Australian LOTE: Achieving Broad and Deep Competence in Languages at School
PENELOPE VOS Candelo, NSW: Mondeto, 2008
Talking to the Whole Wide World: Integrated LOTE and Intercultural Studies for Australian Primary Schools
PENELOPE VOS Candelo, NSW: Mondeto, 2009
Reviewed by ALAN REED LIBERT, University of Newcastle
Australia clearly has a problem with foreign language learning: few children whose first language is English graduate from school with a fluent knowledge of another language.
This has implications beyond foreign languages themselves: learning a second language can help one understand the grammar of one’s own language, and since children do not seem to get much instruction in English grammar either, many of them have few chances in a school setting to learn much about any language. This becomes abundantly clear when they show up in a university and write essays with numerous grammatical or punctuation errors, or if they take linguistics courses: one cannot intelligently discuss issues in structural linguistics if one does not know what adverbs and prepositions are. This means linguistics lecturers must spend weeks talking about such elementary matters such as the parts of speech matters which should have been discussed in English classes in school, and reinforced in French, German, etc. classes.
It is not obvious how this situation should be remedied, given current attitudes and resources available to schools. Penelope Vos offers a possible solution: the first of the two books under review here presents and argues for it, while the second can be used to put it into practice. This solution involves training regular elementary school teachers in Esperanto, and having them teach it as a second language, rather than having dedicated teachers of e.g. French come into the classroom.
This may sound like an unusual solution, and traditionalists may immediately object to it. My own choice of a foreign language for schools would be Latin, or a major European language such as French. However, Latin is admittedly difficult, and in recent years school classes in the living languages, which are easier, do not seem to have been very successful. Vos’s justification for her proposal is as follows: one can learn Esperanto more quickly than natural languages, and, once a child knows Esperanto, he will have a good idea about the nature of languages in general, making it easier for him to learn a natural language. Given the fact that Esperanto is easy to learn (compared to natural languages), a regular school teacher, i.e. one who is in the classroom the entire school day, as opposed to a language teacher who only comes in for an hour per day, could learn it and teach it in class, like most other subjects in primary school, eliminating various problems connected with having dedicated language teachers. Of course, most teachers would not already know Esperanto, but it would not be very difficult for them to gradually learn it and stay a little ahead of their students. Another advantage of Esperanto is that it would be a second language for all students, with none having an advantage as some would with e.g. French or Chinese.
Australian LOTE is a thin book (43 pp.) containing such ideas. It seems fairly convincing but contains some statements with which one could take issue. On p. 32 Vos says that Esperanto ‘promotes literacy through transparent grammatical structure, sound/symbol constancy and use of Latin roots’. This might give the impression that the Esperanto vocabulary is based only on Latin, which is not the case, as Vos herself indicates two pages later, stating that ‘The lexicon derives mainly from languages of the Romance (Latin) and Germanic groups, although there is significant input from other groups too’. (One might add that there are not many ‘other groups’ which have had ‘significant input’ into the Esperanto vocabulary; even within Indo-European one does not see many branches represented, e.g. [virtually] no roots come from Celtic or Iranian, and no family outside of Indo-European has contributed many roots. This is not a criticism of the method by which the Esperanto lexicon was created; I am merely pointing out that this statement is misleading.)
On p. 14 Vos says, ‘Educationally disadvantaged students often experience psychologically valuable spelling and reading success in Esperanto, even if it has been elusive in English’. The reference given in relation to this assertion is ‘Treetops Montessori School, school records’ (p. 43). This does not seem to be adequate support for it; what often happens at this school may not often happen elsewhere and one does not know what counts as ‘often’ in these records (or what counts as success). A claim such as this should be based on research reported on in a scholarly source, and one that is publicly available, so that its validity can be checked.
