We Care About Your Privacy
By clicking “Accept all”, you agree to the storing of cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts. View our Privacy Policy.
Fostering each learner's cultural identity, what can you suggest to parents? There is more awareness now than ever before on fostering an understanding of migration, refugees, general diversity and mother languages. There is rightly a tremendous sense of pride from parents over their own culture, which is often enhanced due to their distance from home.
Schools are often hubs of support for multicultural families and have multiple ways to foster learners' identities, languages and cultures within the school community, e.g. International Migrants Day, Refugee Week or Mother Language Day. However, what ideas can be provided for families to support this kind of awareness at home? Share a message about the importance of spending some time helping their child learn more about their cultural identity. For example, you can use the attached resource to support engagement in identity reinforcement.
In cases where you have an absolute beginner to English, an induction-to-English is supportive. Yes, we need to be differentiating for the curriculum content in class too, but let's help our learners with some of the basics in a regular small group or one-to-one supportive English learning session...
The National Learning and Work Institute (2018) completed a randomised controlled trial of a Community-Based English Language intervention aimed at people with very low levels of functional English proficiency. Findings showed “a strong and clear positive impact that attendance on an intensive 11-week Community-Based English Language course has on both English proficiency and social integration for those with relatively low levels of English proficiency.” (Integrated Communities English Language Programme, 2018).
If you have the opportunity to use a bilingual support partner to help families who have learners working from home, it may be useful to prepare a list of questions for this staff member to ask. Bilingual support is extremely useful when making contact with parents who speak little or no English.