Well, Pierre was back today by popular demand, but I may have found something that works even better. I've been looking into a method of teaching French to children pioneered in Canada by a woman named Wendy Maxwell. She uses various media to teach French, including plays and music, which I'm already using and/or working on, but the core of her method is the concept of "pared down language" and the use of gestures to make the language learning stick. She calls her method AIM (Accelerative Integrated Method). The method has received rave reviews, and is quickly being adopted by school boards all across Canada. The bold claim is that AIM users can achieve achieved in less than 1/2 hour a day. You can see why it's appealing!
I've known about Ms. Maxwell's method for a while now, but I'd been somewhat hesitant about it, since, as previously mentioned, I've been teaching my children sign language (ASL). The gestures Ms. Maxwell uses in her method are not the same. Her gestures are meant to be the most natural motion for the word. For example, for "walk," the gesture is the index and middle finger "walking" in the air, while the ASL sign is a two-handed motion with both hands moving back and forth in front--you can see the sign demonstrated on various ASL demonstration sites, such as ASL Pro. (Although there is one version of "walk" in sign that is identical to this motion.)
I'd heard of teachers who use sign language in their classrooms to enhance the teaching of French. The biggest argument in favour of it is that signing or gesturing involves different kinds of learners and different kinds of learning. It's visual and kinesthetic (involving the body). Like a picture, it gives a reference point for the sign when children may forget the words.
I wanted to try using sign to assist the teaching of French with my kids. Since I'm already a believer in using sign with children, the biggest hurdle for me was figuring out the "pared down language." Ms. Maxwell has isolated her pared down language to 700 of the most useful French words for children. The other day when I visited the Modern Language Collection at the library, I found a book with transcripts and detailed frequency summaries of the speech of native 9-year-olds. Most of the words were verbs, prepositions and adjectives (so it therefore didn't include the nouns you'd commonly learn in vocabulary lessons--words for clothes and food items and animals, etc. ). I copied down approximately 200 of the most commonly used words. I'll add to that some of the words most commonly used in teaching baby/child sign, available readily on the Internet, and some of the vocabulary sets like clothing and animal words.
I spent a chunk of time on the weekend making a chart of French words, and their ASL and English equivalent. I'm a little more than halfway through my work on the chart (of the core 200 words), and I already had a chance to put some of it into practice this week. It works great! The sign makes an easy and effective way to prompt my kids for a word they may have forgotten, and makes learning a lot of fun. Plus, there's the added benefit of learning more than one language at a time!
And it's not as hard as it might sound, once the initial work is done. Together with Pierre, we livened up a book my kids hadn't been so interested in using before, and they had a lot of fun with it.
Stay tuned. Tomorrow I'll start a product review of some of the resources I've located for teaching French effectively.
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