Speaking a foreign language is such a valuable skill. People who speak more than one language can strive both professionally and personally. This is why children should start learning a language other than their native, in the earliest stages of their childhood. Plus, when they’re younger, they have the power to acquire a language faster and more easily than in the later years.

1.             Memory Games

Memory games are kids’ favorite, especially when played in larger groups. And, they’re brilliant for language learning as well.

Here’s a fun memory game for a group of children in a class or a birthday party:

• everyone sits in a circle
• you decide on a topic e.g. grocery shopping
• the first person to start says: ”I need to buy eggs.”
• the next person repeats this grocery and adds one more ”I need to buy eggs and ice cream.”

This continues around the circle, with everyone adding one grocery item to the list. In case someone is unfamiliar with the vocabulary used, the game can pause for the teacher or parent to explain the meaning.

2.             Picture Storytelling

Kids have a wild imagination. Use it to make language learning productive and fun through picture storytelling.

All you need is a couple of pictures or illustrations to show the kids. Then, ask them to come up with a story behind the pictures.

For instance, give them a portrait of an old man looking at the sky and have them invent his life story. It’s fun, creative, and will boost their language learning process.

They’ll enjoy this writing assignment. Who knows, it might inspire them to become professional writers working for an  online dissertation writing service, like the ones I use to  type my essay.

Memory games are kids’ favorite, especially when played in larger groups. And, they’re brilliant for language learning as well.

3.             Body Numbers

If you’re looking for a simple beginner’s activity for kids, this may be the perfect match. Most kids enjoy activities that are designed for kinesthetic learning.

For this activity, have kids work in small groups of three or four. Go over the numbers you want to learn- first verbally or in writing. Then, start the activity:

• say a number the kids are in the process of learning
• have them shape this number using their bodies
• assign a point to a group that did the best job or was the fastest to succeed

This activity involves physical effort, teamwork, and competitiveness which is everything the kids love. You can do the same with other types of vocabulary, and have them put together a house, a cloud, or a horse!

4.             Touch Game

Touch is an icebreaker game for shy learners who need a bit more time to relax when speaking a foreign language.

The game is simple. The teacher or the activity facilitator gives commands. The command is for the student to find and touch something of a certain characteristic. Here’s a couple of examples:

• Touch something rusty.
• Touch something cold.
• Touch something made of wood.

Students need to look for the nearest object with such characteristics and touch it. Plus, if they’re not sure what the command means, they can look around and see what the others are touching.

This is a truly fun game that kids love playing. All it takes is as many different hats as you can find.

5.             Finding Something in Common

This language learning activity is great for bringing the kids closer together and encouraging them to be friends.

The goal of the game is for the kids to learn about each other. Here’s how it works:

• write down some questions on the blackboard or a piece of paper
• have everyone answer those questions individually, in writing
• have the students walk around the classroom, comparing answers, and finding something in common

The questions can vary from simple like ‘‘What’s your favorite color” to more complex like ‘‘What was your favorite summer vacation?”. It’s great for building writing and speaking skills in kids. They’ll practice simple conversations in the foreign language and even improvise while talking to each other.

6.             The Hat Game

This is a truly fun game that kids love playing. All it takes is as many different hats as you can find. Give each kid one of the hats and ask them to act like the person that’s most likely to be wearing such a hat.

For instance, a student puts on a shabby old winter hat. So, they start acting like an old lady walking slowly on a cold winter day, saying: “Back in my days, winters used to be way worse! “.

Final Thoughts

Learning language through fun games and activities is a great idea. You can teach kids a foreign language using the activities listed above and ensure they’re all participating and enjoying.

Choose your favorite activity and give it a shot today!

About the author: Jessica Fender is a professional writer and educational blogger at Valuablewriters. Jessica enjoys sharing her ideas to make writing and learning fun.

The post How to Teach Kids a Foreign Language with Activities appeared first on Novak Djokovic Foundation.

