Many Languages, Building Connections


Book Description

All infants and toddlers need experiences that nurture, support, and teach their home language and culture. Language is a vital component of early experiences well before the child can say his first word. Many Languages, Building Connections outlines adaptable strategies that caregivers of children younger than the age of three need to feel confident that they know how language develops, how cultural differences can come into play, and how to assess an individual child's situation to provide appropriate support.




Cognate Connections ENGLISH AND FRENCH COGNATES AND SENTENCE EXAMPLES FOR LANGUAGE LEARNERS


Book Description

The language learning process not only enhances individuals' communication skills but also broadens their cognitive, cultural, and social capacities. Each language, with its unique structure, rules, and cultural background, opens a new world to the learner. Although this process can sometimes be complex and challenging, it also offers countless opportunities. Developing effective strategies to overcome the challenges of language learning and to make this process more efficient is of great importance. This book aims to assist you in overcoming the obstacles you might encounter on your language learning journey and in conducting your learning process in a more systematic way. One of the core focuses of the book is to comprehensively examine the role of cognates and similar words in language learning. Cognates are significant tools that facilitate the learning process by leveraging the similarities between the root structures of a language and their counterparts in other languages. These words present familiar structures to learners, thereby making the acquisition of a new language quicker and more effective. The book provides in-depth information on how to learn cognates, how to make this learning permanent, and the contributions of cognates to the language learning process. The section on Cognates and Similar Words discusses the advantages of these words in the language learning process and how they can be used. The similarities in the meaning and structure of cognates reduce the difficulties faced by learners and make the learning process more efficient. This section offers practical information and strategies on how students can effectively learn cognates and how to make this knowledge permanent. Additionally, it details techniques for working with cognates and the best approaches to learning these words. The section on the Impact of Repetition on Learning explores the critical role of repetition in memory and learning processes. Repetition is considered an effective strategy for transferring information into long-term memory. This section comprehensively examines how repetition should be done, which techniques are effective, and the positive effects of repetition on learning. It details the impact of repetition on expanding vocabulary, mastering grammatical structures, and developing overall language skills. The book outlines ways to implement repetition strategies and the benefits of these strategies in the language learning process. The section on Teaching Methods Combining Cognates and Repetition offers practical suggestions on how to make repetition strategies with cognates more effective. This section provides detailed information on how teachers and students can apply repetition with cognates. It also explains how these strategies can be applied through weekly lesson plans and activities for students. The aim is to demonstrate how successful results can be achieved in the language learning process using these methods. The final section, Conclusion and Evaluation, summarizes all the information presented and assesses the role of cognates and repetition in language learning. This section highlights how the methods discussed in the book can be effectively applied and the contributions of these processes to language learning. It also offers suggestions for future research to further improve the language learning process. This book provides comprehensive information on how to effectively use cognates and repetition strategies in the language learning process. It serves as an important resource for language teachers, students, and anyone interested in language learning. We hope that this book will be useful for anyone looking to overcome the challenges of language learning and make the learning process more efficient. We wish for this book to be a guide in your language learning journey and to make your learning process more meaningful and effective. With the methods and strategies presented, we hope to assist you in achieving your language learning goals.




Through the Language Glass


Book Description

A masterpiece of linguistics scholarship, at once erudite and entertaining, confronts the thorny question of how—and whether—culture shapes language and language, culture Linguistics has long shied away from claiming any link between a language and the culture of its speakers: too much simplistic (even bigoted) chatter about the romance of Italian and the goose-stepping orderliness of German has made serious thinkers wary of the entire subject. But now, acclaimed linguist Guy Deutscher has dared to reopen the issue. Can culture influence language—and vice versa? Can different languages lead their speakers to different thoughts? Could our experience of the world depend on whether our language has a word for "blue"? Challenging the consensus that the fundaments of language are hard-wired in our genes and thus universal, Deutscher argues that the answer to all these questions is—yes. In thrilling fashion, he takes us from Homer to Darwin, from Yale to the Amazon, from how to name the rainbow to why Russian water—a "she"—becomes a "he" once you dip a tea bag into her, demonstrating that language does in fact reflect culture in ways that are anything but trivial. Audacious, delightful, and field-changing, Through the Language Glass is a classic of intellectual discovery.




Many Languages, One Classroom


Book Description

The strategies in this book - such as using lists of key words and visual aids to using body language and gestures - are adaptable and easy to put into practice.




Language, Learning, and Disability in the Education of Young Bilingual Children


Book Description

Using an interdisciplinary perspective to discuss the intersection of language development and learning processes, this book summarizes current knowledge and represents the most critical issues regarding early childhood research, policy, and practice related to young bilingual children with disabilities. The book begins with a conceptual framework focusing on the intersection between the fields of early childhood education, bilingual education, and special education. It goes on to review and discuss the role of bilingualism in young children’s development and the experiences of young bilingual children with disabilities in early care and education settings, including issues of eligibility and access to care, instruction, and assessment. The book explores family experiences, teacher preparation, accountability, and policy, ending with recommendations for future research which will inform both policies and practices for the education of young bilingual children with disabilities. This timely volume provides valuable guidance for teachers, administrators, policymakers, and researchers.




