The weather has been good lately especially this past weekend, but it seems that we might have to wait a bit longer before there is stable warm weather. I am enjoying my yoga which I stopped for about 2 months due to travelling back and forth every other weekend and too much writing, but now I am slightly free. I was browsing through the ‘Therapy today’ magazine which is a journal for counselling and psychotherapy professionals and I came across an article titled: ‘ Noisy home lives make children slow at school’. This was a claim made by Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills) in the UK, after their December 2010 visit to many nurseries across the country.
They reported that constant use of television, raised voices and noisy siblings made it difficult for children to listen attentively and some were unable to speak. We don’t know how true this was for all the nurseries they visited and if all the teachers felt the same but it seems Ofsted has outlined some factors that both the education and linguistic fields need to look into.
Does constant television use and background noise affect language development? This reminded me of a book a read a while ago, because of my obsession to understand the effects of technology on people it was titled: ‘Detoxing childhood: How the modern world is damaging our children and what we can do about it’ by Sue Palmer; and in that book she shows how computer games and constant television hinders child development. One of those aspects affected is language development, the fact that children who spend so much time in front of a screen are less likely to have good language skills and good reading skills. Of course I am not an expert in that field but anything language related interests me and so it seems Ofsted has arrived at the same conclusion as Palmer. Language is the tool by which we communicate if we cannot use language effectively then other problems will arise and it is probably something that needs to be looked into with much more detail and seriousness.
I know this short post was not Arabizi related but thinking deeply about it I know that it is very relevant to the way Arabic is used today by its native speakers. It is an issue affecting everybody all over the world. Is television bad? No, but it’s how we use it that can cause a problem, we would not want to live in world where people only watch and take in and do not talk or air opinions and thoughts what would be so human about that? Thanks for reading!
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Sources:
Therapy Today- for Counselling and Psychotherapy Professionals December 2010 vol.21/ issue 10 (page 4)
Palmer, Sue (2006) ‘Detoxing childhood: How the modern world is damaging our children and what we can do about it’. Orion: London
Arabizi- اللغة العربية 