Newcastle University linguistics experts, Professor Michelle Sheehan and Dr Farah Nazir, hosted a fascinating webinar for educators on 27th March about how to celebrate multilingualism in education settings and use linguistics approaches to maximise the benefits of engaging learners in exploring their own and other languages. This was part of the 2023 Express Yourself: North East Festival of Languages, which is co-ordinated by International Newcastle. Their work is part of an ongoing outreach initiative and they also offered the opportunity to participate in a 6-part course in June and July (more details below).
The UK is an incredibly multilingual country. 20% of state school and nursery pupils speak an additional language at home and yet these languages are often invisible in mainstream schools. The interactive discussion included ideas to promote multilingualism in schools and tap into all this linguistic expertise and shared learning about the UK’s and the region’s linguistic diversity and how languages influence each other in the minds of bilinguals. In this event, reporting on their own research and that of other people, Professor Michelle Sheehan and Dr Nazar engaged participants to explore topics such as sound change, grammatical change and codeswitching in multilingual contexts. They demonstrated that the tools of linguistics offer accessible ways to be more inclusive of multilingual pupils in mainstream classrooms and shared some concrete ideas for things that educators can do with multilingual pupils.
- Click here to watch a recording of the event (available until 28th April 2023)
- Click here to download the event presentation, with links to further information and resources
- Get involved with their course – for more information, please sign up here with details of your school (mainstream or supplementary): https://forms.office.com/e/25KM5q0yq5 . The project will take place via Zoom this summer (June/July) and is aimed at year 12 students who are interested in multilingualism.
