[Sugar-devel] Language Learner, a GSOC 2010 idea proposal

[Zhang Yao]

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!
 <http://espeak.sourceforge.net/>--
School of Computer Science
Fudan University, Shanghai, China
Yao Zhang
e-mail:saturntoad at gmail.com <e-mail%3Asaturntoad at gmail.com>
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