Lote+Strategic+Plan+2010-2013


 * What Are The Benefits of Learning a Language? **
 * Enriches our learners intellectually, educationally and culturally.
 * Encourages creative and divergent thinking.
 * Bilingual children develop a more analytical orientation to language due to their experience in organising their two language systems and keeping them separate while they perform particular tasks.
 * Enables our learners to communicate across cultures.
 * Encourages cultural cohesiveness through better communication and understanding.
 * Enhances employment and career prospects.

Studies have shown, for example, that children need certain preparatory skills in order to learn to read. These include metalinguistic awareness, which, loosely defined, includes the ability to think about and reflect upon language, its nature and functions, and to use knowledge about language as distinct from the capacity to use the language itself. Learning a second language has been shown to enhance children’s metalinguistic awareness, and thereby their reading readiness.

Cognitive skills transfer readily between languages. While there may be differences in the vocabulary, grammar and writing systems of languages, what all languages with writing systems have in common is that the reader must learn to make meaning from the text. Concepts and strategies involved in this transfer easily from one language to another, for example, ‘scanning, skimming, 'educated' guessing of words, skipping unknown words, reading for meaning, making inferences, monitoring, recognizing the structure of text, using previous learning, using background knowledge about the text’ are strategies used by readers whether the text is in English or Japanese.