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May 06, 2010
Can Grade Two Braille Spell Trouble?-Bangladesh
The following information was downloaded from the mailing list of "accessbangla."
When Braille is taught, it is usually taught in steps. First, there is "Grade One" Braille, which consists of the entire Braille alphabet and some punctuation. As a Braille user becomes more advanced and efficient with the language, he or she is taught "Grade Two" Braille.
Grade Two Braille offers a series of contractions, which most people would call short-hand. I suppose that the inventor of Braille decided to designate a series of words as abbreviations and then taught to the blind. For example, each letter of the alphabet in Grade Two Braille, accept for the letters A, I, and O, represents a whole word. The letter B is written as "But", the letter C is written as "Can", etc. To get to the point of this article, I will now give you a letter that stands for a bigger word.
The letter K in Grade Two Braille means the word "Knowledge." Assuming that most blind children who learn Braille are either in first or second grade, many may be learning these Grade Two contractions before they actually learn how to spell the actual real word as sighted children do. Did you know how to spell knowledge when you were 6 years old? If you learned Braille at age 6, and learned how to write the word knowledge by simply writing the letter K, chances are you'd never have to know how to spell knowledge, unless you took up typing or word processing and needed to learn that word.
Grade Two Braille also offers different symbols for other words, such as "And", "The" and "Of". Am I suggesting that little children didn't know how to spell these words before learning these Braille contractions? No, but I actually do know a 35-year-old Braille reader who spells the word "With" as "Width." When I saw that in some of her correspondence recently, I couldn't help think about the possibility that learning Braille contractions at a very young age may exempt some Braille users from ever having to learn the real spellings.
Here is one more example of my concern. Another feature in Grade Two Braille is abbreviated contractions. For example, the word "Could" is taught as "CD", the word "good" is taught as "GD", and the word "Your"is taught as "YR." One day, a young blind boy was in a spelling class. He was about 8 years old, and a very good Braille reader. The teacher asked him how to spell "Good", and he answered, "GD." I'm sure you can imagine the look on the teacher's face when he spelled it that way. Yet, to the little boy's credit, he probably never knew how the word "Good" was really spelled because he learned the Grade Two contraction in first grade, while all sighted first graders would have to learn the real spelling.
For my blind readers, I ask you, am I making too much out of this?
For my sighted readers, I have a suggestion. If you know a young blind child who's learning Braille, it may not be a bad idea for you to make sure that he or she learns the real spellings of Grade Two Braille contractions, if, for no other reason, to avoid embarrassment as he or she gets older. By the way, I have a confession to make. When I learned Braille at 8 years old, I did not know how to spell knowledge until after I learned the Braille contraction for that word.
Posted by jicafriends at May 6, 2010 03:31 PM