Learning a Language Other Than English (LOTE) early in life, helps students develop empathy, cognition, perspective, literacy, self-confidence and capacity to learn other languages later.
Recognizing this, Australia spends up to $50 million a year teaching LOTE but, despite the best efforts of such dedicated teachers as we have, the universities and government now acknowledge that it is not working.
Many of our children get no LOTE at all and those that do have too little time, continuity and motivation to gain a useable language.
Motivated adults need over 2000 hrs to gain basic competence in Japanese or 700 hours for French or German. If our primary children have around 200 hours available, we can offer them very different fractions of a language, depending on which language we choose.The most practical LOTE for us to offer is in primary schools is Esperanto, the user-friendly international language, which is available in around 100 hours.
This strategy:
- Shows fairness and equal respect for all cultures.
- Is regular and phonetic, and so accessible, encouraging, empowering and inclusive.
- Promotes literacy through transparent grammar, sound/symbol constancy and use of Latin roots.
- Provides a large vocabulary with a minimum of rote-learning, by creation of words from parts of fixed meaning.
- Gives access to the widest variety of cultures in all dimensions: language, religion, arts.
- Provides an especially solid basis for learning other whatever languages may emerge as strategic in the future.
- Finally, Esperanto is not the first language of any Australian child so, uniquely, it offers something new to every child in every class from lesson one; a level playing field.
Australian LOTE programs fail due to lack of combinations of: teacher availability, time, continuity and commitment. About half is due to lack of a suitable language teacher.
In-servicing existing primary school teachers so that they can teach primary Esperanto in an integrated curriculum addresses all 4 major obstacles:
- Teaching by generalist teachers is normal primary practice because it is both logistically efficient and developmentally appropriate for young children. LOTE should be part of that normal education.
- Time accounts for 30% of program failure (starting time, length and frequency of lessons and practice sessions, changing staff and rooms, duration of the course etc). Dependence on specialists constrains change but generalist teachers have more flexibility.
- The primary-to-secondary continuity problem can be resolved by all primary students arriving at high school with English, Esperanto, confidence and readiness to choose.
- The Primary Esperanto Stategy can engage the commitment of the whole educational community by being fair, achievable and affordable.
For the cost of the LOTE budget of 2002 all 100,000 primary teachers can be trained and rewarded, and every primary child receive a complete and usable LOTE education.
By empowering existing primary school teachers to teach a simple international language first, the Australian Government can provide a second language for every Australian child, and a third in secondary for those who want it.
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This proposal summary is presented in full detail, with references, in “Australian LOTE” available from the Mondeto home page, either as a normal purchase or a 2-for-1 offer which encourages Australian decision makers to engage with this strategy, too.
The Resource package "Talking to the Whole Wide World" is also available from www.mondeto.com
