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November 3, 2023
by Mary Pat
Comments Off on Does Your Classroom Feature These 8 Components Of A Positive Classroom Climate for Multilingual Children?

Does Your Classroom Feature These 8 Components Of A Positive Classroom Climate for Multilingual Children?

Last post in this series on how to support multilingual children in settings from day care to preschool to school! This time we are off to Spain where Khalfaoui and colleagues looked at 14 studies to get a handle on what constitutes a positive classroom climate in multicultural early childhood education. When the classroom climate is positive, children benefit: their language development is better as is mathematical skill and behaviour. They describe 8 components divided into two categories. First up are pedagogical practices (for example, planning and carrying out learning activities) and there are 6 of these:

increased instructional time and an emphasis on competences that foster cognitive development i.e. focusing on literacy
teacher-student supportive interactions. Lot of things to consider here!
1. When teachers support and encourage academic tasks, give feedback tailored to each situation and each child, ask for further information, repeat student contributions, and encourage participation from a place of respect and support without using sarcasm, there are fewer conflicts in the classroom and disruptive behaviours decrease.
2. Being close to all students by knowing each child’s name, addressing them with a moderate tone of voice,
3. Caring: when children feel cared for and included (via clear rules that provide security and certainty that their needs and demands are met) by the lead teacher
4. Maintaining high expectations with all students has been found to impact classroom climate in culturally diverse early childhood education settings
Several studies showed that during instructional time things like peer interactions & friendships where open dialogue and respect for speaking time boost relationships among students. Friendships in the classroom contribute to a positive climate by reducing conflicts, increasing student participation, and fostering safe and respectful environments.
Having children actively engaged in activities and tasks is associated with emotional regulation. Successful emotion regulation influences children’s functioning in behavioural, academic, and social domains leading to a positive atmosphere in the classroom.
Teacher-training on emotionally supportive environments was found to translate into more emotionally supportive, trust-based behaviours in their classrooms.
Teacher-family trust-based relationships: This involves, for example, knowing the names of tudents and their families or legal guardians and establishing a cordial relationship with them when they are coming into school and going home. Teachers who have close relationships with students and their families tend to build an atmosphere of respect which can lead to children feeling motivated and excited learn.

Next, they report on structural aspects by which they mean things like class size and the physical classroom. There are two components to consider here:

Group Size: small peer groups with clear rules that foster a safe space allows for more dialogue among the children. Collective moments or dialogues open to the whole class contribute to lower amounts of conflict when children work in smaller groups.
Physical space: materials shared among children e.g. no names on pencils, invites peer-to-peer sharing and favours a positive classroom environment. They call these community materials. Literature that references the cultural diversity of the class is important. Picture books shared by young children in the classroom, children engaging in interactions around the books, creating a supportive literature environment in which children also share their experiences from their diverse social back-grounds. Bilingual books or wordless picture books can be a good addition to your class library. Not all bilingual books are created equal though! Will have a blog post coming soon on this.

So there you have it! 7 posts with 35 research-backed strategies for supporting multilingual children from day care through preschool to primary school! Phew! Which of these do you already do? Which ones would you like to try? Which ones just wouldn’t work in your context? Be sure to head over to the Talk Nua Facebook Page and let me know!

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What I read so you don’t have to:

Khalfaoui, A., García-Carrión, R., & Villardón-Gallego, L, (2021). A Systematic Review of the Literature on Aspects Affecting Positive Classroom Climate in Multicultural Early Childhood Education. Early Childhood Education Journal, 49: 71-81.

November 3, 2023
by Mary Pat
Comments Off on 5 Ways To Support Multilingual Children To Develop The School Language

5 Ways To Support Multilingual Children To Develop The School Language

Langaloo and colleagues in Holland looked at 31 studies of teacher-child interaction with multilingual children and how they compare with teacher-child interactions with monolingual children. Essentially, they conclude that where children have low skill levels in the school language, teachers need to:

support children’s understanding by using non-verbal communication (bearing in mind that there are cultural differences in non-verbal communication). This means natural gestures but you’ll need to make sure that your gestures mean what you intend them to mean!
create consistent, predictable classroom routines that take the stress out of trying to understand what’s going on. Visual schedules are great for this so children can work out the sequence of events for the day without having to rely on language to know what’s coming next.
use the child’s home language in the classroom
avoid downward biases when creating classroom activities for multilingual children so that you don’t create learning and developmental gaps between monolingual and multilingual children. Activities need to be engaging and challenging. They may know the concepts already and the language for them in their home languages and now they’re learning the school language for these concepts. Of course, they will be learning new concepts too.
develop awareness of differences between the majority and home cultures

In my last post, I shared ideas for day care which you can also apply in school. You can read it here.

