The bilingual texts in this series of booklets can be enjoyed in borh English & Hindi, as young children can fruitfuly use a known language to learn a new one.
Aao Padhein Series
Children are constantly surrounded by adults who are engaged in various activities. A child observes and tries to imitate them as per his ability and understanding of the purpose of the activity. While there are some actions like crying, walking and eating which are instinctive and the child does not need systematic training for doing these, learning language is dependent on various factors such as: - the social interaction of the child with the language-using adults, his/her innate ability to acquire language as claimed by Chomsky and the several instances in day-to-day life which allow him to use language as a medium of communicating his thoughts. This is common for all children irrespective of their socio-economic and linguistic backgrounds.
From the time of birth itself, a child listens to people talking to him/her and generally begins to talk by the time he/she is one year old. But reading and writing ability develops later and varies according to the atmosphere he is living in. If a child is constantly surrounded by people who are literate and who effectively use print in their everyday lives, then it is easier for him to start reading and writing at an early age.
Children generally learn their mother-tongue first and then begin to learn other languages as they interact with people who speak language different from theirs or in school which requires them to learn a widely used language (e.g. Hindi or English). If we are dealing with children whose mother tongue and first language both are Hindi, i.e. those who speak Hindi at home and their medium of instruction is Hindi, need more time to learn English as they do not come across the language so often. The condition is same for the children who speak some other language at home and learn English from the beginning in school. They find it difficult to learn Hindi. For teaching any subject be it language or science, if the text is relevant to the culture and social milieu of the student, it becomes easier for the teacher to explain and for the students to understand.
The CLR books are a great way to start teaching simple and meaningful sentences in both Hindi and English. Although, these books are bilingual, they contain meaningful texts and not just word-to-word translation from one language to another.
The main features of these books are listed below: