Lovely morning. Have you ever thought about the image of a word? And have you ever felt the importance of that word image?
Just recently I have been teaching a returnee student who is in the third year of primary school. The parents want her to learn grammar properly, so I use EIKEN questions to guide her, but the most important thing for me is the image of the word.For example, there is a question in the Eiken that says “My computer is old.I ( ) a new one”. I ( ) a new one”.
There were four verbs to choose from: jump, sleep, need and read. She chose need.I asked her, “What does need mean, and what image comes to your mind when you hear the word need? and she immediately said “something that is definitely there”. This image of need is the image she had of the word when she lived in America.Her parents are in a hurry to teach her better grammar, but this word image is a real treasure that she has acquired during her time in America.I want to teach her the image of the word and also the image of the grammar.
And it was at this point that I was reminded of Helen Keller.
Helen Keller was a deaf-blind person who travelled the world to promote the education and welfare of people with disabilities. When you think of Helen Keller, you probably think of the “miracle at the well” episode where she discovered the existence of words. But the truth is that the existence of words was something that she had in her mind. She felt that there were many things in the world by touching various things and people with her hands, and she also tried to communicate by gesturing what she wanted. Ms. Sullivan taught her thirty fingerspellings and within a month she had learned how to spell thirty letters, but she felt that it was a bit like finger play. Helen was confused about what “water” was, so Sullivan took her to the edge of a well and poured water from the pump into the palm of one hand while spelling “water” over and over again with her fingers on the palm of the other. Helen already knew how to spell ‘water’, but what she wanted to find out was what it meant. She realised, as if by revelation, that the fingerspellings were not a gesture, but something to help her understand the universe. This is the moment when she intuited the essential mechanism of language.
I think it was the moment when she grasped the very image of language.
We are surrounded by words that describe the emotions we feel, the things we see and hear, and the people we love around us. Sometimes, when we really want to show our feelings, the feelings are too overwhelming for us to find the words to express them. But in our hearts we are full of them. We want to keep that image in our mind. I feel that if we do this, our hearts will be enriched. And we want to cherish the feeling we get when we realise that the image of a thing or a person, or a person or a thing, is the same as a word, or when we realise that this is the word that expresses our feelings.