What to do for Project Two...?

While thinking about my lesson plan/prototype for a schizophrenic learner, I keep reminding myself that my former student, Gavin (see entry from 3/1/06), learned best when I worked with him one-on-one after class. As soon as the classroom environment changed from chaotic (full of 20 fifteen year-olds) to calm, Gavin suddenly became attentive and eager to learn. In other words, it was imperative that all outside distraction disappeared before he was capable of concentrating on me or the subject matter. This makes perfect sense since back in 1997, the first neuropsychological assessment of adolescent schizophrenics revealed that the greatest impairment pertained to their "focused and divided attention as well as working memory" (source: http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/reprint/154/11/1613).

While it's very difficult to find research related to schizophrenia and foreign language acquisition, I can't say that I'm surprised. In fact, I think I remember the school administration strongly discouraging Gavin's parents from enrolling him in my Spanish class. His mother argued, however, that he was smart enough to handle it.

I often equate learning Spanish to solving a math problem. Both require the process of translation. Pieces have to be broken apart and rearranged before they can make any sense. Take the passage above, for example. Without an image of Curious George, a beginning language learner might have a hard time deciphering the passage in Spanish. By identifying proper nouns like "Jorge" and "Africa" as well as cognates like "curioso", the image helps the learner to figure out what "monito" means through a process of elimination. The image is helpful to the average learner but might go so far as to reduce stress for the schizophrenic learner.