Speaking a foreign language is such a valuable skill. People who speak more than one language can strive both professionally and personally. This is why children should start learning a language other than their native, in the earliest stages of their childhood. Plus, when they’re younger, they have the power to acquire a language faster and more easily than in the later years.

1.             Memory Games

Memory games are kids’ favorite, especially when played in larger groups. And, they’re brilliant for language learning as well.

Here’s a fun memory game for a group of children in a class or a birthday party:

• everyone sits in a circle
• you decide on a topic e.g. grocery shopping
• the first person to start says: ”I need to buy eggs.”
• the next person repeats this grocery and adds one more ”I need to buy eggs and ice cream.”

This continues around the circle, with everyone adding one grocery item to the list. In case someone is unfamiliar with the vocabulary used, the game can pause for the teacher or parent to explain the meaning.

2.             Picture Storytelling

Kids have a wild imagination. Use it to make language learning productive and fun through picture storytelling.

All you need is a couple of pictures or illustrations to show the kids. Then, ask them to come up with a story behind the pictures.

For instance, give them a portrait of an old man looking at the sky and have them invent his life story. It’s fun, creative, and will boost their language learning process.

They’ll enjoy this writing assignment. Who knows, it might inspire them to become professional writers working for an  online dissertation writing service, like the ones I use to  type my essay.

Memory games are kids’ favorite, especially when played in larger groups. And, they’re brilliant for language learning as well.

3.             Body Numbers

If you’re looking for a simple beginner’s activity for kids, this may be the perfect match. Most kids enjoy activities that are designed for kinesthetic learning.

For this activity, have kids work in small groups of three or four. Go over the numbers you want to learn- first verbally or in writing. Then, start the activity:

• say a number the kids are in the process of learning
• have them shape this number using their bodies
• assign a point to a group that did the best job or was the fastest to succeed

This activity involves physical effort, teamwork, and competitiveness which is everything the kids love. You can do the same with other types of vocabulary, and have them put together a house, a cloud, or a horse!

4.             Touch Game

Touch is an icebreaker game for shy learners who need a bit more time to relax when speaking a foreign language.

The game is simple. The teacher or the activity facilitator gives commands. The command is for the student to find and touch something of a certain characteristic. Here’s a couple of examples:

• Touch something rusty.
• Touch something cold.
• Touch something made of wood.

Students need to look for the nearest object with such characteristics and touch it. Plus, if they’re not sure what the command means, they can look around and see what the others are touching.

This is a truly fun game that kids love playing. All it takes is as many different hats as you can find.

5.             Finding Something in Common

This language learning activity is great for bringing the kids closer together and encouraging them to be friends.

The goal of the game is for the kids to learn about each other. Here’s how it works:

• write down some questions on the blackboard or a piece of paper
• have everyone answer those questions individually, in writing
• have the students walk around the classroom, comparing answers, and finding something in common

The questions can vary from simple like ‘‘What’s your favorite color” to more complex like ‘‘What was your favorite summer vacation?”. It’s great for building writing and speaking skills in kids. They’ll practice simple conversations in the foreign language and even improvise while talking to each other.

6.             The Hat Game

This is a truly fun game that kids love playing. All it takes is as many different hats as you can find. Give each kid one of the hats and ask them to act like the person that’s most likely to be wearing such a hat.

For instance, a student puts on a shabby old winter hat. So, they start acting like an old lady walking slowly on a cold winter day, saying: “Back in my days, winters used to be way worse! “.

Final Thoughts

Learning language through fun games and activities is a great idea. You can teach kids a foreign language using the activities listed above and ensure they’re all participating and enjoying.

Choose your favorite activity and give it a shot today!

About the author: Jessica Fender is a professional writer and educational blogger at Valuablewriters. Jessica enjoys sharing her ideas to make writing and learning fun.

The post How to Teach Kids a Foreign Language with Activities appeared first on Novak Djokovic Foundation.

