Independent Thinking, July 2007

By Ian Gilbert of Independent Thinking - one of UK's leading providers of people, knowledge, ideas and inspiration to help make a genuine and lasting difference to education.

I put the Speekee Spanish language resource to its harshest critic – my 8 year-old daughter. Now, a week later, as far as she is concerned, she is learning Spanish and can recite nearly every word and phrase that we focussed on during our little languages session. We sat and watched extracts of the video together, her holding the book with its Spanish-English, English-Spanish dictionary and me with my finger on the pause button. We both found that having the Spanish subtitles up helped considerably (obviously we are both visual learners).

The flexibility of the resource to help us learn in a variety of ways including the CD which she insisted on listening to on a two hour car journey (until my 12 year-old daughter could take it no more!) and the curious characters (puppets and humans) make this a very powerful tool for not only helping children learn but also helping them see themselves as language learners – half the battle in my experience.

Like many resources, it is at its best when mediated by an adult and as such is a great tool to help bring parents and carers safely into the language learning fold.