Newly-arrived pupils who speak English as an additional language (EAL) often make ‘mixed’ linguistic and academic progress during their first years in British schools, which need a proper framework to give them sustained support, a study suggests.
With our Postgraduate Open Day fast-approaching (3 Nov), we introduce five PhD students who are already making waves at Cambridge.
Napoleon Katsos (Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics) discusses why speakers of two dialects may share cognitive advantage with speakers of two languages.
The ability of children to speak any two dialects – two closely related varieties of the same language – may confer the same cognitive advantages as those reported for multilingual children who speak two or more substantially different languages (such as English and French).
Tomas Folke (Department of Psychology) and Julia Ouzia (Anglia Ruskin University) discuss the cognitive disadvantages that may be associated with learning more than one language.
Dr Teresa Parodi (Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics) discusses the linguistic, social and cognitive advantages of speaking more than one language.
Research shows that children who speak more than one language have an advantage over their monolingual playmates when it comes to communication, understanding and social interaction. But the benefits go even further if children can be encouraged to take a formal qualification, such as a GCSE, as this short film describes.
Unconscious learning could be the secret to speeding up learning a second language.
Henriëtte Hendriks, Head of Cambridge’s newly formed Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, explains why linguistics – the scientific study of human language – is central to understanding our highly complex system of communication.
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