Exposure to such diversity at a young age may be incredibly beneficial in creating open-minded and diverse youth, but it may also confuse the child and create a lacking sense of identity and belonging. Learning one’s native language, particularly in the early years of childhood, can combat this.

Why Is Learning Native Languages So Important?

[dropcapFor one, in many communities, be it Native American communities in the US or small tribal communities in parts of Africa, native languages are dying at an alarmingly quick rate. The long-term effects of colonization and assimilation have ridden many such communities of their native tongue, and unfortunately socioeconomic circumstances today have not made the task of resurrecting such languages any easier.

There is also the benefit of bilingualism/multilingualism with regards to intellect and academic capacity, particularly for children in the early years of their life. Research has been done surrounding the role bilingualism plays in developing the executive control system of the brain, the section of the brain which monitors and controls multi-tasking, concentration, and the ability to process several different thoughts at once.  The benefits of learning a new language in terms of intellectual development are clearly existing and important, however, what is significant is the personal and communal benefits of learning a native language.

Copyright: Fh Photo

In communities where the culture and native language is endangered, teaching children, who are often more apt at picking up languages, will help protect and restore dying languages. The Native American community, along with other communities around the world that have suffered at the hands of colonialism, continue to face several large hardships. These include unemployment, substance abuse, and mental health problems. A lot of these stem from a loss of identity and culture, things that were shunned for years under suppressive regimes. By teaching children their native tongues, a sense of identity and belonging is being instilled, simultaneously teaching them to accept and be proud of their heritage and upbringing.

The Importance of Language in Native American Communities

With a growing number of Native American language immersion programs in the US, there are two significant benefits emerging regarding 1) an increasing number of Native American language speakers, which aids in saving and restoration of such ancient languages, and 2) it allows many high-risk youth from difficult backgrounds to overcome their socioeconomic circumstances and to excel.

Many children lack interest in their education because they’re missing some degree of personal connection to the things they’re learning. By introducing them to their native language and perhaps even instructing them in their native language, these children find a personal connection with their learning. This connection can harness itself to a greater appreciation for one’s culture and education, and foster a positive relationship with the education system, one that may contradict the negative experiences among minority groups and the education system in the past.

Copyright: AlohaHawaii

Keeping in Touch with Your Roots

Learning your native language also helps connect you to your ancestors and culture in a way that many other things don’t. For immigrants or children of immigrants, it’s increasingly important to keep some form of connection with one’s heritage, to serve as a continuous reminder of the hardships and challenges that had been overcome to sustain the immigrant lifestyle.

Language also helps foster a sense of belonging. Many children may be struggling to fit in to their communities or their schools. They may feel as though they need to abandon their roots and the cultural differences that set them apart from other kids, but it’s important to teach them how important it is to foster diversity, and how valuable culture is to enriching our society. For children who are growing up in a different country than they are ethnically from, it can help them feel more connected to their parents and relatives, those who speak the native language, and it can help them feel as though they have some form of ‘home’. This ‘home’ may not be a physical place, but even having the capacity to think in your native language can serve as a reminder that you’re culturally diverse and always have a ‘home’ to escape to.

Copyright: Yuganov Konstantin

Our native language not only allows us to communicate and connect with one another, but it allows us to understand and appreciate the history of our ancestors and our upbringing. It cultivates an appreciation and understanding that is beyond beneficial for children, especially those from diverse familial backgrounds.

All in all, there are many benefits to learning to speak one’s native language. It may appear to more work than benefit at first, but the rewards of eternalizing a people’s dialect through communication are well worthwhile.

The post The Importance of Children Learning their Native Languages appeared first on Novak Djokovic Foundation.

Ialso know that this is something considered a bit of an oddity amongst us lazy, monolingual Brits. However my fluent French, rusty German and smatterings of Spanish and Dutch are nothing compared to some of my continental friends who speak five languages fluently. Indeed, amongst some of the international families I teach, children have three or four languages by the age of five or six.

