Year-round academic and extracurricular opportunities that encourage cultural exchange between international students, their peers and the wider society are important.
They are soaking up everything your say.
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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.
Signs of anxiety in kindergarten should not be ignored.
(Pavel Danilyuk/Pexels)
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.
Schools helped connect immigrant children to grandparents and families overseas.
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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.
A stop sign in English, French and Inuktitut, in Iqaluit, Nunavut.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Paul Chiasson
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.
Classroom noise and students’ inability to hear can be a barrier to teaching and learing.
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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.
Moments of intimate playing, learning and teaching are among the ways that
immigrant parents extend and expand their home languages with their children.
(Rajesh Rajput/Unsplash)
When schools honour and learn from immigrant parents’ knowledge, they support more opportunities to enhance young children’s linguistic, cultural and social experiences.
Researchers found that the oldest child in Syrian refugee families has the most responsibility and the lowest English knowledge compared to peers.
(Kilarov Zaneit/Unsplash)
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.
Using a diary in a language setting helps make learning concrete and more immediate.
Danny/Shutterstock
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.
The Cast of Dix pour cent.
Christophe Brachet/Netflix
Watching a foreign film or TV show doesn’t automatically teach you the language – but there are ways to make it stick.
English language teachers should encourage students to draw on their own mother tongues. Here, children participate in learning to help Syrian refugee youths prepare for school at the H.appi Camp in Toronto, July 2016.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young
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.
Streaming services are carrying more foreign-language content. While people are stuck at home because of the pandemic, why not use the time to improve their language skills?
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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.