Modern foreign language teachers – don’t leave those kids alone! Linguistic-cultural “give and take” in an ad-hoc tutoring scheme (original) (raw)
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FORMAZIONE & INSEGNAMENTO. Rivista internazionale di Scienze dell'educazione e della formazione, 2019
Migrant learners in Malta are EU nationals (the vast majority) or non-EU (mostly from Libya, Serbia, Syria, and Pakistan) with little or no ability to speak English or Maltese, and at times with limited, interrupted, or no formal education. Newly arrived students with no proficiency in English or Maltese can attend induction classrooms for a year to acquire communicative competence in the languages of schooling, before being placed in mainstream classrooms where academic instruction is conducted through English and Maltese. Teachers possess varying degrees of reading, writing, and speaking proficiency in both languages. English and Maltese are used in academic and social interactions, but formal academic writing usually takes place in English. In this paper, we give the results of a quantitative survey that examines Maltese teachers' perceptions about their own cultures, the languages they speak, and what they need to carry out effective instruction with their students who come from a variety of countries, with varying L1 language and literacy. I Migrant Learners a Malta provengono da Paesi europei nella maggior parte dei casi e a volte da Paesi non europei come Libia, Serbia, Siria e Pakistan. Possiedono spesso una scarsa capicità di parlare le lingue di scolarizzazione, l'inglese o il maltese e in alcuni casi sono del tutto privi di formazione scolastica. Gli studenti appena arrivati che non parlano le lingue di scolarizzazione hanno la possibilità di frequentare classi di induction per un anno in modo da acquisire le competenze comunicative di base in inglese e in maltese prima di unirsi alle classi mainstream. Gli insegnanti, dall'altro lato, possiedono varie abilità linguistiche in entrambe le lingue. A scuola l'inglese e il maltese vengono usati in misura uguale nel parlato, ma si tende a preferire la lingua inglese nello scritto. In questo contributo, presentiamo i risultati di un questionario distribuito a insegnanti maltesi per cercare di capire come percepiscono la loro cultura, le loro lingue e le loro necessità per insegnare con successo studenti di varie nazionalità.
Include Network Symposium proceedings, 2016
The recent international events have made it acutely necessary to develop active inclusion and social cohesion. One of the ways to achieve such major goals is by helping students from a migrant background discover the national tongue while valueing their own language(s), thus making them become aware of their multilingual competence and develop their language learning strategies. Pluralistic approaches based upon unknown languages (PAUL) sessions can help implement such goals, by confronting students from a " regular " class to languages that are not being taught in the national curriculum, thus creating an artificial multilingual situation. A quasi-experiment was launched in five French year-7 and four year-9 forms, over a full school year. The PAUL sessions took place during the time usually devoted to the teaching of English as a second language, at a rhythm of one per month, and were led by the ESL teachers. Students, in groups of four, were successively confronted to three unknown languages: the first language was Dutch (chosen because of its typological proximity with English) and the second one was Italian (close to French). The last language was Finnish, an agglutinative language that presented no immediate similarity with any language the students knew. The quasi-experiment included, for each language, three successive sessions of metasemantic, metasyntactic and finally metaphonological problem-solving activities. The sessions followed the same model so as to confer a certain systematicity to the regular exercise and to allow the comparison of the results of the group recordings and sheets added to the pre and post-tests.The data were analysed qualitatively and quantitatively in order to explore the impact of the PAUL sessions on the learning strategies and the metalinguistic competence naturally developed by the students. For reasons of brevity, only the general results regarding the learning strategies will be presented in this paper. Involving students from a migrant background in setting up such sessions can be seen as one of the ways to enhance not only their linguistic abilities but also their feeling of inclusion and at last, the social cohesion among learners.
International Journal of Bilingual Education and …, 2002
While bilingual education programmes in European mainstream languages are becoming increasingly popular in France, the bilingualism of migrant children remains overlooked and is believed by many to delay the acquisition of French. An institutionalised language hierarchy lies all too often unchallenged within the French education system and linguistic policies for primary schools, while trying to develop foreign language learning from the earliest age, fail to deal with the question of minority languages. This study presents a language awareness project in a small primary school in the Mulhouse area of Alsace as an example of how languages of unequal status can be placed on an equal footing in a school context, how children can be educated to linguistic and cultural variety and teachers made aware of the linguistic and cultural wealth present in their classes and their community. Finally, we shall argue that language awareness programmes do not have to compete with early foreign language teaching, but can be implemented in a complementary way, to educate children about language, languages and cultures, thus valuing differences as a source of learning, helping to foster tolerance and fight racism and extending teachers' knowledge and understanding of multilingual and multicultural issues.
Roots and Routes: A Book Review of "Language Learning of Adult Migrants in Europe"
Malta Review of educational Research, 2024
Pedagogical Issues," edited by Glenn S. Levine and David Mallows, offers an in-depth examination of language acquisition among adult migrants in Europe. Published by Springer in 2021, this book is part of the Educational Linguistics series and addresses the multifaceted challenges and opportunities that migrants face in learning a new language. The volume integrates theoretical frameworks, empirical research, and practical pedagogical strategies, making it a significant contribution to the field.