While many foreign language books here on Wikibooks present their content in similar ways, each has its own approach determined by the authors' style and the characteristics of the language. This wikibook seeks to provide insight into the various issues specific to language books and help Wikibookians choose a style and structure to best aid the reader navigate the available contents and learn the material.
This book is meant to detail guidelines, not rules, on how to make an excellent wikibook teaching any language. You can pick and choose from all the suggestions this book has to offer and implement them in your wikibook to make it an effective and useful foreign language wikibook.
Learners have different strengths and a wide range of approaches will make a book useful to more readers. (Kick User:Swift if he forgets to elaborate on this -- Feb. 2009)
It is important to gradually introduce the language to your readers. This keeps your readers interested, instead of frustrated, and allows you to go into greater depth in any given subject. Before moving on after describing a series of grammar points, provide your readers with a large number of examples, and excercises. Afterwards you can show the table as a summary of what was learned. While readers should be aware of exceptions, these might be better saved for later.
Don't expect the reader to have a deep knowledge of grammar or linguistics. Such concepts are still useful but the text may have to describe these or refer users to where they are explained. Use your best judgement in deciding which terms are reasonable to expect readers to know. Many readers, for instance, won't know what a "guttural", "plosive" or "voiced" sound is, much less know how to produce them.
Before writing any lesson, set a goal for the course (e. g. level A2 of the European Reference Framework for Languages) and make a lesson plan that will gradually lead people there.
A lesson plan should indicate which vocabulary and grammar each lesson introduces, and the order of which these are introduced. This gives current and future contributors an overview of what has been taught already. Already covered grammar and vocabulary should be regularly revisited. Grammatical structure that hasn't been covered yet will more often than not just confuse the reader, but if handled correctly it can be used as a tool to get readers used to certain modes of speech.
Avoid choosing which phrases to teach first, and then seeing what grammar they require. Once you have set up grammar points, you should pick sentences in their scope which the reader might find interesting and can begin to use in mock- or real conversations. What constitutes as "interesting" varies of course. At the outset, however, anything that readers can understand and use will encourage and motivate them. As most wikibooks are for self-study, a constant experience of success is a critical factor in the success of your book.
Keep the lesson contents manageable and their size regular. Again, centering around phrases will create some very short lessons, while complex phrases will require lots of background. Set each lesson to cover a small number of grammar points, introduce a set amount of new vocabulary and revisit particular grammar points.
Reading is not enough to learn a language. Readers should practice contents they've learnt. Lessons should assist them in doing so by supplying excercises (e.g. phrases to construct or modify) with answers. Note, however, that this is where Wikibooks starts to overlap with v:Wikiversity. You may want to track down the department that would benefit from your book, and help integrate it into a learning stream.
Excercises should be simple and allow plenty of repetition.
User:Swift's old math teacher called it (with a grin on his face
;-)) the bulldozer method when he assigned
them homework with around a hundred series to be tested for
convergence. The same principle applies here. Repetitions are the
only way to get an intuition for how
series, sorry; language, works.
Give readers plenty of chance to passively understand and then practice (reading, listening, and speaking) example phrases before producing (writing or speaking) their own.
Here are some examples of excercises:
While more work to create, visual triggers (such as images) are more useful than phrases. Describing something about an image, rather than translating an English phrase allows users to concentrate on learning the new language independently, rather than in terms of how it relates to English. This is particularly important for languages that differ radically in grammar.
References allow the reader to quickly find a certain rule that he needs to brush up on. References need to be accessible (ordered by alphabet, level and/or type to name a few) and complete. Don't, however, start something you won't finish. Know your limits.
Languages written with variants of the latin alphabet or completely different character sets require teaching how to read and write these. Where stroke order is important or useful, provide images describing these. There might already be some available on Commons:, such as at the Commons Stroke Order Project or Commons:Tamil alphabet.
Audio and video clips to illustrate converstations by native speakers are useful. You can direct readers to popular media in the language you are teaching for practice to keep learners interested and hlep them immerse themselves in the language.
Never teach languages in the sense of simply providing a sentence with its translation and requesting memorization.
Without first teaching how to construct sentences, such examples do not aid in learning a language. If a person doesn't understand the structure and components of a sentence, the reader gains very little from memorizing it because he cannot use it to make or understand new sentences.
Developed by Junesun, the Bite-sized language lessons aim to break lessons down into small easily digestable bits.
The 1-2-3-4-5 Punch is a process of repetition and memorization critical to the learning of a new language. There are two parts to the 1-2-3-4-5 Punch: the 1-2-3 Punch and the 4-5 Punch. Parts 1, 2, and 3 deals with lessons and parts 4 and 5 with groups of lessons:
The more repetition the better. This is important, people don't normally remember something the first time they hear it. The more times you repeat the material you've gone through with the reader, the more likely they'll be able to remember what they read. It's a simple, but important, concept.
Many wikibooks for languages are trying to be curriculums rather than textbooks or references. This is an excellent goal, but to achieve it you must plan your curriculum, and repetition is key to any curriculum.
There is little specific about styling and structuring language books. See Wikibooks:Manual of Style for more on this.
Avoid splash pages as they only increase the distance to actual content. The MediaWiki softare creates links to parent pages under the page title. Leaving worth-while content on the book's main page increases access. Remember that wikibooks are not made of paper and your readers haven't come searching for pretty pictures of the flag of Japan or Morocco.
Keep a consistent style throughout the book. Be creative and add graphics specific to that book. Memorable logos and mascots can be a great idea for a representative theme in illustrations.
It can be a useful to motivate contributors to your wikibook to, display them prominently with recognition of their level of contribution. You can, for example, put a small symbol or image next to the name of each contributor for each module they have contributed substantially to.
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