Dyslexia and learning a foreign language: A personal experience

Annals of Dyslexia, 2000 by Simon, Charlann S

Over the next six years, I continued to retake 100-level courses and studied for three to four weeks in France each summer. I developed a passionate interest in learning French because I felt "at home" in Paris and wanted to be able to communicate. In 1997-1998, I finally ventured into French 201 and 202. In May 1998, prior to the French 202 final, the instructor said to our class, "Here is something that will help you study the verb system," and she distributed the handout that I had created six years earlier to pass the French 102 final. Although the handout was titled "Simon's Summary of French Verbs," the instructor was surprised that I was the author, and for good reason. She knew how I had struggled with the verb system, showing absence of automaticity on some verb structures and lingering confusion about others. That is, there was (and still is) a "Grand Canyon gap" between my French linguistic competence (at a metalinguistic level) and my performance (as a speaker, listener, reader, and writer).

I no longer tell the truth about how long I have studied French because people cannot comprehend how I could have studied since 1992 and have so little proficiency. In the fall semester of 1999, I took French 264 (readings on, and discussion of, French culture) from the same professor with whom I had taken my first semester of French (French 101). She observed that while my comprehension had improved significantly since 1992, it was a puzzle to her that I still struggled so severely with spoken and written language. I could not fluently retrieve basic structures or pronunciation patterns to communicate my thoughts in classroom discussions, so I tended to speak in sentence fragments and phrases that would be typical of first year students.

Making the distinction between language competence (what one knows about a language) and language performance (what one can do with a language) (Gass and Selinker 1994) has been critical in sustaining my motivation to learn French. By keeping in mind this differentiation, I reduce my frustration about the gap between what I know about the French language after seven years of study and what I am able to retrieve for spontaneous use: When one is dyslexic, there is always a gap between what one knows and what one can do. Learning a foreign language provides one more example of this discrepancy.

A SELF-REPORT OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING DIFFICULTIES: APPLYING THE LINGUISTIC CODING DIFFERENCES HYPOTHESIS

In this section, I present examples of difficulties I have experienced in past French courses and continue to experience to some degree after seven years of study. My learning has displayed the plateau in foreign language acquisition that foreign language teachers have reported in their students with dyslexia (Michaelides 1990; Lescano 1995). For example, I have been placed at the "low intermediate level" on entrance exams for summer classes in France for the past three years, despite continuous study at community colleges during the academic year.