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.
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.
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.
Why not teach languages the way we actually use them?
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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.
The number of students studying Mandarin in Australian schools nearly doubled between 2008 and 2015.
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Even if only 130 Australians of non-Chinese heritage can speak Mandarin fluently, there are many more if you count those of Chinese heritage. And a level of fluency is not the only measure of success.
Young people from working class backgrounds in socially deprived areas are far less likely to choose, or have the opportunity, to study languages at secondary school, than their more affluent peers.
Luiz Capitulino,11, and his mom Sheyla Do Vale of Brazil embrace after becoming official Canadians during a citizenship ceremony at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa on Monday, Sept. 25, 2017.
CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick
The language learning approach called “plurilingualism” empowers people to draw on many languages and cultural modes of communicating.
In their early years, children have the ability to accurately produce all sounds of all languages, to mimic a near-perfect accent, which makes it an optimal time for learning a second language.
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Coverage of a new study suggests it’s impossible to become fluent in a foreign language after age ten. But that’s deeply misleading – and not what the study found.
Hosting sporting events to spark an interest in language and culture is known as ‘soft diplomacy’.
EPA/Vassil Donev
There is usually a historical reason why schools teach certain languages. But as new economies emerge, such languages may no longer be the best ones to learn.
Black South African students need fewer excuses and more support from universities.
Kim Ludbrook/EPA
Students from South Africa’s public school system battle to cope with the rigorous demands of any university degree without genuine, committed support.
Learning a language in a classroom is best for early teenagers.
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