Language teaching in elementary school
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Scope
What are the possible options for language teaching in the elementary school?
Definition
Data
Phonetics
Instead of languages, children in elementay school should be taught phonetics. At the age before twelve years, children learn the pronounciation of their mother tongue and other languages. After that, it gradually becomes more difficult to learn the pronounciation with the level of native speaker.
Children mostly are not exposed to several languages in such a way that they would learn to speak them fluently. The school system can teach two or even three foreign languages, but this time is away from other subjects. Although good language skills are clearly a benefit for the society and its success in the global world, there are strong practical limitations to the languagge teaching.
A major problem is to know which languages to choose. The choice between which languages is dependent mainly on the supply, which changes rather slowly, as it depends on the availability of skilled teachers. Also the perceived value of a particular language changes rather slowly in the society. The future need for the language should be, in principle, a major determinant for the choice of languages. This has been reflected in the popularity of English in Finland, as it is obvious that there is a need for that language. But with many other languages the need and choices do not match. For example, there are few pupils in Finland who can and want to learn Chinese or Russian, although it is very likely that these language are very valuable in the future labour market.
A solution to this problem is to teach phonetics instead of a single language. There would be several benefits:
- Children would learn to pronounce all languages, as the focus would be on pronounciation of individual sounds. There are only a hundred or so sounds that are needed to good pronounciation of any language.
- Children would learn the phonetic alphabet.
- Children would learn to identify sounds from many different languages.
- They would learn to write down languages they don't know with phonetic alphabet, and read aloud text written in phonteic alphabet.
- In the near future, computers will be able to translitterate languages from the original alphabet to the phonetic alphabet and vice versa. This will make it easier to communicate using the phonetic alphabet, and it will be a valuable skill to know the phonetic alphabet.
- Children can be taught a small vocabulary in a large number of languages, say ten most common languages in the world. If they learn greetings, basic pronomines, numbers and a small number of the most common verbs, adjectives, and nouns, they can impress people in any part of the world and handle the most critical phase of communication: ice-breaking between cultures.
- When a child has learned strong skills in pronounciation, it will be easy to start learning any language. The phonetics is the natural way of learning languages.
Causality
Result
| Option | Probability of availability for a random pupil (in Finland). |
|---|---|
| Mother tongue. | 0.95 |
| The language of the majority of the population. | 0.98 |
| English. | 0.9 |
| Chinese. | 0.01 |
| Spanish. | 0.05 |
| French. | 0.2 |
| German. | 0.3 |
| Swedish. | 0.4 |
| Russian. | 0.1 |
| Finnish. | 0.99 |
| Some other language not mentioned above. | 0.01 |
| Phonetics. | 0.01 |