I had never heard of the QTalk method for teaching foreign languages, in this case French. This made the following concept all the more surprising:
Picture symbols stand for French words or groups of words and are not translated in writing at any time. This means that the pupils see a picture, hear the phoneme, i.e. the sound, and thus memorize the French expression visually and auditorily. This process also takes place during language acquisition of the mother tongue in childhood: Image and sound = word as a carrier of meaning.
The similarity with natural language acquisition is very beneficial for children at school and basically omits the intermediate step via the German word.
The consolidation of the “acquired” French sounds takes place in a second step via the learning of the corresponding written image. Here, the symbolic image of the sound in the memory acts as a support for understanding. This results in a back-and-forth learning process that leads to a particularly effective consolidation of vocabulary.
Another very welcome effect of the QTalk method is the immediate need to speak: the material is designed in such a way that the pupils can repeat it very quickly and produce sentences themselves surprisingly quickly. They do this with joy and a great sense of achievement using the flashcards, whether digitally on a laptop or visualizer or analogue in paper form. They can vary the sentences themselves, link the flashcards in different ways and thus experience their own language creation. All constructed sentences make sense and can be inserted into the respective situation. The selection of speaking occasions is accordingly well laid out.
QTalk can be used in a variety of teaching methods: The flashcards can be combined frontally using the visualizer, whether to introduce new vocabulary or create sentence combinations or to teach grammatical content. Pupils can also work on all of this independently on the computer with the help of the online book or games. But QTalk can also be used in lessons without the digital aids. All symbols are available on cards and can be used in different ways in the classroom.
QTalk focuses on speech production from the very first minute. Speaking is at the center and is essential for teaching. Nothing was and is more desirable in French lessons! The routine becomes easy for the students in no time and they draw their motivation from their daily success.
It is particularly pleasing to see how foreign-language children can easily keep up with native German speakers. The German translation is omitted, the picture is the common carrier of the meaning. This is the same for all languages.
In my 20 years as a French teacher, I have never experienced such happy, motivated children and never achieved such fast, confident speaking success!
QTalk gives the children easy-to-learn language tools, makes them aware of the structure of language and encourages them to use it. This in turn gives them the confidence they need for all other areas of foreign language learning (cultural experience, language comparison, etc.).
With QTalk, I got to know an amazing concept for teaching foreign languages, which I think is didactically clever and very user-friendly. It is clear, simple and well-structured whilst not leaving out anything linguistically.
I see QTalk as a great operational supplement to the cultural content of the regular teaching material in the classroom.