- Late starting time,
- Lesson and practice infrequency,
- Lesson duration and time on task limitations,
- Disruption and/or discontinuity of the program,
- Lack of time flexibility to allow for individual needs.
These time issues were identified as the cause for the failure of LOTE courses in about a third of cases reviewed in the LOTE report.
Languages education suffers more from these problems than other subjects because of its heavy dependence on specialists. Well-prepared generalists can vary these factors to suit the age and character of their particular charges.
How long does it take to learn a language?
The U.S. State Department's Foreign Service Institute ranks Mandarin as one of five "exceptionally difficult" languages (the others are Arabic, Cantonese, Japanese and Korean). The average English speaker requires 2,200 class hours to reach proficiency, according to the Foreign Service Institute. If you could somehow make learning Chinese your 40-hours-a-week job, it would take you over a year! Spanish or French would take 4 months or so under these conditions. Esperanto would take less than one month.
In spite of advantages in some aspects of their learning capacity, children learn languages much more slowly than adults. Therefore it is clear that if our primary children have about 200 hours to learn (Professor Joseph Lo Bianco, The Australian, September 2009), we can offer them very different fractions of a language depending on which we choose.
“Children taught from age five clearly make more progress than those who start later...An early start to language learning also enhances literacy, citizenship and intercultural tolerance." (Nuffield Report) Choosing Esperanto as the first LOTE means that a start can be made for all students at the best time for them.
Weekly LOTE lessons are most common in primary schools, although more frequent shorter lessons are known to be more effective for young language learners. Appropriately qualified specialist language teachers cannot be expected to come in for 15 minute timeslots but "Talking to the Whole Wide World" can be used in any-sized chunks of time!