Talking to the Whole Wide World, to be used by teachers, is a much larger book, with 202 pages, plus a foreword by the late Michael Clyne and an introduction by Alan J. Bishop; it comes with an audio CD which ‘models pronunciation of the sounds of the language and the songs and poems used in the course’ (p. 4). It contains much information and many activities, arranged into a schedule of 40 weeks. Not all the activities involve Esperanto: each week has an ‘intercultural focus’ section which asks questions about different nations or groups selected by children to study. For example, in Week 11 the questions are: ‘What animals are important to the culture or country you chose? Why are they important? How are they treated?’ (p. 65).
To the extent that I can judge, learning Esperanto through this book, with its activities and many pictures, would be fun for primary school students. There are some problems with it, some of which I shall point out. Since teachers using it might themselves be beginners in Esperanto, an Esperanto-English lexicon at the end might have been nice to have. Of course one can buy a dictionary, and dictionaries are discussed on p. 197, but some beginners might prefer to have a vocabulary in this volume itself; a statement of the famous 16 rules of the language might also be useful, as well as a list of affixes. There are some serious errors in grammatical terminology: on p. 123 Vos speaks of the ‘imperative case’ (!), on p. 153 of the ‘passive tense’, and on p. 166 she says, ‘‘‘Je’’ is an indefinite pronoun ...’; of course she means an indefinite preposition. On p. 41 she indicates that Esperanto mi is the equivalent of English I or me; this is misleading, since in most contexts English me would be translated by Esperanto min, not mi. Of course min is the accusative form of mi, and me and mi clearly resemble one another (and at this point Vos is pointing out and using this resemblance), but a beginner could be confused and use mi where min is required. On p. 48 Vos brings up the possibility of using the non-standard pronoun sli to mean ‘he or she’ to avoid the supposedly sexist use of li ‘he’ to mean ‘he or she’. Even if one believes that this use of li is sexist, it might not be a good idea to introduce non-standard features of a language at beginning stages.
I am dubious about whether this approach to teaching LOTE will be successful. However, given the failure of other approaches, I think it might be worthwhile to try out Vos’s ideas, they might just work.
PENELOPE VOS Candelo, NSW: Mondeto, 2008
Talking to the Whole Wide World: Integrated LOTE and Intercultural Studies for Australian Primary Schools
PENELOPE VOS Candelo, NSW: Mondeto, 2009
Reviewed by ALAN REED LIBERT, University of Newcastle
Australia clearly has a problem with foreign language learning: few children whose first language is English graduate from school with a fluent knowledge of another language.
This has implications beyond foreign languages themselves: learning a second language can help one understand the grammar of one’s own language, and since children do not seem to get much instruction in English grammar either, many of them have few chances in a school setting to learn much about any language. This becomes abundantly clear when they show up in a university and write essays with numerous grammatical or punctuation errors, or if they take linguistics courses: one cannot intelligently discuss issues in structural linguistics if one does not know what adverbs and prepositions are. This means linguistics lecturers must spend weeks talking about such elementary matters such as the parts of speech matters which should have been discussed in English classes in school, and reinforced in French, German, etc. classes.
It is not obvious how this situation should be remedied, given current attitudes and resources available to schools. Penelope Vos offers a possible solution: the first of the two books under review here presents and argues for it, while the second can be used to put it into practice. This solution involves training regular elementary school teachers in Esperanto, and having them teach it as a second language, rather than having dedicated teachers of e.g. French come into the classroom.
This may sound like an unusual solution, and traditionalists may immediately object to it. My own choice of a foreign language for schools would be Latin, or a major European language such as French. However, Latin is admittedly difficult, and in recent years school classes in the living languages, which are easier, do not seem to have been very successful. Vos’s justification for her proposal is as follows: one can learn Esperanto more quickly than natural languages, and, once a child knows Esperanto, he will have a good idea about the nature of languages in general, making it easier for him to learn a natural language. Given the fact that Esperanto is easy to learn (compared to natural languages), a regular school teacher, i.e. one who is in the classroom the entire school day, as opposed to a language teacher who only comes in for an hour per day, could learn it and teach it in class, like most other subjects in primary school, eliminating various problems connected with having dedicated language teachers. Of course, most teachers would not already know Esperanto, but it would not be very difficult for them to gradually learn it and stay a little ahead of their students. Another advantage of Esperanto is that it would be a second language for all students, with none having an advantage as some would with e.g. French or Chinese.
