Humanising Language Teaching
Year 5; Issue 4; July 03

The Misunderstood Child, seen through a"Multiple Intelligences" Lens

Sandra Piai, University of St Andrews, Scotland

I was once asked had to take over a workshop on Multiple Intelligences at quite short notice. After a lot of thought I decided to concentrate on the practical side of MI rather than the theoretical or psychological side, ie I decided to demonstrate some of the different kinds of activities which involved the use of one or more of the eight intelligences identified by Howard Gardner which could be used in the classroom with students of different ages and levels. As there was quite a range of ability amongst the students on this course, I thought some of the less fluent members of the group would be able to participate more actively in this type of session.

It was while I was thinking about what to do in this workshop as well as how I could target all the students on the course that I remembered some of the problems that one of my children had had at school. Many of these problems we tended to blame on the type of school he attended, but there was no getting away from the fact that, although he seemed reasonably intelligent to us, he was, nonetheless, struggling at school. His younger brother, who was far more extrovert and much quicker, though not necessarily more intelligent, went to the same school, but did not have these problems and thus avoided the trauma of repeating the year and the feeling of failure. Andrea's experiences opened my eyes to just how much sensitive and 'different' children can suffer with unsympathetic teachers or in unsympathetic school systems. From that time on, I have always tried to be aware of, and help, the slower child. Schooldays are not the happiest days in the lives of a lot of young people.

Knowing what Andrea went through, especially in Primary School, made me far more sensitive to my students and their problems. And not only children have learning problems, some adults find learning a foreign language more than just a challenge. If you give classes in companies, for instance, it can be really embarrassing when the student struggling with English is the boss, especially if his/her employees are all taking to it like a duck to water – which is often the case if they are much younger than the boss. One learner, not an adult, who always stands out in my mind, was a young boy - I think he was probably nine at the time - who came to the class I was teaching after school, dopo scuola, at the local primary school where I lived in Italy. His name was Arnaldo and he was described as 'not being particularly bright', and he certainly did not shine at English, until ……. one day we made a poster of the months of the year and the children were drawing small pictures to illustrate the different months. Arnaldo suddenly became really interested and was so eager for his picture to be stuck onto the poster, that I would have included it even if it had been absolutely dreadful. The following lesson he arrived with other pictures he had drawn and coloured for the poster and so I promoted him to art editor and put him in charge of selecting the pictures and deciding where they should be placed on the poster. From that day Arnaldo never looked back. His spoken English improved lesson by lesson. We did not do much written work, so he might perhaps have had problems with that, but orally his pronunciation was good, he remembered words and expressions and, by the end of that first year, he could ask as well as answer simple questions, he could count up to 100, he could tell the time, and he knew the colours, days of the week and months of the year in English. Not only that, his class teacher also told me that his Italian and maths had improved as well. I knew nothing about Howard Gardner and Multiple Intelligences then, but I still realised if we had not done that drawing activity, Arnaldo would have finished that year still being considered a not very bright child. His interest in drawing motivated him to participate more in the English classes and the sense of achievement in these classes motivated him to work more in his other classes.

When I did read Howard Gardner's Frames of Mind seven or eight years ago, it made sense to me, especially as I had always considered art and music as different ways of communicating. I can remember in my late teens reading a book about J.M.W. Turner and how his mother had been committed to Bedlam and how he had lived with the fear he would inherit her insanity. Perhaps if his mother had been able to express herself through art in the way Turner did, she would not have been locked up. Gardner once suggested in an interview (1999) that people 'might understand more about the Spanish Civil War from Picasso's Guernica than from a textbook'. This would probably be difficult to prove scientifically, but a picture of Guernica, as well as a text, with possibly some kind of recorded material, such as an oral description of the painting by the teacher, would certainly help cater for more than one style of learning and probably reach more students.

