Holiday Homework - Do you have any?

[Jo Rhys-Jones]

So schools out at last and finally a little 'me time' to catch up on things. I've been inspired by two recent stories in the press - firstly that Primary school children in Northern Ireland are set to have the option of learning Polish from September and then the TES article about Back School in the Outer Hebrides keeping alive the teaching of Gaelic.

At the end of July I was lucky enough to go to the Cilt Community Languages Show in Southampton and met some very inspirational and enthusiastic people. The lunch alone was amazing hearing so many different languages spoken at the same tables and I realised for the first time what an incredible range of languages are already spoken in our schools. Having worked in fairly rural counties, apart from Cornish and Welsh I'd not come across many children who speak other languages, yet this situation has and continues to change rapidly. Now, even in the tiny primary school my youngest attends, of the 50 children there are 8 who do not speak English at home (and 4 of them speak French).

I've spent a lot of my time this last year persuading KS2 class teachers to put themselves out of their comfort zones and learn a language so they can start teaching it themselves and it's high time I put my money where my mouth is and did the same. So this summer my own personal challenge is to learn Polish. OK I do not intend to be fluent by September but I'd like to know some basics - colours, numbers, foods and a few nouns, how to say I like/please/thank you/goodbye that sort of thing.

So with the support of my new friend Bryga who I met in Basingstoke, www.fonetiks.org a great phonetics site for all sorts of languages, Internet Polyglot which has all sorts of vocab learning games in many languages and a free software download from BYKI, I now know numbers to 5 in Polish. And I really know them too! Forwards and backwards and with fingers and everything!

So maybe you will share with us your own Summer Holiday Challenge or Project if you have one? And get back to us all in September to let us know how you got on!

[Chris]

I think learning a language over the holidays is an excellent idea!
However for non-specialists in particular, I believe that certain imporrant factors apply:

- They need courses that are designed for absolute beginners, and that take into account the possibility that the learner has had negative experiences leaning a language at school. This aversion to languages is an added factor we have to deal with in UK primary schools.

- The courses should be heavily focused on audio learning, and should ideally be those you can use without a text book. These mean they can be used when driving or exercising etc, so learning doesn't feel like a drudge.

- The course should teach only the modern, colloquial language, teach only the essential grammar, and do so in an highly accessible way.

- They must contain quality audio, and lots of it. There is no compromise on this, especially if you're learning French!

- They need to be designed for effective self study.

Here are some of the courses I recommend:

The Pimsleur courses spring immediately to mind. They are ridculously expensive, but they offer a unique learning experience that, for once, lives up to the hype. I'm very impressed, although you do need to get the complete 3 or 4 level sets to get the most out of them. Memorisation is, literally, built into the methodology. You do have to use the lesson segments every day, but they are only 30 minutes long, and very easy to use.

Michel Thomas. Like many other experienced language learners, I find Michel and his method frustrating, although I do acknowldege that a lot of non-linguists have made breakthroughs with his method, especially in terms of language structure they didn't understand at school. I have very mixed feelings about the much-publicised Michel Thomas method. This is why: You only need to listen to Michel's heavy accented English to get an idea of how his French sounds. French is not his native language either. It's not the model of pronunciation I'd want to learn from! However, the newer courses, such as those in Chinese and Arabic, while they still rely on his method, do employ one native speaker so they are better. I have tried the Arabic course, and although I found it frustrating, I did learn easily with it. I have promised the publisher that I will write a review on this course actually. You can use these courses 'on the go' but they tend to be very limited in the range of vocabulary they teach. Maybe the new vocabulary supplement helps with this.

I also like the Rocket courses, which are at rocketlanguages.co.uk if you haven't heard of them. They're pretty basic for an experienced linguist, but are conversation-based and ease you into the language very gently, so they are ideal for non-specialist primary teachers. The audio courses are easy to use, and supplemented with vocabulary software. They're fully downloadable too, so you can get strated straight away.

[Lorraine]

Congrats for being keen to put yourself in the 'learner's position' again.
I became interested in this concept last year and this next year will be embarking on studying for my Spanish GCSE - just been studying at night school so far.
I think it's so vital to see exactly how our students may be feeling, being able to find hints and tips etc. can only make us better teachers.
And as you say we're asking teachers to do it so we need to be leading the way.

[Jan Lewandowski]

Best of luck with the Polish, Jo! It's the cases that are sodifficult!

[Jackie Berry]

So that's what you're up to this week! Dobre szczęście!

Now you've thrown down the gauntlet Jo, here goes!

For me it will have to be to learn a little Bengali, thanks to the lovely teachers I met at the Community Languages Conference, too. I'm away most of August but am going to try to learn the numbers to 10 and maybe a few colours or phrases, time permitting.

The biggest challenge will be trying to learn to read the words in Bengali script - it will be the first non-Roman script language I've attempted but I think it's really important to have the correct graphemes to map the phonemes onto. Have found some useful soundfiles on http://www.virtualbangladesh.com/bd_phrases.html and am going to install the Bengali language files on my laptop next!

If anyone has any good websites to recommend I'd be very grateful!