Teaching that sticks

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.

Speaking english

Okay, so this is a blog about learning French. So why am I writing about speaking English? Well, whenever someone chooses to teach a second language to children still learning their first, this issue invariably comes up. And it has some bearing in our situation.

Before I go further, it's going to be necessary for me to identify my children in some way. Since I'm not crazy about the idea of using their names on the Internet, here's how we'll refer to them:

Pumpkin - my son, about to turn six
Monkey - my daughter, 4 1/2
Sprout - my youngest (a daughter as well), coming up on two

So the issue people often get concerned about when it comes to teaching children a second language is that they may become confused--that their language abilities in the first language may be compromised in some way.

But my background is in teaching English as a second language. And part of my education was a healthy dose of linguistic training, so I know the research, some of which can be referenced here. I know that learning a second language often enhances a child's abilities in the first language, not the reverse.

And none of that changes my confidence that I'm doing a good thing teaching all my children, including Sprout, a second language. But Sprout is talking later, and a lot less clearly than either of my other children did. While Monkey spoke her first words clearly at about six months (!), Sprout was well over a year old before the first word appeared. At a doctor's appointment a couple of months ago, her doctor said she should have a vocabulary of 10 consistently-used words by now. He suggested that if she doesn't have a vocabulary of about 50 words by the time she's two, she should see a specialist. But the waiting list to see one of those specialists is six months long, so she's already on it.

I'm really not worried--as I said, I know the research--and there's actually some debatable evidence to suggest that children who are late talkers can be very gifted. Einstein, for example, was a late talker.

But it does raise issues, and make my decision to introduce French something I occasionally have to defend. And I'll admit to choosing to speak English to her when I'd be perfectly capable of speaking French, just because I want to hear her say something I'm sure I'll recognize.



Because I was thinking about all of this, I thought I'd make a brief record of the (English) words Sprout is using. Most of the time she babbles in a very meaningful way--as though she's convinced you understand her. She also uses sign language much more than she speaks (so I suppose she's learning three languages, but what a life-saver, since she's not speaking!). And when she speaks, it's often poorly enunciated, so my husband and I are continually saying, "Did she just say...?" "Didn't that sound like...?" "I'm pretty sure she just said..."

Sprout's signs: all done, more, milk, water, baby, potty, hurt, stop, please, thank you, I love you, up, book, and she shakes her head for "no" and nods for "yes." She uses these signs regularly, but she also knows the following signs, and will produce them when asked to: bed, brush teeth, eat, read.

Sprout says: mommy/mama, daddy, grampa, gramma, bye-bye, night-night. She also puts her finger to her lips and says "shhhh" when her dolly is sleeping. (These are all fairly clearly enunciated.) The following are rather unclear, but identifiable to family members: milk, banana, book, yes, that, I love you. She also says her brother and sister's names, but again interpretable only by those of us who know her best! She makes animal noises (moo, meow, etc.) and identifies correctly virtually all her body parts.

And once or twice, I've thought I heard a French word, but I can't be sure.

As I've mentioned before, she doesn't seem to care which language I address her in, and will respond appropriately to requests or questions in French or English. So, I'll continue to teach her French. And in a year or so, I'll look back on this blog entry and wonder why I even thought it necessary to say anything at all about it.