DEVELOPING K–16 STUDENT STANDARDS FOR LANGUAGE LEARNING: A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF THE CASE OF ESPERANTO

Abstract

In light of the ongoing attention to standards-based education in U.S. schools and the concern over how to effectively develop literacy skills in a first, let alone a second, language, this article reports on the drafting of the K–16 Student Standards for Learning Esperanto in the United States. Esperanto is ideally suited to aid children in the primary grades develop accurate phonemic awareness and an understanding of the parts of speech because of its absolutely regular sound-symbol correspondence and the transparency of it morphosyntactic structure. In addition to improved first language (L1) literacy skills, the early successful second language (L2) acquisition experience that Esperanto can provide leaves students more inclined and better prepared to study French, Italian, German, Spanish, or other ethnic languages when the opportunity becomes available to them. It is in this spirit that the Task Force on Standards for the Learning of Esperanto K–16, an international group of Esperanto educators, standards writers, linguists, applied linguists, and language teacher educators from schools and universities throughout the United States and abroad, met to draft the K–16 Student Standards for Learning Esperanto in the United States and to align them with the Standards for Foreign Language Learning in the 21st Century.

Acknowledgments

The Task Force on Standards for the Learning of Esperanto K–16 sincerely thanks the Esperantic Studies Foundation for funding this project. We also wish to thank Roger Williams University, in Bristol, Rhode Island, for providing the facilities necessary for the workshops.

Notes

¹The members of the Task Force on Standards for the Learning of Esperanto K–16 were Christine Brown, Duncan Charters, Patricia Charters, Bonnie Fonseca-Greber, Katalin Kováts, and Timothy Reagan (Chair).

∗The verbal morphology of Esperanto is characterized by an absolutely regular tense, voice, and aspect system. The verb is uninflected for person.

²In fact, the Esperanto lexicon includes words derived from Romance languages (especially French and Latin), Germanic languages (primarily German, Yiddish, and English), Balto-Slavic languages (especially Russian, Serbo-Croatian, and Polish, as well as Lithuanian), Greek, from shared Indo-European roots, and finally, small numbers of lexical items from Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese and other languages (see Gledhill, 2000, pp. 20–26; Janton, 1993, pp. 51–55). Estimates of the distribution of the lexicon by source language vary somewhat, but it is likely 70–75% of the lexical items in Esperanto are Romance in origin, and 10–20% are Germanic in origin. Kolker (1988) has suggested a much more significant impact of Russian on the Esperanto lexicon, while Gold (1980, 1982) has examined the influence of both Hebrew and Yiddish on Esperanto (see also Piron, 1984).