Course: Understanding Multilingual Children's Language Development

Before we finish the course, let’s return to Rebecca and Reenaz to hear their suggestions and advice about supporting multilingual children. Review the actions you noted down on the Profile …

You looked at the research base for the key elements of successful multilingual environments in Step 3.8. Here, we list resources and associations that practitioners may find helpful in supporting …

Research has shown1 the importance to language development of creating a nurturing environment for multilingual learners at school, but how can these findings be put into practice in the classroom? …

Mount Pleasant Junior School nurtures a multilingual environment in all sorts of ways, some of which the children talk about here. They tell us about their Bibliotheca before sharing their …

You saw in the previous Step how important language input is during children’s development. The people who are best placed to provide this are the parents. We talked to some …

Welcome to ‘Understanding Multilingual Children’s Language Development’, developed by the University of Reading’s Centre for Literacy and Multilingualism (CeLM) and Institute of Education (IoE). The course has three main sections, …

Welcome to Week 2 of the course. This week we will explore the effect multilingualism has on the mechanisms of language development and we’ll introduce you to the research that’s …

You’ve reached the end of the course. We hope you’ve found it useful and inspiring, and that you feel empowered, ready to take the next step. If you’d like to …

Meet Rebecca Simmons, Speech & Language Therapist in Solent NHS Trust and Reenaz Tarafdar, Year 6 teacher at Mount Pleasant Junior School in Southampton. How does their professional experience of …

Among the many terms used to describe multilingualism, you may have heard ‘EAL’ (English as an additional language) and ‘ESL’ (English as a second language). We won’t use these terms …

Meet a teacher and some of the children from our featured school who introduce themselves and talk about the languages they speak. This Week you’ll be exploring the wide range …

The first part of this article focuses on the UK school system and SLT service delivery. If you work outside the UK, you can compare these facts and figures with …

Listen to Reenaz, Ana, Mandeep, Yusaf and Yumna talk about how and where they use their different languages. They demonstrate how they’d introduce themselves in one of their heritage languages …

Most researchers agree that language is integral to identity as it’s the main domain in which we think, define ourselves and present ourselves to others. A ‘multilingual identity’ is an …

This Week you’ve explored how multilingualism is defined, the varied contexts that multilingual children grow up in, the ways they are supported in the UK education system and how being …