Cours de Langue FOTOUNI-Africa

Teaching Methodology of African Languages ​​applied to the Language Fotouni

Objective: To provide African Languages ​​teachers a tool for rapid and modular computerization of their teaching, to make available to learners already speak a "language called Basic" another friendly learning tool from another "called Language New".

In this demonstration, the Base Language is French, and the language is the New Fotouni, a Native Cameroon.

Our methodology is inspired by an alien who moves into a neighborhood indigenous majority. He learned the local language on the job, with little phrases of everyday life, and its assimilation depends mainly on the frequency of hearing and using these phrases.

The teacher designs the expressions teaching and class in the pedagogical that suits him. An expression can for example be a word or phrase. Each expression is retained what we call Teaching Unit (EU). An EU can also be an introduction or explanation, and why not a story.

Each EU, the teacher records a sound file of the base text, and one of the corresponding text in new language. It may involve an illustrative image. These registrations are then converted into a special database that learners use across modules is oriented towards understanding or towards reading the written expressions of the new language.

For understanding, the module performs the reading of the phrase in one language and its translation in the other. A break is scheduled after playing a phrase, and another is after reading the translation. The first allows the learner to try to anticipate the translation, and the second allows to assimilate the translation imitating. The user can select some expressions and audition loop to control before proceeding to the next.

The ability to search phrases containing a word before it provides a function of when the dictionary database is rich (enter two words, for an expression containing both).

Computerization allows everyone to adjust at will the length of breaks, to reverse the direction of the translation, and even to present the EU in a random order.

For making a course, this is what must be the teacher:

- Develop a list of phrases to teach,

- Enter the elements of these expressions in an Excel sheet following the template that we hold to it,

- Make the necessary audio and visual recordings, or import them from any available source,

- We send all items above for making the final database (until this last step is decentralized).

And this is what we must do:

- Check the correct coding of IDs,

- Create the final database or integrate with the application, or keeping it available as a basic usable external data from a memory card.

Our ability to produce in less than an hour the database matching perfectly formed elements allows the teacher to computerize even a lesson in easily producing a course that a learner would use either revision or self-training . This ability to produce a product as being episodes of a television series offers a very significant flexibility.