http://www.deliberatelyconsidered.com/2013/03/speech-deficits-a-young-%e2%80%98other%e2%80%99-and-his-mother-in-berlin/ Informed reflection on the events of the day Wed, 15 Jul 2015 17:00:00 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.23 http://www.deliberatelyconsidered.com/2013/03/speech-deficits-a-young-%e2%80%98other%e2%80%99-and-his-mother-in-berlin/comment-page-1/#comment-26419 Thu, 21 Mar 2013 11:43:00 +0000 http://www.deliberatelyconsidered.com/?p=18179#comment-26419 When I told your story to a friend this morning, she shared her experience with her, now 9 years old son. Native German (we now call them “biogerman”, have you heard that expression), both parents academics. The son was found deficient in the German language when he was five years old. It was only by chance during the deficiency-focused conversation with the parents, that the doctor’s assistant spoke to the little boy in Turkish. It turned out that he understood her perfectly but did not respond in Turkish. It turns out that not even the parents knew that the boy’s favorite kindergarten teacher would speak a lot of Turkish with the kids. He was passively fluent in Turkish but found “deficient” in German. The parents refused any other “treatment” of the kid.
It is indeed shocking to see how our education institutions in Germany are unwilling and unable to appreciate diversity. There has been quite some progress at the pre-primary level in recent years (though neither your example nor mine testifies to that), but very depressing from the primary school level. Unfortunately there is no recognition that the investment in language support “Sprachfoerderung” may be systematically malprogrammed because of this focus on deficiency.

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