Our new colleagues in Australia Ian and Caitlin have a story that is just what we all need to hear as we get ready to crank out the CI in the next few weeks:
Hi Ben,
I’d like to tell you a story about something that happened recently. A bit of feedback.
Caitlin is my colleague and co-Chinese teacher at my high school. She just told me this story about a kid we had in Year 8 this year. This story nearly brought me to tears, and I’d like to share it with you because what happened was a direct result of your ideas and passion for CI….
Bella (real name) is 13 years old and just finished Year 8 (2014) in Dec. She is severely intellectually impaired. Her English reading skills are minimal – she operates at about the level of a 6 year old. She has difficulty buttoning up her school uniform. Beautiful nature, joy to have in the class. Sat there well-behaved all year. Listening. In Term 4 when Caitlin started using TPRS, Bella followed along with the class as usual. Nothing special, Caitlin didn’t expect her to be getting much of it, especially when we got to Cold Character reading the first story (Guiseppe) which pops up after Unit Two. Lots of English words in this story such as names etc to assist the beginner reader navigate through the story, but still a significant proportion of the story is in Chinese (characters NOT pinyin). No attempt was made to teach the characters. The students, to our amazement, were reading the text ! How? They knew the storyline back to front before we started the reading. From listening to input that was comprehensible. And they were really solid in that language.
One of the Year 12 girls came back to shool after graduation to help Bella for a week reading through the text of Guiseppe while the others in the class were doing other reading activities. At the end of this week Caitlin had the students read through the text, she asked some simple comprehension questions about it etc. All good. Bella wanted to read to Caitlin. OK, she said, not really expecting too much after just a week.
Well.
Now I didn’t see this but Caitlin swears it’s true. Bella, intellectually disabled, not reading much in English, read one quarter of the text in nearly fluent Chinese, really good tones, and insisted that she be allowed to finish reading the whole page. Which she did.
Now, if that isn’t the perfect advertisment for CI !!
However, I’m feeling a bit sad at this point because of all the kids I’ve written off in the past, intellectually disabled and “normal”, because they couldn’t “get it”. It wasn’t them. It was me. OMG, thank god I’ve found out now before I inflicted more damage.
Happy New Year.
Cheers,
Ian