Author: paige laevy

When you stroll through South Kensington on a Tuesday morning, you soon notice something. Among the groups of parents waiting after drop-off outside the Lycée Franço Charles de Gaulle, you’ll notice that many of them speak French with an accent or, strangely, none at all. accents from America. baseball caps. occasionally a tote bag from UNC or Duke. It’s not exactly what you’d expect outside of one of London’s most illustrious French institutions, but here they are, an increasing number of American families who have traveled across the ocean to live in Britain and then, somewhat perplexingly to outsiders, have…

Children who lack the words to express their emotions are surrounded by a specific type of silence. For generations, the Saharawi people have lived in the sun-baked refugee camps in the southwest corner of Algeria, where they have spent more than fifty years. inadequate educational system. restricted access to the outside world. And there was no real way for the majority of kids growing up there to get the kind of education that could make a difference. That’s where Sandblast Arts, a small, volunteer-run charity in London, has been quietly doing something worthwhile. Sandblast was established to raise awareness of…

On a Tuesday afternoon, stand in any supermarket line in Peckham, Southall, or Hackney, and you will be surrounded by an amazing sound. Not very loud. Not disorderly. Just layered — phrases that resolve into Somali, then Gujarati, then something that might be Tigrinya or Amharic, then the particular London English of someone who grew up speaking both languages and now speaks neither quite as their parents did. It is quite commonplace. No one says anything about it. In a sense, that’s what makes it so amazing.For longer than most of its citizens realize, London has been the world’s most…

The foreign language curriculum is frequently a selling point when you walk into a prestigious private school in Bethesda or Manhattan. Mandarin from elementary school. immersion in French by the third grade. Parents are spending $30,000 to $40,000 annually in part for the cognitive benefits of bilingualism, which have been repeatedly demonstrated by research to include enhanced executive function, a stronger working memory, and an enhanced capacity to handle conflicting information. Even though those terms aren’t used in the school brochure, the belief is present beneath the waiting lists and enrollment decisions. The conversation is frequently completely different when you…

Every day, without giving it much thought, Coreyanne Russell, a science teacher at Fort Vancouver High School in southwest Washington, witnesses her students accomplish something remarkable. There are more than 35 languages spoken there, and when students who speak the same language end up sitting close to one another, the conversation changes—sometimes within a single sentence. English is influenced by Spanish. Somali to English. The body becomes more relaxed. The tempo quickens. The words sound different, as though something that had been somewhat restrained has been released. Code-switching is the term for what those students are doing, and the workings…

If you ask ChatGPT to describe a traditional wedding, it will almost certainly describe one with white dresses, a church or registry office, speeches at the reception, and a cake cutting. You might receive the same response translated if you ask it in Tagalog. The response will still use a Western ceremony. Anglo-American presumptions will persist. While thinking in the same language as before, the AI will have responded in a different language. This is not a mistake in translation. It is something more structural than that, and an increasing amount of research is now accurately describing it, making the…

Every Tuesday afternoon in an Ottawa government office building, a manager is seated across from a public employee conducting a performance review in French. The manager can communicate in French. Perhaps “approximate” would be a better description. Everything is filtered, including the employee’s career, the nuances of their accomplishments and areas of difficulty, and the things that are difficult to express in your second language and more difficult to hear in someone else’s. No one brings it up. There has always been a filter. Daniel Quan-Watson, a former federal deputy minister who worked in Canada’s senior public service for almost…

Imagine a five-year-old sitting across from a receptionist in a Bradford, Leicester, or Tower Hamlets elementary school. The child has been in an English nursery for less than a year, has spoken Panjabi, Somali, or Sylheti at home since birth, and is currently being evaluated on their language and communication abilities using a standardized tool created for and tested on monolingual English children. The youngster performs worse than their classmates. The gap is noted by the instructor. Why is the most important and challenging question to answer. This question is central to a 2020 policy paper by Kamila Polěenská, Shula…

A three-year-old is sitting on a rug in an English nursery classroom while a story is read aloud. At specific pages, the adult reading stops, gestures to pictures, and asks the child what they anticipate happening next. It might appear to a casual observer to be a peaceful moment before lunch. It is one of the most significant things that could be occurring in that child’s educational life, according to a researcher, and there is now a lot of evidence that explains why. A 4.3-month attainment gap between children from disadvantaged homes and their more fortunate peers already exists before…

Right now, a child, most likely between three and five years old, is switching languages in the middle of a sentence without stopping to consider it. A question in the grandmother’s language, a response in the school’s language, one word in Cebuano, the next in English. Sometimes this is interpreted as confusion by adults who are observing. When linguists watch, they see something completely different: a developing mind performing an incredibly complex task, managing two grammatical systems at once, and developing cognitive flexibility that monolingual children simply do not have the chance to develop in the same way. Over the…