Speekee; a TOS Crew Review

Sometimes, we are assigned review items randomly, and sometimes, we get an opportunity to sign up for a chance to review a particular item.

When Crewmates were given the opportunity to show interest in this item, I asked Li'l Bit if she is interested in learning Spanish. She gave me an excited, "YES!" in return. Fortunately, for us, we were chosen to review Speekee, an online program that teaches Spanish to young learners in fun video song segments that feature children, puppets, and a few adults (mostly children and puppets). The music is upbeat; there is a lot of repetition (variations on a theme - love it!), and the 10 song/video lessons are 10-15 minutes long. The videos are captioned with the option to turn off the captioning.


Along the right-hand "sidebar" of each video, Speekee offers suggestions and links to worksheets that accompany and support concepts taught in each lesson.

Using Speekee with my homeschooler with special learning needs taught me a lot about her. The captioning can be an obstacle to comprehension for her; I am glad we have the option to turn it off. She tries to memorize the Spanish words as sight words instead of relating them to something she already knows, and this is an area where she and I need some practice. Right off the bat, understanding "Mira!" ("look!") and "El parque" ("the park"), relating them to familiar English words, gave her problems, I think, because she was reading the text (the captioning is in both Spanish and English; the actors and puppets in the DVDs speak only Spanish) and not hearing the sounds, and she needs to be able to do both, simultaneously. Ah. Multiple channel processing - here's an opportunity to work on that.

We did figure out how to watch Speekee through the Wii with no captioning; I never figured out how to turn on the captions using the Wii.

Some visuals (and an occasional song or sound) are aversive to my daughter. Some are easy to figure out; some, I have no idea why she doesn't like them. Something on Speekee gave my girl the need to be cautious - maybe when the fruit came out to name colors and fruit (she hates bananas and doesn't like to look at them or smell them), and watching the videos made her extremely anxious. Those of you with kids who have these odd-to-the-rest-of-us rules will understand.

So, we spent our Speekee time two different ways. Sometimes we watched the videos together (she would not watch them without me); sometimes she sat across the room and drew while I watched the video and she simply listened. Quite honestly, I preferred her drawing and listening; she learned more in that setting, than trying to process the visual and auditory simultaneously. I stopped the video quite a few times, repeated the word being demonstrated, and asked my girl to guess what it meant. "Hir-ah-fay" - yep, she knew it was a giraffe. Watching the video after listening to it facilitated the learning experience at my house. If you have a child with special learning needs, know that you can use Speekee as an auditory program, too, even though it is in video format.

Here's a sample:

One late afternoon, I was grabbing my coat to leave for the grocery, and was absentmindedly singing a line from Speekee's videos, "Donde vamos..." (warning: the songs are catchy and you'll probably get them stuck in your head! *smile*), and I heard my girl translate, "Where are we going?" I didn't realize that she was listening (I didn't realize I was singing, either).

I like the Speekee approach, especially the option to listen or the option to watch without captions. This is the way we learn our native language; listening, using it, speaking it, interacting with it. Symbols (letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, etc) are added to what we know after we have a lot of experience using the language to communcate. (In contrast, here's a blog post about how I was taught Spanish in college.) Speekee is a really fun introduction to Spanish via full immersion with simple, common words, phrases, sentences, concepts, presented in context. I like that.

Speekee is designed to be attractive to small children; it's simplicity makes learning easy, even for a mom. The 10 different videos are settings that are common to our routines and include the park, the home, a party, the cafe, the zoo, the market, the garden, the bus staton.

Speekee offers you the opportunity to use the online product for two weeks in a free trial. Click here for details. The cost to subscribe is $7.50 per month.

Read about my Crewmates' experiences with Speekee here.

I was given two months of Speekee at no charge for review purposes. I am not paid for this review and am not obligated to provide a positive review.

Reflections on Language Learning vs Communication

We are reviewing a Spanish program that has sent me back in time, comparing and contrasting an experience from my past with this program we are using, now. I am thinking about early autism intervention, too, and why we thought we should teach my 2-year-old the way we did at the time.

As I see and experience with my daughter the way this Spanish program (that we received in order to review) teaches Spanish, I am reminded of the Spanish classes I took in college, which were very different, and not very effective.

In college, the teacher was dry and boring. He was a quiet man, not animated at all, with no affect or enthusiasm.

