Time
How long does it take to learn a language?
The U.S. State Department's Foreign Service Institute ranks Mandarin as one of five "exceptionally difficult" languages (the others are Arabic, Cantonese, Japanese and Korean). The average adult English speaker needs 2,200 class hours to reach proficiency, according to the FSI. If you could somehow make learning Chinese your 40-hours-a-week job, it would take you over a year! Spanish or French would take 4 months or so under these conditions. Esperanto would take less than one month. It would also reduce, by more than that, the time required for other languages. Here's why.
In spite of advantages in some aspects of their learning capacity, school children learn languages more slowly than adults. Therefore it is clear that if our primary children have about 200 hours to learn (Professor Joseph Lo Bianco, The Australian, September 2009), we can offer them very different fractions of a language depending on which we choose.
The U.S. State Department's Foreign Service Institute ranks Mandarin as one of five "exceptionally difficult" languages (the others are Arabic, Cantonese, Japanese and Korean). The average adult English speaker needs 2,200 class hours to reach proficiency, according to the FSI. If you could somehow make learning Chinese your 40-hours-a-week job, it would take you over a year! Spanish or French would take 4 months or so under these conditions. Esperanto would take less than one month. It would also reduce, by more than that, the time required for other languages. Here's why.
In spite of advantages in some aspects of their learning capacity, school children learn languages more slowly than adults. Therefore it is clear that if our primary children have about 200 hours to learn (Professor Joseph Lo Bianco, The Australian, September 2009), we can offer them very different fractions of a language depending on which we choose.
Solving the Time Problem Changes Everything
Principals and classroom teachers struggle with "the crowded curriculum". Everyone has suggestions of what should be added, but 25 teaching hours a week can only hold so much!
Language experts often recommend 10% of instructional time be devoted to teaching a second language, which is 2.5 hours a week. That is 100 hours a year which, continued over a full 6 years, would be 600 hours altogether, barely sufficient to provide mastery of Italian (600+ hours), but no-where near enough for Chinese (2200 +hrs), even if that time could be found and staffed. Realistically, one hour a week (minus a few for public holidays and sports days) is more often the time available. This amount of time adds up to 240 hours over 6 years and, broken into 4 or 5 mini-lessons by the classroom teacher, can achieve bilingualism in the time that is actually available, with time to apply those skills to intercultural exploration. |
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