You should not need to master the subjunctive to get a C-minus in a first-year Spanish course. For an A, you should, but if you just need to pass, you can blow off that lesson.
We don’t know what the college is, but I’m going to assume it’s not a school with legendary rigor in the humanities like Swarthmore or UChicago.
Can he CLEP out? He can use modernstates.org so he can pass the CLEP test. If he can’t CLEP out have him use modernstates anyway. It is free and can teach him what is learned in the first year of college for spanish or french.
I’m not overestimating the verb tenses covered in the community college class I took. I know what we covered. I was there.
You might not have to learn all the verb tenses to pass Spanish, but I doubt you’d get by without learning the subjunctive. Spanish uses the subjunctive a lot. Maybe you could skate without knowing some of the compound past tenses though.
The compund tense patterns and usage pretty much parallel English patterns and usage. The killers for me are the subjunctive and ser/estar. My Spanish is fluent but those two still trip me up.
If he’s set on Spanish, there are lots of resources out there. Probably more than for just about any other language.
My dyslexic H could not pass FL in HS. Fortunately, he was able to graduate but he didn’t get a Regents’ diploma. My third son was FL exempt. S17 (4th son) took Latin and made it through middle school. He barely passed 9th grade with a D, at which point we pulled him out of it, but because he had passed in middle school, I was unable to get him exempted. That meant that he was unable to earn an advanced Regents diploma (that made it easier to let him take accounting instead of Algebra 2/Trig as well).
Latin is NOT a panacea for dyslexic kids< IMHO. My son did ok in middle school because half of the grade was based on history and mythology, which he loved and did well in. Once he got into HS and the history portion dropped to 25 - 333% of the grade, his deficiencies showed up.
I stand by my prior advice. Dyslexic kids could take FL over the summer at a local CC and transfer the credits back. As long as they can get a C, they should get the credits. Of course, you must check with your school to see if this is allowed. My kids attend/ed SUNY schools and my D was able to get prior permission to pursue this route. S17 is about to seek that permission this semester to do ASL over the summer. He has always wanted to study ASL and is excited about the possibility.
The notion of taking the foreign language over the summer is an excellent one. It’s not perfect for my son, because as a “transfer” he needs to get the rest of his units at his college, but it might be the answer anyway.
Can he take a course for no credit over the summer to prepare for the fall semester? Can he start using Duolingo or rosetta stone? Can he take less credits when he takes the FL? Can he get a tutor?
Would you really fail first-year Spanish if you nailed all the vocab on the exam, but only used the indicative mood? I don’t believe it. There’s no way that use of the subjunctive adds up to 30% of the grade. Not even close.
Would you really fail first year Spanish if you got everything else right on all the exams, and got perfect scores on all the assignments, but got all the questions on the subjunctive wrong? No, probably not, but this is not a student who is going to get everything else right on all the exams and get perfect scores on all the assignments. So he’d better get some of the subjunctive questions right, which means he has to learn how to form and use subjunctive verbs.
I know that as a parent it is natural for you to worry… but from your posts you seem to have made up your mind that your son is doomed to fail the course. As I posted above, there can be tremendous variation in expectations, approach, and instructional philosophy in the way that languages are taught at different colleges, and via different instructors. And you seem to be projecting or overlaying your own fears – assuming that your son will be expected to be able to fully conjugate verb forms and master use of the subjunctive in an introductory class - when it is quite possible that he will be in a class that is more focused on vocabulary development and developing listening skills.
Obviously, I don’t know what your son’s college’s expectations will be … but my point is, you also don’t know yet. And a summer course that you took at a community college might not be the best way to judge – because often those courses are given at an accelerated pace to cram in a full semester over the course of a shorter summer session.
I believe you that the course you took at a community college was very much focused on teaching grammar, but again, courses are different. Textbooks are different. Teachers are different. Forms of evaluation are different. Some courses are much more focused on building vocabulary and basic conversational skills than nuances of grammar.
Given that your son is required to take a course – I’d suggest that you might do better with a wait and see approach rather than trying to prove to everyone that your son’s course will be too difficult for him. Maybe it will, and maybe it won’t – but what’s the point of debating about that now? I think all you are doing is increasing your own anxiety level, stressing over problems that may or may not come to pass.
I would have chosen a college without language requirements.
Dyslexia is a language processing difference, so anything that has to do with words and language is a potential stumbling block. Dyslexics also tend to be big-picture, whole-to-part, intuitive learners — so reliance on rule-based learning or memorization can also be quite difficult. So if you are saying that something is “just a set of rules”… that is exactly the point. It may be very easy for you to remember the rules and apply them – exceptionally difficult for the dyslexic to do so — but the dyslexic student might excel in areas where flexibility of thought or creativity is an asset.
