Bitter Almonds Read Free Page A

then forgot.” The saleswoman, who is black, and also very sure of herself, just laughs. “Absolutely. You have your basic illiterate French people, who have forgotten, and then you have immigrants, who are analphabets.” She leads Édith over to a shelf where at least forty textbooks are crammed together.
    Initially Édith is afraid she’ll never be able to choose. She can still see Jacques with his eyes raised heavenward—the phonics method is far superior to the whole language method. But all the textbooks on sale at L’Harmattan are variations on the whole language method, with one exception. And that is the book Édith chooses.
    Reading, a First Step toward Insertion: A Reading Method for Adult Beginners.
The author is a professor. She herself had analphabet students from abroad and, according to the back cover, as she could not find a textbook she thought was suitable for the situation, she wrote her own.
    Ã‰dith leafs through it slowly. Three quarters of the book are written in “joined-up handwriting,” as the children say. The bulk of the learning process will be based on this type of writing. After that comes printing, then capital letters.
    The method is very simple. You begin with the five vowels and the consonant
m
; from page one you can already write
ma, me, mo, mimi, mama.
    From pages two to six you learn how to use the
l (le lit, la mule, ali a lu).
From pages seven to ten you add the
t
, from eleven to fifteen the
r.
By then you have several dozen words. Then the first diphthongs, then the silent letters. By page sixteen you can read
la petite mule a mal à la patte.
    Consonants come along one after the other, not in alphabetical order; then there are subtleties like
ph
and
gn;
then words that are more and more complicated, up to
expéditeur, destinataire, numéro d’immatriculation.
    It seems like a good method. At the register, though, Édith is assailed by doubts. She asks the young saleswoman: “Why have nearly all the manuals opted for the whole language method?” The bookseller is cautious. It is a war that has been fought for fifty years. There are champions of both methods. She is conciliatory: “You know, the human brain combines both methods. You can begin with an analytical approach, but as soon as you know the words you recognize them globally. Or, on the contrary, you can familiarize yourself with them by grasping the whole word, but then before long you’ll be trying to deconstruct them.”
    That evening Édith reads the textbook attentively. She mustn’t get this wrong. If Fadila fails a second time round, she’ll give up altogether.
    With Martin it didn’t even take a month. Édith knows that it won’t go that quickly this time.
    She spends several hours on the internet. First of all she discovers that there are still many proponents of the phonics method. On the specialized websites nearly everyone seems to prefer it. Édith thought she was being old-fashioned, but in fact it is the whole language method that seems to be outmoded.
    She refreshes her memory. The expression is “cursive handwrit­ing,” not “joined-up.” Of course. What you write is a grapheme, what you hear is a phoneme. A morpheme is the root shared by several words in the same family. You’re not supposed to say illiterate, false beginner is the preferred phrase, or complete beginner. But such reservations no longer apply when you’re referring to illiteracy as a phenomenon, or the rate of illiteracy. Established pedagogues are encouraging: you don’t have to be a professor to teach someone to read. It is complicated, Édith reads, and it can take a long time, but sometimes it goes very fast, too.

3
    That Tuesday, when Fadila comes in, Édith hands her the textbook.
“Good,” says Fadila. “We beginning next week.”
    â€œWhy not today? We can start right away, or in a while, when