Writing Development in Simultaneous and Successive Bilingual Learners Writing is one of the most demanding skills children acquire because it requires thinking, language knowledge, motor skills, and cultural awareness to work together. For multilingual learners, this complexity increases further, as writing develops across languages with different structures, scripts, and conventions. Joan Sedita’s Writing Rope offers
Across the world, multilingual families are navigating rapidly changing linguistic landscapes. Children grow up in multicultural societies, in homes where several languages coexist, and in classrooms that reflect a global mosaic.
When you raise your children away from your homeland, you quickly realize that the task is not only to keep a language alive. For many of us, it is about passing on a whole world of feelings and identity.
Many multilingual children experience a paradox: some may chat fluently in a new language but struggle academically, whilst others may grasp complex academic concepts yet find casual conversations about everyday topics difficult.
This is where four essential concepts – BICS (Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills), CALP (Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency), CUP (Common Underlying Proficiency), and CALS (Core Academic Language Skills) – help us understand multilingual development and learning success.
In this post I address the distinction between simultaneous and successive bilingual emergent readers, providing practical, research-backed strategies for working with both groups.
How to Read Bilingual Books: for Teenagers and Adults Bilingual books offer a unique opportunity for language learners, both teenagers and adults, to enhance their language skills, gain deeper cultural insights, and maintain their heritage language while acquiring a new one. However, reading bilingual books effectively requires more than just skimming through the text. It
In our multilingual language timeline we can discover how many languages we have acquired or learned along the way.
Originally developed as a language awareness exercise in education, the Language Portrait is now increasingly used as a research tool investigating how speakers themselves experience and interpret their heteroglossic practices and repertoires (Busch 2018). It allows a multimodal approach as it combines discursive and presentational forms of symbolization (Langer 1948). By providing a body
Multilingualism is not only good for our brain, our overall flexibility and open mindedness, it is also good for the economy. That countries like the UK with relatively “poor language skills” loses “the equivalent of 3,5% of its GDP every year” for exactly this reason whereas Switzerland, with its four national languages (German, French, Italian
Some international families send their children to international schools, especially if they move frequently this seems to be the best option as the curriculum of international schools is expected to be similar all over the world. Unfortunately this is not the case. There are sometimes major differences even within the same kind of “international” school