Empowering Family-Teacher Partnerships: Building Connections Within Diverse Communities


Book Description

Empowering Family-Teacher Partnerships: Building Connections Within Diverse Communities prepares students to work collaboratively with families and community professionals in support of children's early education and development. Students are invited to develop a personal philosophy of family involvement to guide their work with families and to join a community of learners in relying upon their collective insights and problem-solving skills to address family involvement challenges. The author takes a student-centered approach to delivering substantive information and framing activities, providing: (a) comprehensive coverage of the diversity of family lives represented in classrooms and strategies for working with those families; (b) challenges to family involvement and strategies for addressing them; (c) strategies for communicating effectively with and empowering families, and (d) reflections, activities, tip boxes, and field assignments designed to facilitate students' skills in building positive family-school-community partnerships.




Creating Language


Book Description

A work that reveals the profound links between the evolution, acquisition, and processing of language, and proposes a new integrative framework for the language sciences. Language is a hallmark of the human species; the flexibility and unbounded expressivity of our linguistic abilities is unique in the biological world. In this book, Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater argue that to understand this astonishing phenomenon, we must consider how language is created: moment by moment, in the generation and understanding of individual utterances; year by year, as new language learners acquire language skills; and generation by generation, as languages change, split, and fuse through the processes of cultural evolution. Christiansen and Chater propose a revolutionary new framework for understanding the evolution, acquisition, and processing of language, offering an integrated theory of how language creation is intertwined across these multiple timescales. Christiansen and Chater argue that mainstream generative approaches to language do not provide compelling accounts of language evolution, acquisition, and processing. Their own account draws on important developments from across the language sciences, including statistical natural language processing, learnability theory, computational modeling, and psycholinguistic experiments with children and adults. Christiansen and Chater also consider some of the major implications of their theoretical approach for our understanding of how language works, offering alternative accounts of specific aspects of language, including the structure of the vocabulary, the importance of experience in language processing, and the nature of recursive linguistic structure.




Educating Young Children with Diverse Languages and Cultures


Book Description

This comprehensive textbook prepares early childhood educators to effectively work with and support young children (ages 0-8) with diverse languages, cultures, and learning needs. With a multipurpose, multilevel format, this dynamic resource focuses on the central role of language development and culture in all aspects of learning. Adaptable chapters cover curriculum, family involvement, co-teaching, classroom environment and more, and feature both brief and deeper study versions of the material, alongside a wealth of case examples and implementation strategies. Accompanied by an online instructor’s manual, this ground-breaking text is an ideal resource for students and educators in early childhood and second language education, and all fields that work with young children, and all fields that work with young children.




An Introduction to Discourse Analysis


Book Description

Discourse analysis considers how language, both spoken and written, enacts social and cultural perspectives and identities. Assuming no prior knowledge of linguistics, An Introduction to Discourse Analysis examines the field and presents James Paul Gee’s unique integrated approach which incorporates both a theory of language-in-use and a method of research. An Introduction to Discourse Analysis can be used as a stand-alone textbook or ideally used in conjunction with the practical companion title How to do Discourse Analysis: A Toolkit. Together they provide the complete resource for students studying discourse analysis. Updated throughout, the fourth edition of this seminal textbook also includes two new chapters: ‘What is Discourse?’ to further understanding of the topic, as well as a new concluding section. A new companion website www.routledge.com/cw/gee features a frequently asked questions section, additional tasks to support understanding, a glossary and free access to journal articles by James Paul Gee. Clearly structured and written in a highly accessible style, An Introduction to Discourse Analysis includes perspectives from a variety of approaches and disciplines, including applied linguistics, education, psychology, anthropology and communication to help students and scholars from a range of backgrounds to formulate their own views on discourse and engage in their own discourse analysis. This is an essential textbook for all advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of discourse analysis.




Making Connections


Book Description

Online collaboration can be a powerful means of encouraging language learners to make connections between their local community and people from other cultural backgrounds. In doing so, learners develop their language skills while exploring different attitudes, values and beliefs. The authors of this book draw on 20 years of participation in numerous online intercultural exchanges to offer teachers a down-to-earth guide to finding partners, choosing a platform and designing online exchanges. They share their experience of working with learners to ensure that deep intercultural learning occurs alongside language development. This book offers strategies for mediating conflict with partners and participants, and guidance on the assessment of linguistic and intercultural competences. It is a practical resource for language teachers, informed by the latest research on language teaching and intercultural telecollaborations and situated in the reality of classrooms around the world.