The concept of bilingual education holds that most children can easily acquire fluency in a second language by first acquiring fluency in their dialect, home language or native language through phonically appropriate speaking the phonemes.
Here language fluency means acquiring the spoken language skills through phonic method so that a smooth transition can be made to the second language. Therefore, the beginning should be made by vocabulary building by attending to learning about phonemes or vowel and consonant sounds.
There exist evidences that speaking skills based on recognizing the phonemes of the native language and additional ones in the new language makes transition to second language easy and smooth.
In the case of transition from Hindi to English, phonic method provides a strong support since Hindi is a phonic language. In Hindi, vowel letters are 11 while vowel phonemes are 11 /12. While in English, there are 5 vowel letters and 20 basic vowel sounds or vowel phonemes. For this, along with cultural knowledge and native language based vocabulary building done through classroom activities and materials first.
It has been observed that native tongue provides situations of contrast- analysis to gain more information and understanding to which effective transition to the second language is the goal.
Hindi vowel sounds are needed to be contrasted with vowel sounds of English with more emphasis on the additional sounds so the the learners get habituated to them.
For phonic practice, in Hindi, the technique of Baraha-khadi is used, on the same lines, technique of Bees-Kadi can be devised for recitation to acquire new vowel phonemes by taking cues from the inset picture.
Such transitional programmes are made by teachers and educators who have bi-lingual proficiency through one-month long orientation programme emphasizing both content and technique mastery.
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