Traditional Bulgarian proverb:¹

The more languages you know, the more you are a person

Foreign language learning is back on the agenda again. Since September of this year it has become a statutory requirement from the age of seven in British schools (we still have a long way to go to catch up to many of our European counterparts many of whom introduce two languages in primary school and sometimes up to another one or two at secondary school). Many people (mostly Brits) do ask me what the relevance of foreign language learning is in an age where English has become a lingua franca for business, tourism and politics. I would say that there are several responses to this question: the first being concerned with economics, the second to cognitive development and the third to developing our humanity and broad cultural knowledge.

Firstly, the economic benefits of learning a foreign language

We must recognise that English speaking nations are no longer the same powerhouses of the global economy as they once were. Emerging markets around the world are becoming increasingly dominant, and their languages then take on more importance in conducting deals the world over. Additionally, we are living in an increasingly globalised and fluid employment market where national frontiers are no longer the barriers to employment that they might once have been. Students who are currently studying at school now will not just be competing with their peers for employment from within their own country as they enter the job market, but also with their peers from around the world, many of whom will have an advantage over them of at least one foreign language.

Copyright: Syda Productions

Secondly, the cognitive benefits of learning a foreign language

Research has shown that learning and using a foreign language has enormous benefits for the brain and that the brains of bilingual people even operate differently to single language speakers. The functionality of the brain improves as it has to recognise, negotiate meaning and communicate within different language systems and students have shown higher scores on maths, reading and vocabulary tests. Multitasking and problem solving skills become more adept as multilingual people become adept at switching between different languages. Several studies have consistently linked multilingualism to improved memory as well as delaying the onset of Alzheimer’s and dementia. Multilingual people have been shown to be better at focusing on relevant information and filtering out irrelevant information.² Additionally, learning a foreign language can make you much more aware of your own mother tongue and how to manipulate and apply grammatical and stylistic rules.

Copyright: FamVeld

Thirdly, developing humanity and broad cultural knowledge

I believe that one of the great responsibilities of education is to expand the world view of children in order for them to develop empathy, understanding and an appreciation of difference. There is no better way to do this than through language learning. As the tradition Chinese proverb goes: To learn a language is to have one more window from which to look at the world.³

So now that I have established the reasons why languages are important, now to consider why is it so important to include them in the curriculum for young children? Many give objections such as ‘it’s too confusing’, ‘there isn’t enough time’  ,‘surely they should learn to read and write in their own language first’. However children are the perfect age to learn a language as their young brain is flexible and hard-wired to learning language naturally. Changes in speech muscles and the ear make this much harder from the age of about eight whereas very young children absorb sounds, structures and intonation patterns with ease⁴ and without self-consciousness. I start teaching children from two years old through stories, games and songs and am always impressed with their speed of acquisition, their ability to imitate sounds as well as their confidence at using this new language.

How important do you consider learning a foreign language? Which language would you choose for your children to learn? I would love to know your thoughts and in another blog post soon I will discuss in more detail the ways in which I get children enthused and excited as well as proficient and confident in using foreign languages.

1 http://www.omniglot.com/language/proverbs/language.htm
2 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationopinion/10126883/Why-learn-a-foreign-language-Benefits-of-bilingualism.html
3 http://www.omniglot.com/language/proverbs/language.htm
4 http://www.languagestars.com/program-overview/programs/parents-and-tots/14-programs/curriculum/66-the-benefits-of-learning-language-young.html

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The school I teach in introduces French for its very youngest nursery members at the age of 2 ½. In groups varying from 10-16 children I do two half hour sessions a week combining a mixture of songs, stories and games. It is fascinating to see how quickly the children pick up the new sounds and language and how easily they adapt and accept different ways of communicating. Language and grammatical concepts are just assimilated and their mouths are so much more malleable to the variety of sounds. At a crucial time in their speech and language development, they are the perfect recipients for new language. As proficiency develops in their mother tongue, so too it develops in whichever foreign language they are exposed to. They are learning, quite simply, how to communicate and they are so eager to understand and make themselves understood. Whenever I see the children around the school they greet me in French confidently as if it was the only way to greet me. Simply, the medium of communication with me is French and this is not confined to timetabled class hours.