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What I read so you don’t have to:

Langaloo, A., Lara, M., Deunk, M., Klitzing, N. & Strijbos, JW. (2019). A systematic review of teacher-child interactions with multilingual young children. Review of Educational Research 89(4): 536-568.

November 3, 2023
by Mary Pat
Comments Off on How to support multilingual children in day care

How to support multilingual children in day care

In day-care settings, De Houwer and Pascal (2021) recommend that educators actively value all of the home languages. This doesn’t mean you have to know all of the languages or teach these languages in the day care setting. It does mean showing that you are open to all languages and the cultures associated with them. They suggest the following self-reflection questions:

Do you speak clearly to a child? Keeping your message simple but grammatical and making use of natural gesture, pointing, facial expression to support successful communication.
Do you make use of context and pictures/photos/drawings to teach the child new content/words?
Do you respond supportively to what a child says, in any language?
Do you give the child the time they need to form a sentence or do you speak for them and/or finish their sentences?

Their suggestions for promoting cultural & linguistic well-being include:

Tell children that it’s really great that they can speak English, Kurdish, Russian, etc. because all languages are equal!
Learning the words for “hello” or “good morning” in the children’s home languages to help new children feel welcome when they arrive at child care or preschool. You could learn how to say “thank you” and “good bye” too for when they are going home. “See you tomorrow’ would be lovely too!
Build relationships with the parents and grandparents, maybe through a breakfast event where everyone brings something small to eat and share or through intercultural theme weeks or through a parents’ café. 
An archive with the most important words and picture cards in the languages relevant to the institution can be built up in your setting. In this way, all educators can access it and, if necessary, teach the children new words for already known content more easily. There are some great archives already for example at Omniglot and Transla https://transla-program.org/en/multilingual/
Invite (grand)parents to come to the centre at a certain time and read short stories, sing songs, recite rhymes, or perform dances in one of the languages available in the children’s group and think about making this a regular occurrence.
Design your rooms in such a way that language diversity becomes visible, for example through posters and murals with people from different cultures and with characters from different languages.
Make different languages and cultures tangible through the selection of materials and media, for example, bilingual children’s books as well as songs and music in all of the children’s languages.

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Let’s get talking!

What I read so you don’t have to:

Axelrod Y, Cole MW. ‘The pumpkins are coming…vienen las calabazas…that sounds funny’: Translanguaging practices of young emergent bilinguals. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy. 2018;18(1):129-153. doi:10.1177/1468798418754938

De Houwer, A. & Pascall, M. (2021). Our children and their languages: barriers, needs and opportunities: A proposal for early multilingual education KITA Handbook https://www.kindergartenpaedagogik.de/fachartikel/bildungsbereiche-erziehungsfelder/sprache-fremdsprachen-literacy-kommunikation/unsere-kinder-und-ihre-sprachen-huerden-beduerfnisse-und-chancen/

Gort, M., Pontier, R.W. & Sembiante , S. (2012) Function, Type, and Distribution of Teacher Questions in Dual-Language Preschool Read Alouds, Bilingual Research Journal, 35:3, 258-276, DOI: 10.1080/15235882.2012.734262

Gort, M. & Pontier, R.W. (2013). Exploring bilingual pedagogies in dual language preschool classrooms, Language and Education, 27:3, 223-245, DOI: 10.1080/09500782.2012.697468

Zheng, Z., , Degotardi, S., & Djonov, E. (2021). Supporting multilingual development in early childhood: A scoping review. International Journal of Educational Research 110.

November 3, 2023
by Mary Pat
Comments Off on 4 Ways to More Culturally Sensitive Early Childhood Education

4 Ways to More Culturally Sensitive Early Childhood Education

You know that expression : if you can’t see it, you can’t be it? I think it’s worth thinking about that in relation to our speech and language therapy clinics and in education settings too. I’ve been reading some studies looking at language learning environments and what features can benefit all children. The research shows that positive multilingual language learning environments include giving emotionally and intellectually supportive and personalised feedback, encouraging children’s autonomy, and open dialogue among teachers, children and their peers. If you want to find out more about the ins and outs of praise, you can read this post and try the three praise challenges here.

