I was teaching a child who could do ok in Chinese but his English and Malay were a mess of inversion. His b and d interchanges. His h and g can be hard to distinguish one from another. For him, I resorted to making play dough in my frying pan to roll out 'a' to 'z' as a play method.
As homemakers know, home-made play dough only lasts about one week before it fragments in hot weather or become mouldy in wet weather. For those few months, my dining table was constantly like a baker's work space. I would sprinkle corn flour before the lesson and have a major wipe down after class.
I wish I could tell you he improved significantly. No such luck! Since the mom was ambitious to make him a success in all three languages, she could not wait for the natural therapy to bring result but went on to try another method before this one had time to work. I met the mother a few years in the wet market one day, it was a small town. She looked totally tired out, she aged about ten years. In two sentences, she told me her disappointment and disillusionment. I encouraged her that academic success is not everything, after all Bill Gates never completed his higher education but is the richest man at one point of history.
A dyslexic child already finds it difficult to cope with one phonetic language, to expect him to learn three different ones is like expecting a quadriplegic to run a 100m race. Of course, all of my children learn two languages, English and Malay. They are reasonably good in one but not the other. I guess that is why we call the alternate a second or the foreign language.
The past few posts dealing with dyslexia all arose because of the girl up in the north, my deep seated memory took turn to come back so that I could run through them all one by one with the mom who home schools her. It is interesting that normally I cannot list out all these, they are filed away in my off-line memory storage, some have not been retrieved for at least twenty years.
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