Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, April 3, 1993 TAG: 9304030243
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LAURA WILLIAMSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
LANGUAGE NO BARRIER FOR LEARNING-DISABLED
Ask Jamie Crouch to write the letter "B" in English, and she might scrawl it backwards, or upside down.But the 7-year-old dyslexic student from Roanoke took no pains Friday writing the letter in Russian.
Nor did it prove too challenging for her to parrot, " Kak tibYA zaVOOT [what's your name?]," a phrase that daunted the adults around her.
Repeating the phrase proved less difficult, in fact, than answering a question about whether it was hard for her to learn Russian. It's tough for Jamie to process that type of information, so she smiled, instead.
Jamie and her classmates at The Achievement Center - all learning-disabled - sometimes struggle less with the Russian they learn from foreign exchange student Sofya Yanofskaya than they do with their English.
Never mind that they're not supposed to learn Russian at all. Experts in the field advise against teaching foreign languages to the learning-disabled - it's supposed to be too hard.
"Oftentimes for an LD youngster, English almost is a second language," said Alice Koontz, an expert in the field who teaches at a private school near Baltimore.
So how to explain Yanofskaya's success?
"Perhaps it's just the novelty of the thing," she said. "It is something new, like being able to make a star."
It's not likely the children will retain the new language, she said.
Maybe not. But Center Director Barbara Ann Whitwell said Yanovskaya's work changed her mind about bringing foreign languages into the school.
"I think it's opened our eyes to being willing to try another language with all of our students," she said.
The Achievement Center, a private school that prepares 5- to 15-year-olds for mainstreaming in the public school system, entered the foreign language field when Yanovskaya entered its classrooms.
A 20-year-old exchange student at Hollins College, she came to Roanoke from St. Petersburg to learn how to teach reading to elementary school students. She spends six hours at the center each week - helping the youngest children with both Russian and English - to fulfill one of her course requirements.
She said the job challenges her more than it does the students.
"Because they have a lot of deficits of attention, I learn to be patient," she said.
Yanofskaya never worked with a learning-disabled student before arriving in Roanoke. In Russia, she said, nobody singles out students who have difficulty with language or gives them special help.
"I didn't realize what these children feel like," she said. Not until Whitwell handed her a paragraph to read with all the letters written backwards and asked her to write with her left hand.
Whitwell said seeing how quickly the children grasped Yanofskaya's lessons taught her something about how the disabled must feel. The tricky Russian phrases slipped from her memory as soon as they fell from Yanofskaya's tongue.
"Because it comes so much more easily for them, it makes the adult feel stupid," Whitwell said.
But not 7-year-old Robert Goodwin. Is it difficult for him to learn Russian?
"Just a tiny bit," he said.