A few more myths about speakers of multiple languages. Does multilingualism cause language delays and identity problems?
The British Council's Nayr Ibrahim busts a few more myths about speakers of multiple languages. Myth: Multilingualism causes language delay Raising children bilingually is sometimes believed to cause language delay. Benefits of word repetition to infants: Repeat after me! Parents who repeat words to 7-month-olds have toddlers with larger vocabularies. New research from the University of Maryland and Harvard University suggests that young infants benefit from hearing words repeated by their parents.
With this knowledge, parents may make conscious communication choices that could pay off in their babies' toddler years and beyond. "Parents who repeat words more often to their infants have children with better language skills a year and a half later," said co-author Rochelle Newman, professor and chair of UMD's Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences (HESP). "A lot of recent focus has been on simply talking more to your child -- but how you talk to your child matters.
It isn't just about the number of words. " Newman and co-authors HESP Professor Nan Bernstein Ratner and Harvard Associate Professor of Education Meredith L. "It takes two to tango," said Dr. The researchers believe their findings will be of immediate use to families. Scott Thornbury's blog. Differentiated Instruction: Resource Roundup. Understanding Differentiated Instruction. M is for Mother tongue. In 1906 Maximilian Berlitz wrote, in the preface to his Method for Teaching Modern Languages: “In the Berlitz Method, translation as a means of acquiring a foreign language is entirely abandoned.
From the first lesson, the student hears only the language he is studying.” The reasons for this (at the time) radical departure from established pedagogy included the following: “He who is studying a foreign language by means of translation, neither gets hold of its spirit nor becomes accustomed to think in it; on the contrary, he has a tendency to base all he says upon what he would say in his mother tongue, and he cannot prevent his vernacular [i.e. his L1] from invading the foreign idiom [i.e. the L2].” TeachingEnglish.
David Petrie: Adapting your coursebook. Very often, this happens because what is on the page doesn’t match what the learners want or need, or because what is on the page doesn’t fit with our beliefs as teachers.
Coursebooks and us! I didn’t know much about methods and approaches when I first started so the course book did everything.
However, after teaching for some time, you start making changes to the activities and make them more suitable for your specific context and you finally end up developing your own material from scratch. English Language Teaching Global Blog. Assessment: Lower Stakes, Raise Retention. Assessment is a hot-button issue in today's K-12 education landscape, especially when one places the word "standardized" in front.
But not all tests and exams need raise hackles or blood pressure. Indeed, there is a certain kind of exam that has been shown to increase learning in the classroom without undue dread: low-stakes assessment. Retrieval-Enhanced Learning Henry Roediger III, professor of psychology at Washington University in St. Make It Count: Providing Feedback as Formative Assessment. Providing students with feedback on written work can, at times, feel like a burden.
Dozens (perhaps even hundreds) of papers clutter your desk, and commenting on each is nearly impossible. Still, we know, both from our experiences and from research, that feedback is essential. John Hattie, Professor of Education and Director of the Melbourne Education Research Institute at the University of Melbourne, Australia, believes that feedback must be timely, relevant, and action-oriented. Adapting materials for mixed ability classes. In these cases it’s important to remember that all students will get something out of the class, but not necessarily the same things, and not necessarily what you aim to teach them!
For example, the beginners may begin to get a grasp of your classroom language whilst the stronger students may begin to be able to put a new tense into use. Adapting materials for mixed ability classes can take different forms. One way to adapt materials is to rewrite reading texts and grade the language accordingly for different levels. Hancock McDonald ELT. All things ELT from Cambridge EnglishCambridge Conversations. Using data from the Spoken British National Corpus (BNC), language researcher Sarah Grieves explores the shift in the language of Christmas over the past 20 years, asking the question – is Christmas really getting more commercial?
What does Christmas mean to you? For lots of people, this time of year is about spending time with family, eating lots of delicious food, and waiting for a visit from Santa Claus (or Father Christmas, or St Nick!). But after analysing more than 2 billion words of everyday spoken conversations, and comparing this to data collected in the 1990s, we found that the way we talk about Christmas really does seem to be becoming more commercial. The research indicated that words associated with consumerism have risen considerably; the words sales, spend, shopping and retailers were amongst the most highly associated with Christmas in the language collected in the last ten years.