Jul. 6, 2007 - Help Your Child With a Foreign Language
Category • Book Reviews
Help Your Child With a Foreign Language (Berlitz Kids) by Opal Dunn provides a simple guide for teaching a child the beginnings of any foreign language. She outlines the process, but also gives a great deal of explanation of how children learn foreign language as well as many examples of how to proceed.
Certainly this small volume embodies Charlotte Mason's advice from Volume 1, p.300: "French should be acquired as English is, not as a grammar, but as a living speech." My familiarity with Gouin is limited to CM's description in that same section of Volume 1. I would say based on that description that Dunn's work applies some of Gouin's principles:
- ". . . we must acquire a new language as a child acquires his mother tongue . . ." (And CM follows this remark with an observation that Gouin's application of this principle may or may not be the best way to apply it.)
- ". . . the ear, and not the eye, is the physical organ for apprehending a language. . ."
- ". . . the child thinks in sentences, not in words. . ."
Dunn encourages us, just as CM did, to delay exposure to the written form of the target language until the child is reading and writing the native language fluently. I believe CM also encouraged waiting until the target language is *spoken* fluently, which is not something Dunn addresses.
Dunn's method uses immersion, even when the parent doesn't speak the target language. It uses whole sentences primarily, rather than individual words. It uses real activities. It uses rhymes and songs. She shows you how to do this yourself, and explains the principles behind the method so you can see why it works.
Although Dunn's method is not the same as Gouin's, I don't believe that represents a conflict with CM. In my reading of the Volume 1 comments on teaching French, at any rate, I sense that CM was ambivalent about Gouin's actual method. She thought his principles were well founded, but she suggested his method might have to be significantly revised to be practical. I would suggest that Dunn's method might fill in for Gouin's in the homeschool of today.
Comments
Jul. 6, 2007 - Untitled Comment
Posted by bethanyrae
I went to language school in France in my 30's, and I can attest that listening and speaking is the best way to learn it. The writing and reading can come later. Otherwise, it will actually interfere with the actual learning. At the time, though, it was SO frustrating, as I tend to be a visual learner. But French can't be learned visually by Americans.....ha. No one would understand us but other Americans who learned it the same way!
bethanyrae
Jul. 6, 2007 - Speaking the Language
Posted by lklivingston
Although I've not spoken a second language fluently, waiting to read until the spoken language is learned well does make sense as well. Thanks for sharing your experience! All of my Spanish instruction was done primarily on paper, and so my comfort level in speaking Spanish, even back when I had a fairly extensive vocabularly, was just about zero. I'm hoping to address that differently with my kids by setting up real-world situations where we can use it right away. Living in Texas, that should be fairly easy to do!
Apr. 23, 2008 - Spanish Spanish
Posted by spike
Oh! I'm again looking at Spanish. I found this book on PBS today. So that will add to my collection. This seems to be a black hole.... mayby immersion would be best... a year somewhere submerged!!! And in another year this is to be "masterd" and we add Latin... hummm... the black hole grows again!!
Alas we know the days of the week!!! and maybe the months!!! :) ss
Apr. 23, 2008 - Untitled Comment
Posted by lklivingston
You really need to pull out your Play and Learn Spanish and actually learn one of the segments (perhaps breakfast?) and then start using it with the kids. That is a simple immersion approach that you can do right now, with what you already have.
We are also making good progress (but slow) with the Berlitz Self-Teacher Spanish book. It complements our other resources well, and now that we're on chapter 4 or so we're able to have (simple) conversations.