First bilingualism: Plan within your time budget


If you were building a house, or planning anything that really mattered, you'd start by considering your budget. Launching into something that you can't fund to completion would be a reckless recipe for disaster!

How may children are told that they are going to be gaining a new language, only to be disappointed that the time available was completely inadequate? Sadly, they often feel it as their own failure, their own lack of language aptitude, when it was simply bad planning by the adults in charge.

If the time available is 40 hours a year, for 6 years, there is only one language that fits - Esperanto. Fortunately, it fits easily and will give children time to use it for Global Education, as well providing as a firm basis for later language learning.

A further advantage is that you can do it yourself. Don't let the idea scare you, because the same design features that make Esperanto a recipe for success for your class, will do the same for you.

Below is a little slideshow of some of the main features:
The US Foreign Service Institute provides some useful comparison data about adult learning of different languages. School children take longer to learn because  they have less existing understanding of how languages work and because one hour a week is hugely ineffective. You can download their paper here.

How can I Teach a Language I Don't Know Yet?

Normally, it wouldn't be a good idea, because most languages have too many exceptions to their rules and you would be teaching things that turn out to be wrong. Esperanto is very much more consistent, so  it is possible to learn a series of simple lessons as you teach them so that you and your class become confidently bilingual together.

"Talking to the Whole Wide World" is a teaching package that will equip you to lead your class in talking, playing, singing and communicating your way to bilingualism. It will help you make contacts with classes worldwide by Skype, email or snail mail (that allows exchange of little gifts, which children love both giving and receiving!).
Several highly respected linguists and champions of languages education recommend "Talking to the Whole Wide World"  

Side-benefits for your class

Experts agree that early second language education helps develop literacy skills in children's first language. Esperanto is particularly useful because its structure is designed to be 'transparent' so that it serves as a model of the general features which all languages, including English,  must have.

Even unfamiliar Esperanto words are recognizable as nouns, adjectives, present tense verbs etc. because they are labeled that way by easily recognizable features, such as suffixes. The resulting thorough understanding of grammar is applicable to any language.

Reading and spelling are as simple as possible in Esperanto. The 28 letters of the  alphabet always sound the same and each sound can be written in only one way. No letters are silent or randomly doubled.This saves time for everyone,  and is especially valuable to children whose self-esteem struggles with the difficulty of English.

Children with special needs may be able to have a second language too, if you choose the easiest.

Esperanto also helps numeracy by the exact match of words and concepts to our number system and other primary mathematical concepts such as fractions and multiplication.

Esperanto's Latin roots help build English vocabulary and promote an interest in connections between languages.