Multiple choice questions often are a problem. You have to be terminally stupid to score less than 20% in a five way multiple choice test.
That is a bit too strong. If the test is so weak that it is amenable to simple rote training then it is a clear measurement fault.
There is an old maxim. What you measure gets controlled and the corollary is that everything else goes to the wall.
And if their careers and bonuses depend on getting the best out of their class - what then? Hedge fund managers see nothing wrong with shorting a weak bank to deliberately drive its share price down for a quick profit or speculating on oil futures to drive them ever higher...
Big bonus and career progression or integrity you choose.
I thought this was mainly a problem in the UK where it is fashionable to say "I am useless at maths". Japan doesn't have this problem.
In English yes...
But in languages like Chinese and Japanese you have no choice ultimately but to learn to recognise whole words (and completely different phonetic readings of the same character according to context) it has to be that way. You also have to learn to draw them with the right stroke order.
My favourite Japanese nonsense rhyme uses various characters for "ni" and "wa". And translates roughly as "there are 2 chickens in the yard".
You can grow out of that by learning to flash read newspapers. It just takes practice - although I expect it is easier when you are young.
Assuming they taught it sensibly he would get the 2, 3 and 4 character phonemes first and grow from there. A few irregular UK English spellings of longer words might cause him trouble but it should still work OK.
He could still be genuinely dyslexic. One of the most brilliant guys I have ever met (a top mathematician) was seriously dyslexic at written English with a reading vocabulary of under a thousand words, but he was still amazing at solving mathematical research problems.
Several faddish methods to teach English have been and gone. But the guy you have described may well have some kind of perceptual problem.
Regards, Martin Brown
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