Australian LOTE is a thin book (43 pp.) containing such ideas. It seems fairly convincing but contains some statements with which one could take issue. On p. 32 Vos says that Esperanto ‘promotes literacy through transparent grammatical structure, sound/symbol constancy and use of Latin roots’. This might give the impression that the Esperanto vocabulary is based only on Latin, which is not the case, as Vos herself indicates two pages later, stating that ‘The lexicon derives mainly from languages of the Romance (Latin) and Germanic groups, although there is significant input from other groups too’. (One might add that there are not many ‘other groups’ which have had ‘significant input’ into the Esperanto vocabulary; even within Indo-European one does not see many branches represented, e.g. [virtually] no roots come from Celtic or Iranian, and no family outside of Indo-European has contributed many roots. This is not a criticism of the method by which the Esperanto lexicon was created; I am merely pointing out that this statement is misleading.)
On p. 14 Vos says, ‘Educationally disadvantaged students often experience psychologically valuable spelling and reading success in Esperanto, even if it has been elusive in English’. The reference given in relation to this assertion is ‘Treetops Montessori School, school records’ (p. 43). This does not seem to be adequate support for it; what often happens at this school may not often happen elsewhere and one does not know what counts as ‘often’ in these records (or what counts as success). A claim such as this should be based on research reported on in a scholarly source, and one that is publicly available, so that its validity can be checked.
Talking to the Whole Wide World, to be used by teachers, is a much larger book, with 202 pages, plus a foreword by the late Michael Clyne and an introduction by Alan J. Bishop; it comes with an audio CD which ‘models pronunciation of the sounds of the language and the songs and poems used in the course’ (p. 4). It contains much information and many activities, arranged into a schedule of 40 weeks. Not all the activities involve Esperanto: each week has an ‘intercultural focus’ section which asks questions about different nations or groups selected by children to study. For example, in Week 11 the questions are: ‘What animals are important to the culture or country you chose? Why are they important? How are they treated?’ (p. 65).
To the extent that I can judge, learning Esperanto through this book, with its activities and many pictures, would be fun for primary school students. There are some problems with it, some of which I shall point out. Since teachers using it might themselves be beginners in Esperanto, an Esperanto-English lexicon at the end might have been nice to have. Of course one can buy a dictionary, and dictionaries are discussed on p. 197, but some beginners might prefer to have a vocabulary in this volume itself; a statement of the famous 16 rules of the language might also be useful, as well as a list of affixes. There are some serious errors in grammatical terminology: on p. 123 Vos speaks of the ‘imperative case’ (!), on p. 153 of the ‘passive tense’, and on p. 166 she says, ‘‘‘Je’’ is an indefinite pronoun ...’; of course she means an indefinite preposition. On p. 41 she indicates that Esperanto mi is the equivalent of English I or me; this is misleading, since in most contexts English me would be translated by Esperanto min, not mi. Of course min is the accusative form of mi, and me and mi clearly resemble one another (and at this point Vos is pointing out and using this resemblance), but a beginner could be confused and use mi where min is required. On p. 48 Vos brings up the possibility of using the non-standard pronoun sli to mean ‘he or she’ to avoid the supposedly sexist use of li ‘he’ to mean ‘he or she’. Even if one believes that this use of li is sexist, it might not be a good idea to introduce non-standard features of a language at beginning stages.
I am dubious about whether this approach to teaching LOTE will be successful. However, given the failure of other approaches, I think it might be worthwhile to try out Vos’s ideas, they might just work.
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