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.
Play is a crucial part of language development and ideas for play and games are an essential part of any teacher’s toolkit. One of the most informal and obvious contexts for language development takes place in the playground for any child (Pinter, 2006). Children will often pick up every day language from their peers and this can be an essential part of their learning. Pinter (2006) explains that when a child moves to a new country, after the initial silent phase, children will then start to pick up phrases, conversation language and so-called playground language fairly fast.
Encouraging learners to engage in the language classroom is a persistent challenge faced by many English language teachers. Despite careful planning and engaging activities, learners often remain silent or disengaged during speaking tasks, or make persistent errors. This can stem from a variety of factors, all of which are important for ESOL teachers to consider.
11 fantastic resources to promote elements of international mindedness...