Question by Rita: How to teach children a foreign language with the help of a dictionary?
I need some points of view by the linguists on how to teach with a dictionary. Could you offer some articles or books or both?
Best answer:
Answer by Wendy
I taught French in High Schools for many years. I found that children remembered foreign languages they used in songs, at restaurants and in role plays. They also listened to recordings of real people speaking in real life situations and answered questions such as:
“What platform is the 10 o’clock train to Nice leaving from?”
Some schools even teach other subjects, such as Geography, in a foreign language, using lots of teaching aids such as pictures and maps.
My daughter sometimes asked me a word when she was doing homework. A foreign language has a different word for each of the many meanings of an English word.
I never just told her the answer, but got out the big Harraps French-English Dictionary, let her look up the word and pointed out that there were examples for each of the different senses of the English word. She would choose which sentence was closest in meaning to the example in her homework.
A good dictionary also has conjugations of Regular and Irregular verbs in the back for more advanced students to use.
In the front, there’s an explanation of phonetic symbols as a guide to pronunciation. Try looking at these phonetic symbols in an English dictionary first to see how they tell you the pronunciation of a word you have never heard spoken before.
There are wonderful language teaching programs on the internet.
I taught myself the Cyrillic Alphabet from the internet before travelling to Russia and the Greek alphabet and how to pronounce the letters.
If you download the free application “iTunes” from the internet, you can download free podcasts of French people speaking clearly and simply.
Some of the clearest French films are “Jean de Florette” and “Manon des Sources” and My Father’s Glory & My Mother’s Castle.
Of course, the quickest way to let children see the relevance of a foreign language is to take them to the country where it’s spoken.
They will pick it up very quickly if they mix with native speakers.
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