Designed with your child’s success in mind, Rosetta Stone is a highly effective way to learn a foreign language when homeschooling, and provide long-term language retention and critical lifelong skills for today’s world.
Whether you’re looking to introduce your child to a new language for the first time, or supplement a language course they’re already taking, Rosetta Stone’s online curriculum can help.
Plus, since Rosetta Stone can be accessed anytime, anywhere, and on any device via its own app, it can easily fit your child’s schedule.
Interested in knowing more about why you should include language learning in your homeschool curriculum, and why Rosetta Stone is the best program for the job? Read on to get the full picture.
Why is language learning important for homeschool?
Learning a new language can be an experience that puts your child’s life on a path full of exciting possibilities. Not only that, but it also expands their thinking and can prime their confidence, which will help them in all of their courses.
Some of the benefits of language learning include:
- Opening up unique career opportunities
- Enhancing problem-solving, listening skills, attention span, and memory
- Improving grades in math and English, as well as on tests such as the SAT
- Deepening travel experiences
- Building connections with other people
Additionally, childhood is the best time to learn a new language. A major study on language learning and age conducted at MIT concluded that children have a natural advantage in learning a second language until age 17 or 18. Starting to learn a new language before age 10 will give your child the best chance of achieving proficiency similar to that of a native speaker.
What makes Rosetta Stone ideal for homeschooling?
There are plenty of ways to learn a language. While freemium learning apps are convenient for casual independent study, many are limited in terms of the languages, levels, and structured learning experience they provide.
Unlike those apps, Rosetta Stone is a fully supported language learning solution, with plenty of features that set it apart from other language programs. More importantly, Rosetta Stone provides language learning that sticks with its unique Dynamic Immersion method.
Immersive learning environment
Rosetta Stone’s Dynamic Immersion method mirrors the way our brains learn our first language. It presents everything in the target language with real-world inspired images and audio from native speakers.
With Rosetta Stone, students learn through context and reasoning as opposed to rote memorization. Instead of reading and remembering lists of grammar rules, they intuitively learn grammar and syntax from native speakers modeling correct usage. As a result, your child can acquire their new language faster and more naturally. And along the way they’ll develop a deeper understanding of why the language works the way it does than they would from more traditional second-language instruction methods.
Many students take a while to get comfortable speaking their new target language. It can be understandably intimidating. But it doesn’t have to be! Rosetta Stone students start speaking from the first word of their first lesson to get them comfortable using their new language right away. Then, the program boosts their confidence by giving quick feedback and celebrating early victories as they happen.
Comprehensive practice
Rosetta Stone engages students in all four domains of language: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Throughout each unit, students learn pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary while practicing each of these domains.
The varied practice in Rosetta Stone helps students develop proficiency in their target language as they progress. Lessons are scaffolded, building upon one another. Students start by learning a single word, then build up to phrases and finally full sentences and conversations.
TruAccent speech recognition engine
Sounding confident and clear is a goal for most language learners. Rosetta Stone’s TruAccent speech recognition engine helps learners do just that. Most speech recognition tools only detect the words the speaker says. By contrast, as your child practices speaking their target language, our TruAccent speech engine gives them instant feedback on their pronunciation based on data we’ve collected from millions of native speakers.
If you’re worried a beginner student will feel too much pressure to be perfect, you can decrease the sensitivity of TruAccent, then increase it as they improve, so they’ll always have an appropriate level of feedback for their skill level.
TruAccent is also one of very few speech engines that can specifically adjust for children’s voices. The child’s speech setting accommodates nonlinear speech patterns, partial words, and other common features of the way children speak.
The confidence that learners can build from the knowledge that their pronunciation is authentic and their communication is clear can go a long way in encouraging their participation in the classroom—and using their language skills in the real world to make real connections.
Stories
Rosetta Stone’s Stories put the concepts your child is learning into context. All of our Stories are written and narrated by native speakers of the target language.
They cover a variety of real-world topics and fictional themes using the vocabulary and concepts from each unit. Some of them are poems, others are short stories, and others are nonfiction passages about historical topics. For very young students, the “child friendly” filter can lead you right to age-appropriate stories.
First, a learner listens to a recording of a native speaker reading the Story. After that, the learner then records themself reading it back out loud. When they’ve finished reading the story, they’ll get helpful feedback on how closely they matched the correct pronunciation.
Rosetta Stone Stories also introduce new vocabulary with context clues. New words are underlined and the learner can simply hover over them to see a picture that demonstrates the word’s meaning. This feature is available on all platforms in all languages except Latin.
Support for 25 languages
With Rosetta Stone, there is no shortage of languages your child can learn. Rosetta Stone contains a comprehensive curriculum for 25 languages for both K-12 and higher education learners, including:
- Arabic
- Chinese (Mandarin)
- Dutch
- English (American)
- English (British)
- Filipino (Tagalog)
- French
- German
- Greek
- Hebrew
- Hindi
- Irish
- Italian
- Japanese
- Korean
- Latin
- Persian (Farsi)
- Polish
- Portuguese (Brazil)
- Russian
- Spanish (Latin America)
- Spanish (Spain)
- Swedish
- Turkish
- Vietnamese
What tools does Rosetta Stone have for homeschool teachers?
Rosetta Stone isn’t just great for learners; it also has features you can use to get more involved with your child’s language journey.
Progress monitoring
One of the major benefits for parents who use Rosetta Stone is the ability to easily monitor your child’s progress using data from reports Rosetta Stone generates. You can see how your child does on each individual activity, and you’ll get a weekly usage report that offers a high-level overview of their progress.
You can track how much time your student is spending using Rosetta Stone, which areas of their target language they are excelling at, and where they need more practice. Using this data, you can build a personalized curriculum to target your child’s learning needs by choosing specific activities.
Learning resources
To help you add even more variety to your child’s language learning, Rosetta Stone offers free resources such as printable image cards, progress trackers, and an activity guide with 20 pages of supplemental projects. If you’re part of a homeschool group with other parents or you homeschool multiple children, these activities are perfect for group work.
Easy placement for different skill levels
If your child already has experience learning a language, or they take an extended break from Rosetta Stone and come back, there’s no need to start at the beginning. You can easily find appropriate material by having them complete four review activities, or one Milestone activity, for each unit. If your child passes, they can proceed to the next unit. If they don’t achieve the minimum passing score, then you know where they should start working.
World language education will prepare your child for a multilingual world, and Rosetta Stone makes it easy to add to your homeschool curriculum. It’s simple enough for kids to start and complete lessons on their own, and its special Dynamic Immersion method gets them to start speaking their new language right away. You don’t have to take our word for it, though. Go to rosettastone.com and try it for yourself. There’s no day like today to start your family’s language learning journey!
