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Foreign Languages
Learning a foreign
language is good for many reasons - it helps you
understand people of another culture better, have a
deeper perspective on their culture, language, and
literature, and gives you a different perspective on
your own. From a cognitive standpoint, bilingual or
multilingual speakers have stronger working memories and
are able to resist cognitive decline better than
monolingual speakers as they get older. Students with
foreign language experience also tend to do better on
all sorts of academic tests like the SAT.
You may want to consider a variety of different issues
before deciding which language to learn.
Considerations Regarding Choosing
a Foreign Language
- Personal Interest
- Fluent Family Member or Members
- Opportunities for
Practice
- Child's Interest
- Possible Future Career Interests
-
Auditory Processing or
Visual Memory Issues
- Auditory and Visual Processing Demands of the Language
- Fluent Teacher
If your student has dyslexia or primary language
disorder, foreign language opt-out is a standard school
accommodation. French is a particularly demanding
language from the auditory standpoint, and it is not
recommended for dyslexic students.
Our oldest has always been interest in words and word
origins, so we made the leap to start Latin. He had a
taste of it in an online class at CTD Northwestern, but
we're continuing with it using
Ecce Romani (with the
Teacher's book,
Minimus for "light"
Latin, and
Latin for Dummies.
There are many free online resources for help and Lesson
plans for Latin. Two that follow Ecce Romani are:
here and
here.
Latin has some advantages
for children with strong visual memory. It also isn't as
demanding on auditory processing as French, so it suited
our son well.
Our daughter had started learning Spanish in school, and
we decided to continue this when she came home. Her
visual memory is also better than auditory, so Spanish's
predictable orthography (you pronounce a word as you see
it) was helpful for her. French would be difficult for
her.
In our area, Spanish teacher are more common than any
other language, so this would increase the likelihood
that she could continue with it. I'm fluent in Spanish,
so it would also be easy for us to converse together. We
have family in California and visit fairly frequently,
so we figured we would have opportunities to practice.
Our daughter is also very social and has thought about
becoming a doctor, and Spanish would be good for all
sorts of people-oriented careers.
For our curriculum, we were able to use a conventional
text from our local homeschool resource center, but I
found that my daughter could keep much more in her head
if the lessons were a little funny and accompanied with
music. As a result, we're progressing through
Musical Spanish. The
program is a bit old, but it's well-suited to our
daughter who just finished the 3rd grade. It has a small
book and CD with simple animations and songs. The
combination (animation, practice games, and songs) seems
to be a particularly efficient way for my daughter to
remember. The program includes basic grammar, and
conventional topics such as ser vs. estar.
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