Thoughts on Language Education in the Home

Hello, and welcome to another post in my homeschooling-thoughts series for all K-12 subjects! As you might remember, I've been exploring subject-specific home education strategies on this blog in 2024. Especially in toddler years (Child #1), one can set up children for success in later work by nurturing their love of learning and discovery, as well as being mindful of the destination ahead (a well-rounded, well-educated mind in a healthy body, mens sana in corpore sano). This week, I will explore foreign language education, which I have a tiny bit of experience in but not that recently. Here are links to my other posts on health education, life sciences, history, geography, and math.

First, though, I wanted to give you a heads-up about the 2025 blogging theme--I am in the early stages of researching for a new book! The general topic will be homeschooling strategies for Christian parents who are themselves neurodiverse. More to come . . .

Basics

In my years of being homeschooled, I studied two foreign languages with my mother instructing (German and Latin) and one with another homeschool mom instructing (French, quickly abandoned). During full-time clinic work years, I took a self-study healthcare Spanish course to help with patient care. During married years, I did a few months of basic Biblical Greek under the guidance of the Bibliovore in a small-group context. He has since dabbled in Biblical Hebrew and plans to return to it at some point, possibly after our children are introduced to Greek and Latin.

Thus, while currently my main language-related job is introducing spoken English to our children, I have had enough experience with foreign language to introduce it as well, at the best time for our family. The Charlotte Mason approach addresses primarily conversational versus academic foreign language, at least early on, but it's definitely compatible with the neoclassical approach which uses the grammar-translation method. (I've tried to address subjects early in the series that are most lent to a CM approach and that I'm the most comfortable with. Here's a modern resource for CM-style foreign language instruction!) Let's explore some terminology related to language instruction.

First - I've chosen "foreign language" rather than "second language" for a few reasons. I am not multilingual, and I'm guessing that most homeschool families in my audience aren't truly multilingual either. I also do not want to limit myself to only one additional language besides English! It has proven beneficial to my knowledge of all languages and ideas to have a grounding in Latin and Greek (because of their grammatical structure and their influence on etymology especially in English), and German and Spanish represent other major language families.

Second - this post is not about "language arts." That's for a later post!

Based on this glossary of language-education terms (here's one geared towards English-as-a-foreign language or EFL educators), what terms can build your framework as a Christian home educator?

• Speaking and analyzing the languages
• Target vs native language - the one you're learning and the one you already know
• Grammar and vocabulary - the overarching basic structural pieces of each language, though actually speaking the language requires more knowledge of how it's used in reality as well
• Consonant and vowel - speech sound categories based on whether your airflow stops or keeps going as you are saying the sound
• Syllable - a blend of particular consonant(s) and vowel(s); syllables make up words
• Matching the parts of speech between languages
• Noun - person, place, or thing
• Pronoun - word standing for a noun (side note: if someone asks you for your pronouns, give them all 100 if you'd rather be left alone)
• Adjective - word modifying or describing a noun
• Verb - action taken by or done to a noun, including existence
• Adverb - word modifying or describing a verb
• Preposition - any word describing a relationship (in, with, under, etc.)
• Determiner (I hadn't encountered this term before): class including
• Articles (the)
• Definite - specific (e.g., the)
• Indefinite - nonspecific (e.g., an)
• Demonstratives (this)
• Possessive Determiners (his)
• Quantifiers (both)
• Cardinal Numbers (three)
• In sentence analysis, parts of speech fit into these grammatical structures:
• Subject - actor "doing" the verb
• Direct object - person, place, or thing directly affected by the subject's action
• Indirect object - person, place, or thing indirectly affected by this action
• More about analyzing and speaking the languages
• Tandem - situation where one person's primary language is used by all speakers first, then the other person's language
• Script - writing system for a given language. A near-synonym is alphabet.
• Phonology/phonetics - "sound" system for languages.
• Case - typically subject (e.g., "she" form), object (e.g., "her" form), and others depending on the language. German and others have nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive; Latin adds ablative and vocative.
• Noun class/gender - depending on the language, this may not be present. Typical examples are German's masculine, feminine, and neuter for various nouns. This doesn't always connect to the biological gender of people/animals described.
• Inflection - word modification to convey grammar. Latin is an inflected language; English is not.
• Conjugation - verb modification to convey grammar (e.g., number, tense, or person).
• Declension - modification of other words (nouns, adjectives).