So part of the reason that dyslexics often struggle in academic language courses is the way they are taught — with heavy emphasis on learning rules, memorizing vocabulary lists, etc. And that has given rise to something of a myth that dyslexics can’t learn other languages – which isn’t true, as there are many dyslexic people who are multilingual. But they tend to learn much better in immersive contexts.
When my dyslexic son was age 17, he went to Thailand for a month with a foreign exchange outfit – 3 weeks was with a homestay with a family where the parents spoke no English. Son came home and spoke to me in Thai – not to express complex ideas, but to express wants and needs – like being hungry or thirsty. He had picked up a bunch of day-to-day interchange phrases.
There was a professor at San Jose State University named James Asher who developed a method of teaching languages called TPR (Total Physical Response). You can google it to get a sense of how it works. My son’s high school french teacher adopted that method for her classroom, and my son did well in French – A’s for four years. It’s built around total immersion and the sort of give & take communication that my son would have experienced in Thailand. One year my son had French the last period of the day – on alternate days because his school was on a block schedule – and on those days he would come home and speak to me in French. It wasn’t that my son was trying to show off to me — it’s that he had a hard time switching between languages. His brain would sort of get stuck on whatever language he had been practicing.
My son also took Japanese for a year in college as a sophomore. At that time his college performance was very uneven – he was getting A’s in half his classes and D’s in the other half. Japanese was one of the A’s.
But the other important thing to understand is that “dyslexia” is a broad term and each person is different. CF’s son also has Aspergers— and while on the diagnostic end of things that is a different label – for the person who carries those two separate labels, there is only one brain – and both labels are descriptive of his the overall way that CF son thinks, perceives, learns. That is, they aren’t separable inside that one person’s head. So what my dyslexic son experienced is not going to be the same as what CF’s son experiences.
I do think that my son would have found a traditional approach to foreign language learning with heavy emphasis on reading and writing to be very difficult. It was tough enough to spell a word in English … writing things out in French would have been quite difficult. His French teacher was quite determined to avoid exposing her students to written French until they had acquired a good speaking vocabulary. (Spanish probably wouldn’t have posed the same problems)
But again, each person is different. I think it helps to approach new challenges with an open mind and also to have a granular approach to solutions (breaking things down piece by piece, or simplifying).
I actually don’t think he’s doomed to fail. I’d say he has a 60-75% chance of passing. Since his small LAC requires everyone to take a language, presumably they are good at getting people to pass it.
I didn’t take a summer community college class in Spanish. I took a full year sequence. Actually I took two full years, and would recommend those particular classes to anyone.
Sorry about the confusion re your community college course – I probably confused your post with other that recommended taking a cc course over the summer. (Which I wouldn’t recommend, precisely because of the accelerated pace).
But the point still remains – all language courses are not cut from the same cloth.
Given that it’s a small LAC, the class is more likely to be taught by an experienced prof (vs. the TA’s my daughter had when studying Russian at Columbia). Encourage your son to be forthcoming with his professor about any difficulties he runs into – he or she may be able to offer appropriate suggestions and may be very willing to offer informal modifications.
You may be very accurate in your assessment of your son’s chances with the course – but I hope you will do your best to change your mindset to “going to pass” as opposed to “significant risk of failure”. Because attitudes and expectations can really influence learning outcomes. There really are a lot of resources for support and skill-building, especially if your son opts to study Spanish.
As someone not very good at languages, I did find that immersion helped. When I took German in college, I was religious about doing all the oral repetition exercises over and over again. At least for me, as long as I did twice as much practicing as anyone else, I could keep up. I also had a roommate who’s Mom was German who could help in a pinch. After freshman year I did an intensive month’s study in Germany and I found the following year of German much easier for it. My son had a similar experience with Arabic, going from C’s to A’s after a year in Jordan.
I’m not sure if it’s helpful for the OP’s kid who apparently has to power through one year. Immersion works better (IME) if you have some of the language under your belt already.
@calmom…its not TAs teaching classes these days but Adjunct professors.
@calmom My point was that subjunctive use isn’t the kind of arbitrary rule that lots of language is, the sort that can only be learned effectively by rote, whether you do it artificially as an exercise in memorization or organically by living immersed in it. It’s principled and logical – exactly the sort of thing at which intuitive, whole-to-part people tend to excel. I wasn’t questioning whether a dyslexic kid would have trouble learning a foreign language in a conventional classroom; I was questioning Cardinal Fang’s fixation on having to use subjunctive forms of verbs as an especially unreasonable barrier.
@bopper Which post of mine are you replying to? I’m confused.
I referenced my daughter having TA’s in her Russian language courses at Columbia – that was 10+ years ago but those courses are still being taught by TA’s. (very easy to verify online – all sections for the first two years are taught by grad students; higher levels taught by lecturers or adjuncts – the full profs are teaching the substantive courses such as Russian Lit.)
But given that CF’s son is at a LAC, that wouldn’t apply to him.