Another child who enjoyed drawing and painting came to me for private lessons. She was in the same school as my children, though a few years younger. Her mother was Italian and her father Belgian, so they had put their child in the French section of the school, even though her mother tongue was really Italian. On top of this she had to do English as a second language. Paola came to me at the beginning of second year primary and though we worked really hard and I had the impression she understood everything, I could not get her to speak. We got to Christmas time and I was getting quite concerned that I would have to tell her parents that perhaps three languages were too many. (She was also having private lessons in French). I decided to wait until after Christmas before mentioning this concern, and this turned out to be the right decision, as in the new year she suddenly started replying to me in English and before long she was not just saying words, but communicating in, albeit short, sentences. All that time she had been internalising the language and when she was ready she spoke, but only to me, unfortunately, not at school and so her bad grades continued for another year until I invited the ESL teacher to my house, so she could see and hear Paola chatting away for herself. Paola was seven years old and very shy when she first started coming for lessons. However, both her parents were architects and she had exceptional drawing skills for such a young child; we had done a lot of drawing and colouring in our lessons, but there was not so much time for this at school with the 'programme' to be completed by the end of the year. An interesting aside is that one lesson when we were revising animals, she came out with the words 'cockerel' and 'tortoise'. I knew I had never taught her these, and was pretty sure she hadn't learned them at school. When I asked how she knew these words, she immediately replied 'Andrea taught me'. One misunderstood child teaching another.

It can be really hard for the shy child to express him/herself in front of the class, and probably even more so in a language that is not theirs, yet in primary school foreign language learning is mainly aural/oral and so if children do not participate in class they get a bad grade, but this does not necessarily mean they do not understand the language, they may be internalising it, like Paola, but are not yet ready to speak it. It may also be that they have a strong intrapersonal intelligence and are not comfortable working in pairs or groups or participating in noisy games. Maybe when older, if they have not been discouraged in the meantime, they will shine in the foreign language because they will be expected to communicate more in the written form; activities such as writing compositions, articles, poetry, keeping diaries and so on are much more suited to the intrapersonal learner. This can also happen the other way round. Children I knew who had got 'A' for French (as a second language) all through primary school, because they were not shy and participated actively in all the oral activities suddenly found themselves getting 'C' or worse in secondary school because their writing skills were not of the same level. Maybe with a more balanced range of activities catering for the different learning styles/intelligences, these children, who were all able to communicate in their different ways in the foreign language, could have avoided the feeling of failure that they certainly felt and would not have lost their motivation for learning the language as most of them did, who not sooner, later. Two colleagues who looked at this article as I was writing it, both commented quite spontaneously: 'That's just like me, I hated having to speak French in class, but I loved reading and writing it'. And I'm sure that's true of many of us. Not a ground-breaking discovery, perhaps, but it does underlines the fact that we are all different. Another 'misunderstood' child I got to know was Ava, a lively, chatty child out of school, fluent in both English and German, but who refused to speak in either language at school. The main article in the Guardian Education Supplement on 25th February, 2003 asks: Is any child really 'unteachable'? Ava was considered so, as she never participated in lessons, yet she went home told her parents what had been done in class and they then went through the lesson with her. The two sisters, subject of the Guardian article, have been excluded from school because they are 'awkward and stroppy'. Both regularly play truant because they don't want to be there. All three have been described as disruptive in their different ways and all three had problems which should have been solved when in primary school, but all three carried these problems with them into secondary school. Ava was lucky, she changed schools and countries when she was 12 years old, immediately started speaking in the new school and became a successful university student. The two sisters are no doubt still playing truant. Interestingly, their mother said the younger one was no trouble at nursery school because, she believes, 'she could move around the room and do things'. The older sister likes 'art and design technology but not much else'. Would a primary classroom catering more widely for different learning styles, encouraging the kinesthetic, visual and intrapersonal learner, have helped these three children with their different problems? They certainly had problems which they seemed unable to express through more traditional forms of communication.

