Small Vowels and 1st Graders

I had a chance to talk to Dr. I. a week or so ago, and--as she's an Arabic teacher and a native speaker--I asked her about the short vowels* I keep seeing at the ends of words in my Arabic New Testament. She said that, as a matter of good pronunciation, you do indeed use them.**

So, naturally, I asked her why we hadn't learned any of this first semester, when we first learned to conjugate verbs. She replied that, when she first taught, she'd been a stickler for that sort of thing. Eventually, though, she found that de-emphasizing them and encouraging useage instead of perfection helped students progress more quickly and enthusiastically.

Last semester I did service learning at the local elementary school for an education class. Just about every Monday morning I was there, the 1st graders had a writing exercise based on something current (ie, Halloween) or a book we'd just read together. I'd go around helping and encouraging: "Good job!" "Have you an your family ever gone on vacation somewhere? --Cool! --Now write down what you just told me." And, while they were writing: "Is that the right way to spell the word?"

The teacher talked to me later on. "You don't need to worry too much about the spelling," she said. "What's important is that they're writing."

I tend to be nitpicky about grammar and spelling, so those two events made me pause and think. There's a lot to be said for perfection--that's the goal. But perfection comes with time. Which would you prefer, a class that does incessant drills, or a class that makes you interact? Starting both with the passable and with the easy leaves room for enthusiasm.

To put it this way: you can't head into the gym and start with 200 pounds. You have to start with something you can actually handle and work up to something you can actually handle (though 200 pounds is a lot). That's why language classes start with "Ana ismee Rachel. Ma ismuki?" It took us a couple months to get through the alphabet, much less start verb conjugation.

*Arabic has three long vowels written in the word with the consonants, and three short vowels written above or below the word. The short vowels are often omitted in writing, except to clarify the meaning. Children's books and holy books are generally fully vowelized, which is why I knew these vowels on the ends of words existed.

**From what I know: sometimes they're grammatical (the indicative and the subjunctive have different final vowels. Other times I think they're part of the word and serve to make the sound flow better. I could be wrong.