Educational content ideas/language learning

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Language learning

Reading, spelling, writing; reading comprehension, from alphabets to serious textual analysis. Including sounds, and images -- pronunciations, songs with lyrics, fonts. Also including: first languages, second and further languages, advanced language : literature and poetry.

Fluency

I would prefer to see people fluent in 2 of the main languages (lets say, UN "official languages"). These are English, Spanish, French, Russian and Chinese.

My grandfather was fluent in Russian, Polish, Hebrew, Yiddish, and English. I have met Swiss and Indians who think nothing of speaking three or four local languages plus English. I am told that this is the attitude in much of Africa, as well. --Mokurai 05:17, 16 October 2006 (EDT)

The main goal must be to enable the children to read and write the language(s) spoken in their own country. The boot prompt of the laptop should be in the language the children speak. For many children the language they use at school isn't the same as they speak at home. We should help them to be proud to have their own language.

There are Linux User Groups in many countries, in addition to a number of governtments, working on full Linux distributions in many languages. It would not be difficult to do this for any language where there are any reasonable number of computer students. link to guides --Mokurai 05:17, 16 October 2006 (EDT)

Since this is an international project, perhaps we could make it easy to learn Esperanto, which is supposed to be an international language and is very easy to learn. That would make it possible for all of these children to talk to one another through IM or some other medium.

Ĉu vi parolas Esperanton?

Esperanto is very easy for Europeans to learn, since the vocabulary is almost all taken from European languages. It has a somewhat simplified grammar. However, if linguists wanted to design a language for global ease of learning, they could do a much better job now.

The problem with any artifical international language is that people have to learn it in addition to, rather than instead of, the key international language of their field (science, business, diplomacy--currently English for all). The reason is that the literature isn't in Esperanto, and you aren't going to get the publishers to pay for the translations.

I would like to point one thing out about that: you are right that more languages learned means more effort. However, I'm pretty sure several studies have been done, for example with American university students learning French, where half of the students learned Esperanto for one semester, then learned the goal foreign language for one year, and ended up with more proficiency than those who simply took the foreign language two full years. This is not irrational because Esperanto teaches the concepts of foreign language-learning very easily and in a straightforward manner, with no exceptions and phonetic spelling, acting as a "stepping stone" to other languages, like English. Not to mention Esperanto's value in and of itself; feel free to look at the articles Talk:Esperanto and OEPC Esperanto.

The way to become fluent in a language is to speak it frequently. For people who can't go and live where the language is spoken, I suggest voice chat with Webcams on computer. We should get classes in the US teamed up with classes in Africa, or any other combination, and let them practice with each other. At the elementary school level, children can become fluent, without accent, in a few months.--Mokurai 05:17, 16 October 2006 (EDT)

Language learning texts

• Reading, spelling, writing materials
• Reading comprehension, from alphabets to serious text analysis
• Sounds and images -- pronunciations, songs with lyrics, fonts
  • First languages
  • Second and further languages
  • Literature and poetry

From the 'sharing your content with olpc' page

I am the autor of a specialized "manual" for the 1. year of studies of French as Second Foreign language. It has only 7.5 Mb, is written in HTML, with some 60 photos. I would like to join that to the OLPC. The manual is divided in 4 modules, each modules is made of 4 lessons, each lesson divided in 6 parts: lecture, foreign expressions, questions, grammar, exercices and documents. There should be 4 manuals (one for each year) - I am now working on the second one. The modules are for this first book: 1/ L'aérotrain, 2/ Les scanners, 3/ La photographie numérique, 4/ L'électricité (with a last part named: "Paris, Ville Lumiere") Sincerily yours: Horváth-Militicsi Attila, prof. agrégé Narodnog fronta 77/III 21000 NOVI SAD Serbia Email: 6hunyadi@eunet.yu

Computer assisted language learning

This paragraph only talks about acquisition of a second language.

Second language acquisition in general

Have a look at Wikipedia's substantial article on the subject.

They cite interesting facts about the student's external influence on language teaching:

• how does his community view learning a second language ?
• has he been exposed to the language early ?
• has he got access to conversation in the learned language ?
• how is his teacher ?

And his own influence:

• age, gender
• is he anxious or shy when learning ?
• does he view the learned language and its culture in a good light ?
• is he motivated ?

They talk about language learning aptitude, ie that some students are 'naturally' better language learners than others.

They talk about strategies for language learning (more on this later).

All of these factors could be tested and reported to the teacher or compensated for by the software.

CALL in the literature

Computer assisted language learning has received some attention in scientific literature. There is also a Wikipedia article and a wikibook.

The wikipedia article also points to the ICT for Language Teaching site, which has very interesting online modules to learn about CALL, and a list of articles.

Strategies for Language learning

In order to survey the strategies used to make language learning more efficient, a typology of language learning strategies has been created (Rebecca Oxford, 1990). This typology regroups every strategy in one of 6 categories:

• Cognitive: rational analysis and comprehension of the language
• Meta-cognitive: analysis of how to best study the language (planning, choosing materials appropriate for our learning styles)
• Memory: using techniques to better remember vocabulary and grammar
• Compensation: talking with one's hands, describing words with long phrases ...
• Affective: managing one's anxiety, rewarding oneself ...
• Social: asking questions, getting involved with the people and the culture of the target language.

Please have a look at Dr. Oxford's website.

What is needed

• probably some 'scaffolding' that will take the various contributions, content, exercises, etc ... and bring them together, by making everything a plugin of a main CALL activity.
• Content, with some way of indicating its level (for beginners, for advanced ...) and concepts used (grammar and vocabulary).
  • In the learners' language
    • Alphabet lessons (for Cyrillic, Arabic, ideograms, kana and other non roman alphabets)
    • Grammar lessons
  • In the acquired language
    • Dialogs
    • Comic strips
    • Video
    • Literature and poetry
    • Newspaper articles (and other 'authentic' materials)
    • Images
    • Sounds
• Exercises
  • Vocabulary exercises
  • Grammar exercises