Childhood is a period of intense cognitive development and rapid learning during which children acquire their knowledge of the world  by approaching a wide range of domains.

The first of such domains is language, the learning of which takes place within the social context closest to the children: Their own family. Language is an essential tool that enables us to communicate with others and to participate actively within a common cultural environment; for this reason adult family members support thoughts and actions through language, converting the experiences children live through at home into crucial settings for early language learning.

Three fundamental circumstances for language learning and acquisition have been identified:

• Frequent and recurrent activities providing a well-known structure that allows children to  interpret the behaviours and languages of others, to anticipate the temporal sequence of events, as well as to infer information from new experiences. Among such activities, a particularly important one is the listening to, or shared reading of, stories which promotes the development of the child’s lexical stock and phonological skills while encouraging a positive attitude towards reading and writing.
• Children’s interaction with adults also plays a formative role in language learning: Children benefit from exposure to adult speech, which is diverse and rich in information, about objects and events.  Additionally, it should be noted that more progress is made when adults respond to children’s exploratory verbal initiatives by answering with detailed verbal descriptions and by asking them questions.
• Lastly, suitable and well-designed didactic materials are of great importance and support. Exposure to age-appropriate  and diversified teaching tools offers endless opportunities for conversation and exchange, while promoting children’s curiosity and stimulating in them a desire to explore, a motivation for achievement, and a positive approach to learning. This is why BRAVO’s methodology, based on such scientific premises, designs and proposes diversified resources that are easily exportable from classroom-teaching to home-learning, and vice versa.

Furthermore, the ability to speak other languages besides one’s own is considered today as a basic training requirement. Languages are not only mere means of communication used for information exchange, but they represent cultural expressions that embody individual and collective identities, values, and world-views.

Presently, there exist a wide assortment of websites and smartphone applications available on the market offering foreign language/s self-teaching methods. Sadly, these rarely offer endorsed pedagogical contents nor do they address specific levels of pre-existing knowledge or different age ranges.

The objective of BRAVO is to produce and to offer learning materials that are structured according to the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) and created with the support of the families that, in this way, become part of, and are involved in, the initial levels of knowledge acquisition.

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REFERENCES |

Dickinson DK. Bridges to literacy: Children, families, and schools. Cambridge, Blackwell; 1994.

Bruner J.: Child’s talk: Learning to use language. New York, Norton, 1983.

Vygotsky  LS.: Thought and language. Cambridge. MIT Press, 1962.