On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 1:35 PM, Zhang Yao <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi everyone, I'm running for the GSOC 2010 for SugarLabs and I'm proposing > this idea to you to see whether it is good or not. Any feedback will be > warmly welcomed : ) > > As far as I know, there are no good language learning activities for Sugar > and OLPC now. And I think it is really important to get a good sense of > native language at the early stage of each childhood, since it should be the > most critical and best time to learn letters, words,correct pronunciations, > etc. And as the world getting more internationalized, it is also important > to give them a basic sense of English, which is good for their future > development. > > My proposal is to provide a basic language learning activity for Sugar and > OLPC, using a method like language immersion. As many of OLPC users are > pre-school and low-grade school children, such a language learning activity > should be simple and intuitive. That is the reason why I consider to use the > language-immersion-like method. To implement this method as an activity, I > think using lots of images from ordinary children's daily life and embedding > some small games is a good approach. This method focuses > mainly not on things like advanced grammar but on the usage of a language > in daily life, which is greatly suitable for basic language learners like > children. It could be used for elder students when learning a second > language as well. > Also, this activity should be able to easily port from one language to > another. Because a basic framework is provided and images used are common, > only texts in the database should be translated to another language, which > may be done simply by things like "Google Translate". Still, a teacher > should be able to replace some of the images and add new images to the > database. And other useful things like the espeak speech synthesizer could > be used in it. > > To summarize, this activity is aimed to introduce the basic and daily > usage of a language to pre-school and low-grade school children and give > them a good sense of the language for their further study in simple and > intuitive ways. It can be ported to many languages and easily modified by > teachers. It can also serve as a tool to learn the basis of a foreign > language for children. > > As a university student in a developing country and the world is becoming > more and more internationalized, I am really looking forward to giving all > those children in developing countries opportunities to start the learning > of their native language and also English as early as possilbe, so that they > could stand a better chance in their future life. Therefore, if you have any > suggestions about my proposal, please do not hesitate to give your feedback > : ) > > Best wishes! Hi, this definitely sounds like a great project idea! :-) Have you thought about the details on how to implement it? One of my first thoughts is that it's very important to provide a good interface for both using and building such language learning lessons, I think Memorize is doing quite a lot of things right in that area. <slight general rant> I generally feel like there's still a real lack of activities aimed at teaching, learning and practicing basic skills such as writing, speaking, using the keyboard/touchpad, learning basic Mathematics, etc. This is *exactly* what primary schools all around the world are doing yet I think we haven't done a great job at addressing this when it comes to providing appropiate activities. </slight general rant> Cheers, Christoph -- Christoph Derndorfer co-editor, olpcnews url: www.olpcnews.com e-mail: [email protected]
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