We are delighted to announce a new course we have developed at CeLM: ‘Understanding Multilingual Children’s Language Development’ on the FutureLearn platform.
With a large percentage of people in the world speaking more than one language, and schools becoming more and more multilingual, it is essential to understand the value of multilingualism. This new course highlights the research behind multilingual language development and argues for more emphasis on using heritage languages both at school and at home.
Training in supporting multilingual children is not a general requirement in a classroom or clinical setting, which often leads to a lack of support being available. However, multilingualism is an important topic to cover, seeing as knowledge of how young children learn to understand and produce spoken language is key to realising the value of creating rich and diverse multilingual environments for learning. This three-week course provides the skills to support and nurture multilingual children.