At the moment, I am no longer teaching young learners, but overseas students on pre-university access courses. Again, there is obviously a whole range of abilities, but I cannot help feeling pleased, even smug, that in my oral presentation class two of the 'weaker' students have suddenly blossomed since using powerpoint (only one member of the class had prior knowledge of powerpoint). Their presentations are interesting, colourful, include clipart and pictures they have scanned in. The care and attention to detail is amazing, but more importantly they are far more motivated and their general English has improved as a result. We have also been doing tongue-twisters and poetry to improve stress and pronunciation. Chinese speakers often have unclear pronunciation because they do not seem to open their mouths. We have had great fun with shouting dictations, miming and such like, trying to improve this. At the same time, the learners have been activating their linguistic, visual/spatial, and bodily/kinaesthetic intelligences. Using statistics, categorising main points, using powerpoint, also means the mathematical/logical and naturalist intelligences have been used. Some students elect to give individual presentations, others prefer to give joint presentations, I leave them free to choose, so the intra/interpersonal intelligences are catered for as well. That just leaves the musical intelligence, which was covered to a certain extent by the rhymes and tongue-twisters in the pronunciation practice. So even in EAP classes, with a bit of thought, it is possible to cater for all learning styles. A few weeks ago I received a postcard from one of these 'weaker' students back in Shanghai for his Spring break. He wrote: 'I am so happy to be back home, and I just wanted to share my happiness with you. I love your oral presentation classes'. This, to me, is what teaching is all about. High achievers will always achieve, but so can many 'underachievers' if they are encouraged to believe they can.

According to the Today Programme recently, the majority of 'victims' of the police stop and search policy are 'male, black, between 18 and 25 years old and were poor achievers at school'. No doubt some of them were 'misunderstood' children too. As Radislav Millrood says in his article Unsuccessful Learners (2001):

Successful learners are those who can actually get good results even with the grammar-translation method and tattered books. It is the unsuccessful learners who really need us to turn our attention on to them… The problem of 'learning disabilities' and 'inappropriate behaviour' is much more serious than mere academic achievements… Challenging behaviour is often the only mask they know that will help them to save face.

Millrood advocates 'learner-prompted strategies', Gardner talks about activating different intelligences, but both are basically saying we need to cater for different learning styles, that people have different intellectual strengths and weaknesses and learn in different ways. We can either teach everybody the same thing in the same way, or we can take the different kinds of ways people learn into account. Perhaps if we take the latter option more into consideration, some misunderstood children will be less misunderstood. Even without having read Gardner's work, I am sure most teachers do use a balanced range of activities which would logically cover these different learning styles, but if we are more aware of them then we can redress the balance at times to help so-called underachievers.

Which brings me back to the day I did my workshop. I hope that by concentrating on the practical side of MI, I helped the less fluent members of the group to get a little bit extra from the course. And my son? For him, at least, there is a happy ending. Towards the end of secondary school, after repeating a year on two different occasions, he met a sympathetic teacher who believed in his abilities and encouraged Andrea to do so too. Now with a rewarding job and happily married, the feeling of being a failure has hopefully been laid to rest. Paola's parents eventually removed both her and her sister from the international school they were attending and enrolled them in an Italian school where they are both top of the class in French and English. I don't know what happened to Arnaldo, but I will never forget the change I saw in him the year I was lucky enough to teach him. The misunderstood child is not necessarily an underachiever, or intentionally disruptive, s/he is simply that: misunderstood. When this happens in primary school it has a profound influence on the rest of the child's life. I believe Howard Gardner's work can play a vital role in helping us to understand the misunderstood child.

References:

Gardner, H. ( 1993). Frames of Mind. London: Fontana Press
Millrood, R. (2001) Unsuccessful Learners: in search of a neglected cornerstone. ELTJ 55/4 pp 405-6
http://www.nea.org/neatoday/9903/gardner.html. Interview with Howard Gardner. Accessed 08.05.02.
BBC Radio 4 (22.04.03). The Today Programme.

Biodata:

Sandra is works at the University of St Andrews where she is Course Director on the Trinity Cert TESOL and joint-coordinator for the new postgraduate M.Litt in ELT and Modern Languages. Prior to this Sandra was Senior Teacher Young Learners with the British Council in Bilbao, Spain. She has also worked in Italy, Germany and Turkey.