So how to make your therapy or classroom more culturally sensitive? Here’s what the research suggests:

Value children’s home cultures by encouraging them to share their home languages and cultures in classroom activities and help children express their social identities. This depends on your situation and the children too. Some children don’t want to have this attention drawn to them. You’ll know your children best and how to approach this.
Respect child’s ideas and emotions by allowing the children to co-construct the curriculum by inviting them to contribute information about their interests and inform the design of educational experiences for the classroom. I bet they’ll have some great ideas!
Foster teacher- parent partnership by involving parents as partners in curriculum design and by connecting families who share cultures and home languages. This helps you build reciprocal relationships with families to further support home language learning.
Peer partnership in classroom curriculum which involves teachers pairing children at similar language levels to work together. But you need to be sensitive to dynamics between children here too as children may not want to be singled out because of the home language they speak.

Coming next is a post about what do you when you have lots of children speaking lots of different languages in your classroom.

If you like this post, please share it!

Let’s get talking!

What I read so you don’t have to:

Gort, M. & Pontier, R.W. (2013). Exploring bilingual pedagogies in dual language preschool classrooms, Language and Education, 27:3, 223-245, DOI: 10.1080/09500782.2012.697468

Zheng, Z., , Degotardi, S., & Djonov, E. (2021). Supporting multilingual development in early childhood: A scoping review. International Journal of Educational Research 110.

September 30, 2023
by Mary Pat
Comments Off on 5 Linguistics-Based Ways To Support Multilingual Language Development In Preschool

5 Linguistics-Based Ways To Support Multilingual Language Development In Preschool

I can’t believe it’s been SO long since I posted….life got in the way I’m afraid…too many balls in the air and not enough hands….planning to be back now though. So this is the 3rd post in the series about how early childhood educators can support multilingual children’s language development. These 5 strategies all draw on knowledge of language development and using direct instruction targeting specific linguistic features.

Five things to try are:

Help children understand connections and differences between their languages by talking about the languages and asking the children about their home languages. This all depends on your context as some chiildren might not like the spotlight being on them. Educators could also learn basic vocabulary in each of the languages spoken in their context and make sure that words in the languages are visible in the rooms
Teach vocabulary or other linguistic features using each language to discuss and extend children’s ideas as opposed to just teaching vocabulary through direct instruction. Like the first point, you’re working on metalinguistic knowledge here and building connections between the languages.
Repeating new words and combining them with gestures has been found to be effective for building toddler’s vocabulary so you can remember to use natural gestures to support children’s language comprehension.
Teaching key vocabulary in parallel in each language. Multilingual children need to have strong support for their home language. If you can’t manage this in yoru preschool, you can work together with parents so they can focus on the vocabulary in the home language.
Directly model target pronunciation/grammar by repeating words and sentences correctly after the child. Here’s a very quick video explaining how to do this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptEATK9XIg4

What I read so you don’t have to:

Gort, M. & Pontier, R.W. (2013). Exploring bilingual pedagogies in dual language preschool classrooms, Language and Education, 27:3, 223-245, DOI: 10.1080/09500782.2012.697468

Zheng, Z., , Degotardi, S., & Djonov, E. (2021). Supporting multilingual development in early childhood: A scoping review. International Journal of Educational Research 110.

November 10, 2022
by Mary Pat
Comments Off on 5 Ways To Support Home Languages in Early Childhood Interactions

5 Ways To Support Home Languages in Early Childhood Interactions

Welcome to the second post in the series about how early childhood educators can support multilingual children’s language development, especially the home languages. Remember how Zheng and colleagues in Australia looked at the research to find what works? Last time, you read about translanguaging strategies. The next set of strategies they identified focuses on interaction-promoting strategies. What are they? Well, essentially they aim to stimulate children to use their developing language abilities (in all of their languages) in conversations with others. What does this look like in practice? Here are 5 ways to encourage multilingualism in the early childhood education setting:

You can respond positively when children speak different languages and draw on a range of ways of facilitating communication. For example, Zheng and colleagues found that infant-room teachers repeated words the children said and used baby signs. You don’t have to use baby-signs, you can use natural gestures instead. It’s all about facilitating communication and responding positively to the range of languages the children use.
You can encourage conversation by switching to the child’s preferred or home language where you can.
You can use ‘tandem talk’ practices (Lee et al. 2008). Tandem talk is a type of collaborative bilingual practice where a pair of speakers coordinates the use of two languages so that each person stays in one language (called monolingual discourse strategy). This means two teachers working together with one teacher using one language and the other teacher using the other.
You can use different teaching materials to boost interaction like having children work in pairs to find matching picture cards. This stimulates children’s interactions because they’re working together and talking in their home language while completing the task. Using real objects can also help children understand and make connections between the object and the sequence of sounds that refers to the object. Zheng and colleagues also found that music and songs are also good ways of supporting interaction and nurturing language development in home languages.
You can slow your rate of speech, paraphrase, and adjust vocabulary to provide emergent bilingual children with access to extended conversations in both of their languages.

