“Tell me and I will forget, show me and I may remember, involve me and I will understand.” says Confucius and expresses the idea of Language Garden. The inventor and director of Language Garden defines the concept of his website as a combination of visualizing information in a Mind Map with different theories of language learning and language teaching. Mind Maps use key words, and structure these organically, the words radiating out from the centre. Rather than viewing language as composed of words and grammar, two separate entities almost, these two systems should be understood as co-existing, with each word having its own grammar, a word grammar. These two powerful theories, one about learning, one about language, combined together, result in language plants.
The Offer
Language Garden is meant for learners and teachers of a languages. It is for all ages and learners do not necessarily have to be learners of English as a second language. The offer includes exploring various language plants of different topics and styles, designing one's own language plants and reading and listening to stories. There are some grammar activities which always work with colours. Interactive materials can be bought but there is also a collection of free resources.
Examples
Although the intention of Language Garden is rather to improve language skills, it offers the opportunity to use it for our purpose, too. Here are some examples how Language Garden can be used with Literature:
This Garden Plant of a part of Martin Luther King's famous speech shows that Language Garden can also be used in terms of literature in higher classes. It is simple, nice and colourful but still shows important rhetoric features of a speech such as the parallelism.
This is an impression of how the interactive material works which has to be bought.
This is an extract from William Blake's poem. Students need a clear understanding of a poem and have to be aware of the structure in order to transform parts of it into Language Plants.
Useful?
The results of Language Garden are amazing! I really like the way how not only language but also literary style is transformed into colourful graphics that still contain the actual intention but express even more than only words. Especially if students are asked to design the Language Plants themselves, they approach literature in a new way. Unfortunately, there are some tripping hazards to be mangaged until one gets to that point of success. It took me some time to really understand what the website aims. Is it a learning platform? Is it access to teaching material? Is it a program for drawing Language Plants? It is a mixture of all this, but for most materials you have to pay.
To put it in a nutshell - it is a nice idea but too complicated for students to handle it idependently- Why not keep the approach in mind and use the old of way of drawing Language Plants on a big sheet of paper?!
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