We began by learning the Spanish alphabet, both the letters and blends, and the sounds each makes. I could memorize those pretty easily, probably because I was already familiar with the sounds. I was assigning a symbol to a sound I'd already learned (even though the sounds I'd learned were from my first language).

Next, we began learning nouns. I was good at learning the nouns. I could memorize nouns pretty easily, too. Woo hoo. (*sarcasm*) I could go to Mexico, Latin America, or Spain and begin naming people, places, and things. Not real helpful if I wanted to have a conversation in Spanish with someone.

You know what? After the autism regression, my daughter's first burst of language (after a couple of months on the GFCF diet) was 32 new nouns in a two-week period. (I wrote them down and counted them for the pediatrician.)

Memorizing nouns does not = reciprocity.
Memorizing nouns can get needs met.

Sure, I could make a request, as long as I knew the right noun.

But manding and requesting does not = relationship.

Getting needs met is very one-sided.

Onto verbs. We learned the root word and the conjugation rules first before ever hearing them in a sentence or using them in a sentence. Conjugating verbs to reflect a person or a group of people doing the action, making it the right tense was very confusing for me. I was constantly referring to rules in my head that I'd tried to memorize in order to correctly use a Spanish verb, and processing all of that took me forever too long to actually have a conversation. When, I wondered, would I be able to quit thinking about the darned rules and simply conjugate verbs without consciously thinking about it?

Remind you of how some programs
try to teach social skills?

When it was my turn to read a passage aloud for the teacher (and the class) to practice pronunciation, everyone was impressed. Even with my thick Southern twang, I could somehow go to a Spanish place in my mind and read the passage with almost perfect pronunciation. That still makes me smile.

If only passing Spanish class depended solely upon
appearing indistinguishable when reading a passage...

Here's a problem: I could decode the sounds and pronounce them correctly without understanding a single word I'd read. Dr. M could give me a passage well beyond my level of comprehension and I could read it aloud with almost perfect pronunciation.

Does that remind you of any
hyperlexic kids you know?

Because I knew so many nouns and roots of verbs in isolation expressively and receptively when they were written, (I could speak them and recognize them when written in text), I could translate written passages on quizzes and tests with some accuracy if you gave me a sentence or two at a time and enough time to process. The longer the exams, the less time I had to process, the more poorly I scored.

The thing that was the most difficult, the thing I hated most of all was translating spoken passages from Spanish into English. My ear and brain simply could not hear it all and process it all unless the speaker slooooooooowed way down, and that didn't happen. We were expected, as new Spanish students, to process all of the language at warp speed, almost from the get-go.

I hated going to the lab to do the listening and translating exercises and I failed (miserably) the parts of our exams where the teacher read a passage that we had to translate on the test.

"Broadband", "multi-channel" processing of the Spanish language was impossible for me. Because I was taught each channel separately, apart from one another, I could not process in "broadband".

After a year of college Spanish, I could do little more than I learned in the very beginning, label nouns in Spanish and figure out a root word of a verb. I know some adjectives here and there.

Fast forward to today: The Spanish program that we are reviewing is an immersion program, a series of videos for children, where full (and short) sentences are used in context, the verbs are already correctly conjugated, no rules to memorize, where we are learning all of the pieces simultaneously: nouns, verbs (and conjugation), adverbs, adjectives, sentence structure, pronunciation, listening, speaking, the way typically developing children learn the language that their parents speak.

I am recognizing in a new way something that I already knew. Foundations are important. Non-verbal foundations of interaction are an important base; those are the first channels of "broadband". Simultaneously learning nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, *in context* adds more layers and channels to the multi-channel processing. We learn through experience with others in relationship, not by memorizing and constantly referring to an ever-growing set of rules.

In developmental delays like autism, sometimes those foundations are ignored, and instead of giving our students lots of opportunities to learn interaction through experience with us, we give them a set of rules to memorize and refer to. We call that "social skills" training. Instead of using ourselves differently to give our children a new experience, we give them a bunch of rules to memorize and practice in "social skills groups", and we send them out in the world and hope they can remember the rules, and if they do, we call that "generalization".

I came to hate that Spanish class. I hated it because I was overwhelmed with the rules I had to memorize, rules that never became second nature. The rules were a burden, not a help.

Watching these Spanish videos (Speekee, if you're wondering) for children as part of my review crew has been a lot of fun for me, because I am learning things I never learned in that boring, out-of-context college class. Seeing the difference between two approaches in teaching/learning a foreign language is eye opening as I think about autism intervention, too.