As you well know, it’s not a one size fits all situation and you’ll know which strategy is a good fit for yours. If you like this post, please pass it on to your friends.

What I read so you don’t have to

Gort, M. & Pontier, R.W. (2013). Exploring bilingual pedagogies in dual language preschool classrooms, Language and Education, 27:3, 223-245, DOI: 10.1080/09500782.2012.697468

Zheng, Z., , Degotardi, S., & Djonov, E. (2021). Supporting multilingual development in early childhood: A scoping review. International Journal of Educational Research 110.

Let’s get talking!

November 1, 2022
by Mary Pat
Comments Off on 9 Ways To Use Translanguaging In Preschool

9 Ways To Use Translanguaging In Preschool

Here is the first of 7 posts about research-backed ideas for supporting multilingual children’s home languages. The community language isn’t in danger. But once multilingual children start pre-school, their precious home languages are in danger of backsliding, plateauing, stagnating, or incomplete acquisition. We’ve got to do what we can to stop that happening! A solid foundation in home languages paves the way for easier and better acquisition of the school language. And home languages are crucial for cultural heritage and family relationships. Need I say more?!!

Zheng & colleagues in Australia identified eighteen studies with details of strategies that teachers used to support home languages in children under age five. Most of the studies were from the US where Spanish and English were the languages so the strategies won’t fit every situation. More research is needed and you need to think about which of the strategies fits with your particular situation. They organised the strategies around four themes and you can read all about the first one in this post. Then I’ll cover the other three in separate posts. Let’s get started!

# 1 Translanguaging Strategies

What’s that? It’s the practice of encouraging children to hear and use their home language alongside the majority language. What would it look like?

Here are 9 strategies that Zheng & colleagues found teachers using:

‘language-by-time-of-day’ i.e. English in the morning, Spanish in the afternoon.
‘one teacher/one language’ approach where teachers opted to speak in one language only.
culturally and linguistically responsive (Spanish-English) bilingual approach where bilingual teachers used both of their languages.
teachers speaking the children’s home languages which means learning at least some words and phrases in the children’s languages.
using code-switching to manage classroom activities, provide curriculum instruction, & direct children’s behaviours. This practice shows children that bilingualism is useful for creating meaning, teachers modelling bilingualism as a resource.
Teachers openly acknowledged the value of using different home languages in the classroom.
Home languages were used in preschool classroom wall signs and were embedded in daily routines, activity materials, and songs.
Teachers used “co-ordinated bilingual performances” during read-aloud activities in a Spanish-English bilingual preschool. In these activities, teachers used both of their languages to meet curriculum targets for children’s vocabulary and narrative skills.
Translation was important to support teachers’ coordinated practices.

Which of these do you do already? Which ones could you incorporate into your pre-school?

If you like this post, please share it with your friends and colleagues!

Let’s get talking,

What I read so you don’t have to:

Gort, M. & Pontier, R.W. (2013). Exploring bilingual pedagogies in dual language preschool classrooms, Language and Education, 27:3, 223-245, DOI: 10.1080/09500782.2012.697468

Zheng, Z., , Degotardi, S., & Djonov, E. (2021). Supporting multilingual development in early childhood: A scoping review. International Journal of Educational Research 110, 101894.

April 30, 2022
by Mary Pat
Comments Off on What’s the story with stuttering & bilingual children?

What’s the story with stuttering & bilingual children?

Key words about the research on this topic? Ambiguous, conflicting, sparse!

I’ve read two systematic reviews that aimed to pull together several studies on the topic & I picked key points from both to keep things simple.

First up is Choo & Smith’s (2020) review that looked at 50 studies about stuttering in bilingual children. Key findings from that review are:

There’s no clear evidence that bilingual children are at an increased risk of stuttering.
More bilingual boys stutter than girls.
Bilingual boys are less likely to recover than bilingual girls.
Onset of stuttering in bilingual girls is earlier than in bilingual boys.
The majority of bilingual children who stutter have a positive family history of stuttering.

Bottom line according to Choo & Smith? The current research offers a fragmented, limited understanding of bilingualism & stuttering & more research is needed.

The second systematic review by Chaudhary and colleagues in 2021 examined 13 studies & mentioned 3 patterns of stuttering in bilingual people:

Stuttering in one language only
Stuttering of equal severity in both languages
Less stuttering in (any) one language

They said that Pattern #3 is the most commonly observed.

What causes the differences? The research reports on things like:

Language proficiency
Language dominance
Linguistic proximity between the languages
Grammatical, phonetic, and syntactic differences between the languages

Key Concepts:

Dominance & Proficiency: these are not the same thing & they’re not straightforward!

