I am enjoying this course as acquiring language and develop in the early years I find fascinating. Future Learn is a great online platform where you can share with students and lecturers from around the world. This course is not only looking at mother tongue but how another language is acquired too. It is pertinent to me with my Family Link Up project as Leen who is now 5yrs old has been acquiring and using 4 languages and Celine who will be 3 yrs in March also is using 4 languages.. Arabic, French, Dutch & English.
This TED lecture The Linguistic Genius of Babies gives us some insight in to how Babies are able to pick up on many languages.
Patricia Kuhl shares astonishing findings about how babies learn one language over another -- by listening to the humans around them and "taking statistics" on the sounds they need to know. Clever lab experiments (and brain scans) show how 6-month-old babies use sophisticated reasoning to understand their world.There is a British Council article by Tracey Chapelton that refers to Dr Patricia Kuhl's work How can young children best learn languages
By exposing children to other languages at an early age, you are giving them the opportunity to tap into their natural ability to hear and distinguish the sounds of other languages, and their capacity to make sense of what they are hearing.
Learning another language early allows your child to fully enjoy the way it sounds. Children aren’t afraid to play with languages. They are drawn into the magic of rhymes and songs. They hear and experiment with the beat of a song; they enjoy mimicking the pronunciation of new and strange words; and they play with rhyming words through repetition, even inventing their own examples. By doing these things, your child is listening to the sounds of the language, and inadvertently working on rhythm, stress, intonation and pronunciation.This course is sharpening my awareness and observations around me. It was fun this week as on Thursday I was on the bus sat behind a mother and her son the son would have been around 10yrs old. I could hear them conversing in a mix of Polish and English.. interchanging in short and long bursts. Sometimes son talking to mum in English and she answering in Polish. Then long excited sharing of gardening plans both in English. I had to disturb them to tell them it was fascinating..the mother told me she wanted her son to speak Polish so he could speak with his grandmother back home. I told her about this course {☆lol stars from our teachers} There are more languages they can share as the Polish mum learned German at school and her son is learning French at our school here in UK. He said he enjoyed French as the teacher was French. So my thoughts are he is learning the French from her by immersion!
It is also time to celebrate languages on twitter there is a hashtag celebrating languages #MotherLanguageDay
