<div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 1:35 PM, Zhang Yao <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:saturntoad@gmail.com">saturntoad@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
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 : )<br><br>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.<br>
<br>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 <br clear="all">
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.<br>
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.<br>
<br>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.<br>
<br>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 : )<br>
<br>Best wishes!</blockquote><div><br></div><div>Hi,</div><div><br></div><div>this definitely sounds like a great project idea! :-)</div><div><br></div><div>Have you thought about the details on how to implement it?</div>
<div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<div><br></div><div><slight general rant></div><div>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.</div>
</div></slight general rant><br clear="all"><br><div>Cheers,</div><div>Christoph</div><div><br>-- <br>Christoph Derndorfer<br>co-editor, olpcnews<br>url: <a href="http://www.olpcnews.com">www.olpcnews.com</a><br>e-mail: <a href="mailto:christoph@olpcnews.com">christoph@olpcnews.com</a><br>
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