How are Foreign Languages Taught in Schools?

Should all students learn a foreign language? According to American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), yes. Ideally, each student will learn at least one foreign language, studying it throughout elementary, middle, and high school. I couldn't find national standards and curricula identifying how things are "usually" done. However, the executive summary of ACTFL's standards is illuminative. Standards are grouped into five Cs.

1. Communication. Can students hold conversations, convey and understand information, interpret both written and spoken language, and present others with information in a language not their first?
2. Culture. Can students understand relationships between aspects of others' culture?
3. Connections. Can students get to know other disciplines of knowledge via the foreign language (e.g., studying through documents)?
4. Comparisons. Can students compare the foreign and native languages, and the represented cultures?
5. Communities. Do students use the language outside of school and sustain interest in lifelong learning via and of that language?

Curricular exposure ideas from the summary document and FluentU include:

• Group collaboration to create a news segment with commercials in the foreign language on a specific topic
• Use of multiple resources (stories, pictures) to learn about another culture's calendar
• Labeling personal items in the foreign language
• Read children's stories in the foreign language
• Review frequently throughout the day whether by conversation snippets, flashcard review, or focused minutes

How can Christian Homeschoolers Teach Foreign Language(s)?

In the spirit of Autumn Kern of The Commonplace Podcast, I don't have a specific curriculum to recommend as you're pondering which foreign language(s) to introduce to your child(ren). Rather, I hope to inspire your thoughts as to your philosophy of education and why you want to include a specific language or another. I'll do this very indirectly, by sharing aspects of my experiences.

My mother, an immigrant from Germany post-WWII, retained her knowledge of conversational and basic written German and Polish because many of her relatives, also residents of Poland-adjacent regions, immigrated as well. Her father experienced xenophobia at work while establishing a life in the US, which pushed him and the rest of the family to learn English with as much fluency and as little accent as possible.

When we came around, she introduced us to bits and pieces of German vocabulary first, by using them in daily life and giving us access to German picture dictionaries. We did stumble across some elementary-level German textbooks, but I have no specific memories of going through them. We did, however, master enough conversational German (plus the ability to pick at Emil and the Detectives) by around age 10 for my mother to need to switch to Polish for Christmas- and birthday-present phone conversations with my grandmother.

While we learned the grammar-translation method for German parts of speech, eventually through the third subjunctive, my younger brother and I also started learning Latin with her in a small group of homeschooled children. Resources for the grammar-translation ("parsing") way approaching Latin included Wheelock's, Civis Romanus (readings), and possibly one other resource I don't recall. The fact that I enjoyed parsing as much as I did, in retrospect, supports my self-diagnosis as adjacent to the autism spectrum, but that's a story for another time.

Neither of my parents knew Greek. However, they did own a New Testament in Latin and one in Greek (interlinear). This allowed me to learn the Greek alphabet and practice some pronunciation back in elementary-age years. This was an unexpected benefit once the Bibliovore encouraged me to start actually learning Biblical Greek, which I plan to resume/restart in a few months.

We kept going with each language as long as we could, but minimized the use of standardized exams because my family's educational philosophy was that as long as we completed on-track work in all subjects, we could run ahead with others (all, few, or none) at our own discretion. My brother and the other student in our group were considering taking the National Latin Exam, but I don't think we ended up doing so. However, the skills I gained from parsing and speaking and reading the languages that I did have served me well in learning scientific and technical concepts later in life, not to mention etymology of words derived from Latin and Greek!

Things we did not use in foreign language acquisition were workbooks, flashcards (I think), and emphasis on formal lectures. In CM style, any lectures were kept brief, and then we went to active, focused practice, usually oral, of the language skill or vocabulary that we had just been exposed to. Probably no more than 20-30 minutes at a time were spent on focused attention to the language per day or before a break preceding a second 20-30 minutes.

What were the long-term benefits of my learning bits and pieces of these languages?

• Growth in vocabulary and the ability to acquire new vocabulary
• Appreciation of the thought processes of people in other cultures (e.g., those speaking Biblical Greek or modern German) by virtue of the grammatical structure differences between their languages and English
• Improved confidence in approaching historical or philosophical documents that contain words, phrases, or sentences in a foreign language that I've learned

What have been your experiences, and what are your thoughts, on learning a foreign language yourself, along with your child(ren)? Feel free to share in the comments!