarks.
In the case of that lawyer I do not know why he stuttered when speaking English and did not when speaking Czech. The woman with the poor pronunciation in English was offended and degraded by her English teacher at school. I made this assessment based upon what she told me. I do not know where the dysfunctions in Czech and nearly perfect German come from by the young boy I teach now, but I hope to be able to find this out.
# posted by Dalibor @ 12:49 PM 
