How can young children best learn languages? The British Council's Tracey Chapelton explains how parents of young children can lay the foundations for success. Children's brains are highly active Your child is unique, but what all children have in common is natural curiosity and an innate ability to learn. Kuhl states that babies and young children are geniuses at acquiring a second language. 'Babies', she says, 'can discriminate all the sounds of all languages... and that's remarkable because you and I can't do that. By exposing children to other languages at an early age, you are giving them the opportunity to tap into their natural ability to hear and distinguish the sounds of other languages, and their capacity to make sense of what they are hearing. Children make language-learning look easy Communication is something that children do to help them achieve something else, and they are blissfully unaware of the enormous amount of learning taking place. Children's emotional environment is important for learning
Early childhood care and education Early childhood, defined as the period from birth to eight years old, is a time of remarkable growth with brain development at its peak. During this stage, children are highly influenced by the environment and the people that surround them. Early childhood care and education (ECCE) is more than preparation for primary school. It aims at the holistic development of a child’s social, emotional, cognitive and physical needs in order to build a solid and broad foundation for lifelong learning and wellbeing. In this way ECCE is one of the best investments a country can make to promote human resource development, gender equality and social cohesion, and to reduce the costs for later remedial programmes.
Does being bilingual make you smarter? Language teacher and researcher Miguel Angel Muñoz explains the latest research on how being bilingual affects your brain, ahead of a British Council seminar in Cardiff on whether learning a foreign language makes you smarter. You can watch the live-streamed seminar on Tuesday, 3 June. More than half the world's population uses two or more languages every day It is hard to estimate the exact number of bilingual people in the world, as there is a lack of reliable statistics . But in 2012, a Eurobarometer survey established that 'just over half of Europeans (54%)' are bilingual, and other studies hypothesise that more than half of the world’s population is bilingual. So what about you? Being bilingual isn't black-and-white To answer that question, first we need to establish what being bilingual means. I, for example, am -- or used to be -- proficient in German, but I have not used my German regularly for a very long time. What are the costs of being bilingual? Don’t worry. 1. 2. 3.
Earlychildhood NEWS - Article Reading Center When we first brought our daughter home from the hospital I was inexperienced. Mother came to help and in her always wise and gentle way said, "Honey, you need to talk to that baby." What wonderful advice! Mother's counsel paid great dividends and I remembered it when our granddaughter was born. As the nurse measured and cleaned and dressed that brand new soul, I talked to her...and she paid attention. She was interested in this talking thing. Kenzie is one year old now, and she is already an expert at communicating her wants and needs. How Do Children Learn Language? Nativist TheoryNativists argue that children have an inborn desire to make sense of the world. Waddington (1957) explains that certain behaviors are learned easily or canalized by members of a species. Noam Chomsky (1972) took the nativist explanation a bit further. When children are born they have the ability to differentiate any sound in any language system (Werker & Lalonde, 1988). What happened? Infants Toddlers Lust, B.
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. Decades of research into bi- and multilingualism has shown that there is no causal relationship between bilingualism and language delay. Myth: Multilinguals should develop literacy in one language first When children are surrounded by multiple languages, they will inevitably have access to multiple literacies. The reality is that children can learn to read and write in multiple languages. Furthermore, once children have gained literacy skills in one language, literacy in the other language comes quite easily. Myth: Multilingualism causes identity problems Bi- or multilingualism was once seen to cause emotional instability, split personalities and even schizophrenia. You can read this article in French.
Ten ways to support your child’s English-learning at home As the British Council opens a new Learning Time with Shaun & Timmy centre in Mexico for two- to six-year-olds, senior teacher Sarah Reid offers some useful tips for supporting your child’s learning at home. More and more parents want their children to learn English from a young age. I often meet parents of children as young as two or three who say that proficiency in speaking English will help their child 'get ahead in a globalised world'. The single most important factor in a child’s success with English is their parents' interest and encouragement, no matter what their child’s age. 1. To build a positive attitude towards learning, and towards English as a language, the best place to start is with yourself. The British Council recently polled 2,000 adults from the UK and found that 40 per cent of them were nervous about speaking in a foreign language when on holiday. 2. Children will naturally learn everything around them without any adult intervention. 3. 4. 5. 6. ‘Thank you’ 7. 8.
How young children learn English as another language By Opal Dunn, educational consultant and author Introduction Young children are natural language acquirers; they are self-motivated to pick up language without conscious learning, unlike adolescents and adults. They have the ability to imitate pronunciation and work out the rules for themselves. Read the notes below about young children learning English as another language. The advantages of beginning early Young children are still using their individual, innate language-learning strategies to acquire their home language and soon find they can also use these strategies to pick up English. Stages in picking up English Spoken language comes naturally before reading and writing. Silent period When babies learn their home language, there is a ‘silent period’, when they look and listen and communicate through facial expression or gestures before they begin to speak. During this time parents should not force children to take part in spoken dialogue by making them repeat words. Understanding
The Power of Evening Routines The word “structure” can evoke less than positive associations. It suggests constraints, which are never a good thing, right? Wrong. As beneficial as routines are for artists and centenarians, they are even more essential for children. Not surprisingly, children from unstructured homes often struggle in school. In order to support families of school-aged children, I surveyed best practices in child development and operationalized them in a two-hour school night routine, which I call “prime-time parenting” (which is also the title of my recent book). 6 p.m. – The Huddle: Check in with your children; spend five to 10 minutes discussing their day and yours, have them take out their homework, guide them in making a list of assignments, and ensure they have the supplies necessary to complete them. 6:30 p.m. – The Dinner Half-Hour: Enjoy a nutritious dinner as a family. 7 p.m. – The Homework Hustle: Sit with your children as they complete their remaining assignments.
How Children Learn to Talk Have you ever wondered how children learn to talk? Many people, when asked that question, respond that they do it by imitating. This is at least partially true. Without imitation, we couldn't account for the fact that children in Texas usually learn Texan English, children in Paris usually learn Parisian French, and not vice versa. At this point some would amend their position to say that children don't imitate others sentence by sentence. At any given point in development, a child's speech more closely resembles the speech of other children at the same stage of development than it does the speech of adults in the child's environment—even if there are not other children around. What do children do as they learn to talk? There is much evidence that children's early sentences result from the use of some sort of rules—and not simply from the haphazard imitation of adult sentences. Imagine that you are in a kitchen with a two-year-old and his mother. Child: Want other one spoon, Daddy. 3.