Year-round academic and extracurricular opportunities that encourage cultural exchange between international students, their peers and the wider society are important.
It takes time and sustained effort to learn a language. Students need to find enjoyment to sustain their learning – and that’s how songs can make a difference.
A study of students across Canada between 2004 and 2015 provides an estimate of anxiety symptoms in kindergarteners, and can serve as a baseline for comparing children’s anxiety after COVID-19.
A study of 25 heritage language schools in Edmonton shows how schools met the needs of migrant and front-line workers, resisted racism and built community for immigrants.
Language electives have fewer enrolments compared to other subjects in Australia. New research suggests students are interested in studying languages, but can’t.
This National Indigenous Languages Day, let’s celebrate the community-led initiatives that focus on building capacity and sustainability for future generations.
Contact languages are widely spoken by many First Nations children. These languages must be recognised and valued in the classroom to better meet students’ learning needs.
Teachers wearing wireless microphones that amplify their voices could be one solution to ensuring children can hear — and saving teachers’ voices from strain, particularly in the pandemic.
When schools honour and learn from immigrant parents’ knowledge, they support more opportunities to enhance young children’s linguistic, cultural and social experiences.
There’s no perfect teaching approach guaranteed to prepare student teachers to teach subjects in English in a multilingual environment. But there are things universities can do to prepare them.
Learning a language to speak adequately requires a minimum of around 870 hours. Some Australian states mandate around 1,000 hours through secondary school, but others require less than half that time.
Many migrant parents are hesitant to pass their language accent onto their children. They fear this may lead them to experience discrimination. But speaking two languages has many advantages.
How we teach languages has not evolved much from the traditional grammar-based mode of instruction, and this approach alone marginalizes students’ existing knowledge and communication abilities.
While staying at home during the pandemic, foreign language learners can improve their vocabulary and comprehension by watching films and television shows in the language they are studying.
The conventions used in texting and tweeting are fundamentally altering how people communicate, but many language apps still rely on old-school English-language grammar.