Chaudhary & colleages define them like this:

Proficiency means knowledge of the languages in terms of syntax (grammar), vocabulary, and pronunciation of the languages.

Dominance means the relative strength of the proficiency of the languages along with the frequency and usage of the languages.

In their systematic review, Chaudhary & colleagues reported several studies that found more stuttering in the less dominant language, possibly indicating a less well-developed language system as a contributing factor to stuttering in people where one language is stronger than the other.

They reported conflicting results when it comes to the influence of proficiency on variations in stuttering. Some studies found more stuttering behaviours in L2 and others in L1 (where there was a clear L1 & L2).

The purpose of their systematic review was to identify linguistic factors that play a role in stuttering in bilingual people. The main conclusions that they came to are that:

Proficiency and dominance are the major factors that influence the stuttering frequency in bilingual people who stutter but studies differ in terms of how they describe language proficiency and dominance so different studies find different things.
When it comes to structural and functional features of the languages, although it’s common to attribute differences in stuttering behaviours to differences between the person’s languages, the evidence here is ‘whimsical ….. neither data-driven nor empirically proven’.

So while there are lots of gaps in the research, two things are clear:

Speaking two or more languages does not cause stuttering.
Dropping your home languages is not recommended.

Let’s get talking!

What I read so you don’t have to

Chaudhary, C., Maruthy, S. Guddattu, V., & Krishnan, G. (2021). A systematic review on the role of language-related factors in the manifestation of stuttering in bilinguals Journal of Fluency Disorders 68.

Choo AL, Smith S, Bilingual Children Who Stutter: Convergence, Gaps, and Directions for Research (2020) Journal of Fluency Disorders 63.

January 28, 2022
by Mary Pat
Comments Off on 6 tips for children with persistent reading difficulties and dyslexia

6 tips for children with persistent reading difficulties and dyslexia

It’s the last post in our five part series and we are back with 6 tips for children who continue to struggle with reading or who have been assessed and identified as having dyslexia. Phyllis Jordan, Senior Speech & Language Therapist and friend of mine, has the following tips for you:

Keep it functional when it comes to homework. If the class reader is too difficult, let them read a part of it and then you read the rest.
For maths homework, you read out the questions so they can work out the answer and not spend unnecessary energy on the reading.
If they have to answer questions on a paragraph, read the questions aloud to them first. That way they can read the paragraph for the desired meaning with a sense of what is expected of them.
Oral language is the foundation of literacy so keep up the quality conversations about topics of interest, movies, documentaries, experiences that you’ve watched together. Have conversations where they explain how to play a game that they love to you.
Develop typing skills as a way around issues with writing.
Get support from your local dyslexia association who can organise assessments, workshops, trainings for parents and teachers.

We really hope you enjoyed this series and found it useful. If you did, please share with your friends!

Let’s get talking!

MP & Phyllis

January 28, 2022
by Mary Pat
Comments Off on 6 tips for helping children aged 8 and above with their reading

6 tips for helping children aged 8 and above with their reading

Here we are with the 4th post in our series of 5 about helping children with their reading. I’ll hand you over to my friend and SLT colleague Phyllis Jordan who works specifically with children and young people who struggle to read. If reading difficulties persist from age eight and older, she suggests trying the following 6 tips :

Keep practicing at your child’s level of reading and let them choose the books for shared reading with you. Shared reading is where you model the skills of a proficient reader. That means you read to them fluently and with expression as if you were recording your own audio book. Sharing of books like this can help your child access books that they might struggle to read on their own. You can pause to have discussions about what you both think is going to happen next or about what has just happened. You can also discuss if anything similar happened to you or your child in real life.
When you’re doing shared reading and they are reading to you, you can fill in the difficult words for them. This will help with reading rate and reading fluency. It’s not a test.
Audio books can also be helpful. Just make sure that your child has the book in hard copy too so that they can read the text while listening.
Use a Hi-Lo approach. This means books with a high level of interest to your child and age appropriateness and low in terms of the reading demands. The Barrington Stoke website is a good source for English reading. Their books are designed to be super-readable and encouraging for children who are reluctant to read or struggle to read.
Coloured or cream background can make reading easier than black print on white paper.
Encourage slow but accurate reading when they’re practicing phonics skills. This helps them understand better and can help increase their confidence as they experience success. They can increase their rate over time.

In the next and last post in the series, we’re going to share tips for situations where the challenges persist or where your child has dyslexia.

If you like this post, please share with your friends!

Let’s get talking!

MP & Phyllis