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Communication with Different Perspectives

ssaludades's picture

what ideas do you have for other ways to express and communicate ideas?

My little brother has a learning disability: From when he was a toddler up to the present, he had trouble with his communication skills in forming sentences and coming up with the right words. in turn, in elementary school, reading and writing became difficult tasks for him. Even now, his reading and speaking skills are not up to grade level par. Nonetheless, we always had the inclination that he was bright as quantitive problems and art came easy to him. Since we knew that he had communication problems, when he got frustrated with the reading and writing required for different subjects besides English, we would always help him to provide it visually or in a math problem. 

 His disability helped me remember that people view information differently. Knowing this, in order to teach, we need to recognize these different perspectives and adapt the present information to the way that they see things - in the way that they see things. My brother’s visual learning is just one example, but it’s interesting to wonder how other disabilities - dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia - would have information presented as well. 

For my paper, in light of my previous post about my parents, I am actually plan on thinking about the different ways non-native speakers view writing. In learning Japanese characters in my Japanese class, I have found that visualizing the stories that helped these characters come to be has helped me remember it more easily. (見-to see comes from a picture of an eye with a person’s feet, seeing in action). In memorizing Japanese words, I make up stories because unlike Spanish words, Japanese words don’t have shared stems with English words. Together, in writing and remembering Japanese words, I visualize not only the story (for the character) but the romanized English (for the actual word). In turn, for my essay, I’m thinking about presenting each word in story form and interchanging between words and characters different languages to present the way in which a non-native speaker may think and dissect writing.