Sadly, this lack of self-consciousness diminishes with age. Children become more wary of making mistakes, sounding “silly” and start overthinking the grammatical aspects of language learning. They may also feel frustrated that their level of communication is so vastly different from their ability in their native tongue. They often are desperate to communicate at a level they just do not yet have the skills for. Without a doubt, the earlier a child is exposed to a foreign language the better.

Research compared children learning a second language at birth, at age 2-3 years, at age 4-6 years or at age 7-9 years. The children in the study were tested on several aspects of language including the types of words and grammar they learned as well as the sounds they made indicating how closely they sounded like a native speaker. The results do not surprise me. Those who learned one language and then another (so learning a foreign language later); whilst they were able to become quite fluent in the second language they did not exhibit the same degree of mastery or fluency:

“We tested children on the whole landscape of human language – and the earlier they were exposed to a second language, the more masterful they were in each of these areas,” Petitto says. “So later-exposed children can say lots of words in French and Russian, but their second language had a heavy accent and they didn’t have as good grammar. They would immediately be identified as a foreign speaker.”¹

I would say that this research concurs with my own experiential evidence as well as anecdotal evidence from my years of teaching. I began French at the age of two or three and whilst this did not guarantee me fluency, with a lot of hard work and motivation to improve, I have acquired fluency (although not native level). I also took up German at the age of 11 and whilst I reached a decent level in that, I never exhibited the natural fluency that I did with French which ‘came to me’ with much greater ease. Having tried to learn both Spanish and Dutch as an adult, I am acutely aware that my approach to learning is very different from that of a young child who is able to assimilate the language. At the same time I would say that age is no barrier to learning a foreign language. It is possible but more thought has to go into it!

http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/

However there was another interesting aspect to the study which indicated that children learnt the second language better if they picked it up in their families or communities than in a classroom setting.² I would suggest that this would be because children are using the language in a real context and not a removed academic environment. It is also more likely to be using a ‘little and often’ approach which is easier for children to absorb. However, what I would also say is that in using French with my students around the school, I am exhibiting that it can be used outside a set lesson time and used within the school community. It is one step towards breaching the barrier between classroom and community.

So how can parents introduce foreign languages to children if they do not have another language themselves?

• Duel language stories (with audio CD’s). Listen and follow the story together. Sound out the new words together. Use the pictures to help decipher meaning.
• Learn alongside your children. Some language centres offer family classes. Children love teaching their parents and seeing their parents learning too.
• Lots of libraries offer story time in other languages. Go along.
• Listen to French children’s songs together and sing them. It’s amazing how the vocabulary sticks in your mind.
• MOVE! Children learn by doing so try games such as Jacques a dit (Simon Says) to use target vocabulary. Hide pictures around the room and ask children to ‘cherchez’. Add actions to stories and songs to help them understand meaning.
• VD’s. Immerse children with cartoons in the foreign language. It normalises their experience of the language even if a lot of the language is over their heads. My students love T’choupi and Babar (all available on Youtube).
• Include intercultural information too. Children love to learn how other children live around the world, whether it is what they eat for breakfast or what their school is like.

If you want to look for language resources, there are lots out there. Amazon is a great place to start but also www.little-linguist.co.uk has lots of language resources from books and DVDs to course materials and song books. www.mamalisa.com has a great supply of songs and poems from around the globe.

How do you get your children interested in foreign languages and which approaches work for them? How young did your children start a foreign language and have they been able to sustain it? We would love to hear your thoughts.

1 http://www.webmd.com/baby/news/20021104/never-too-early-to-learn-second-tongue
2 http://www.webmd.com/baby/news/20021104/never-too-early-to-learn-second-tongue

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