multilingual – Page 2 – ¡Vámonos!
 

Category: multilingual

I’ve just received an email from the British Council Schools Online sharing these two resources (as well as mentioning the benefits of hosting/sharing a native language assistant) for primary language learning.

Our free Sharing lives, sharing languages activity packs are aimed at children aged 7-11 who are new to learning languages. They can be used in the classroom or with your partner school.

Encourage your pupils to greet one another in a different language with our Hello Everyone!activity pack

We heard it in the playground activity pack introduces children to numbers one to six in a different language through the context of playground games.

The activities are very simple and there plans are mostly language agnostic so you can decide on the language to be used dependent on skills or the language of a partner school. I’ll be suggesting to staff at WCPS that they use these activities as part of our whole school project through eLanguages in which each class has a different country on which to focus in the lead up to the World Cup finals in June.

I particularly like the playground games idea. Why not look at sites like  Traditional children’s games from around the world or this site that shares German games or this blog post or this one too. You might find some ideas in this PDF or on TES resources or Streetplay you’re looking for Spanish ideas. And what about these 3 programmes from BBC School Radio with dance based on playground games from around the world?

*This is one of a series of posts about some of my favourite story books for Primary Language Learning*

When my boys were little, one of their favourite books was Moo Baa La la la; in fact, I can still quote it verbatim as I read it so many times! So I was pleased to see that there was Spanish version Muu. Bee. ¡Así fue!

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This simple rhyming book introduces the noises that animals make as well as animal names. I was pleased when I read it that it still (mostly!) rhymes in Spanish and that it features lots of animals that make different noises in Spanish. Or, as it’s come to be put in my classroom

“Animals speak other languages too!”

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When we use this in class, after the initial reading learners want to join in with the animal noises – it is fun after all pretending to be a snorting rhino! – so I pause at the appropriate moment to allow for this before continuing. The final page  also invites the reader/learner to share what they say so can lead into a game of ‘Adivina que animal soy‘; learners take it in turns to pretend to be an animal by making the noise and the rest of the class have to work out which animal they are. This could be done with more ‘control’ by assigning learners animals in advance or giving them a mask. And a (noisy!) follow on activity could be for everyone to be assigned an animal from the story e.g un cerdo, una oveja, una vaca, un pato, un caballo, un perro; and their task is to find the rest of their family by making the animal noise  and listening out for others doing the same.

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As I mentioned above,  “animals speak other languages’ was the conclusion that was reached when we read this book, and when I presented at the ALL North East Spanish Day at Gosforth High School I was given this book which reinforces just that!

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Whilst this isn’t a book in the language that I teach (mostly Spanish) I love sharing this as, to me, language learning is about more than one language. It’s about exploring and making connections, and sparking interest as well as celebrating diversity. This book has the English in the corner, and then one or two ‘featured’ languages on each page  i.e. the ones that animals say in their speech bubbles as well as a section in the opposite corner which shows another three languages.

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And in case you have trouble pronouncing the animal sounds, there is a glossary on the inside covers written “phonetically” to give you some help! My aim in using this book would not be to teach animal noises in 30+ languages but to look at similarities between the different languages, to consider whether we’d know which animal made that noise if we hadn’t got the picture to help us, and why, and to perhaps look at the home languages of learners in the group.

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The idea that animals speak different languages just like humans seems to appeal to children; I wouldn’t be surprised if there were pupils of mine across the world these holidays addressing animals in their ‘native language’ 🙂

And if you want a French book with animal noises – and nice touchy feely patches for stroking ‘if you sit nicely!’ – there’s  Le Réveil de la ferme in which a little sheep dog goes around the farm greeting all his farmyard friends. He introduces them in a pair of rhyming sentences and then says Bonjour ………. before the animal responds with their call in French. At the end, he says goodbye to them all in a double page spread with all the animal calls in French (great as a reference point!)

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I’ve recently started following @singalingo on Twitter and been interested in several links that she has tweeted. This morning she posted the following-

When I checked it out,I was initially disappointed as I thought it was just a catalogue of books with information about where you might buy them. However, when I clicked on one, I discovered that the books are actually scanned onto the site and you can read them online.
Not only that, but you can read them in a number of languages. And as you can see from the title screenshot, you can search by word, age group, type of story, theme, character etc.
For example – the following book The Blue Sky is originally in
English but is available in a number of languages. The information on the book is written in Spanish and it has been contributed by a University in Croatia.

If you click on the book, each page is presented to you – the writing is a little small but on the English books, you can enlarge the text (not sure why it’s only one language that does this!)
By clicking on the top you can choose the language of the book – so you can read the story in English to make sure you know what it’s about and then read in another language with understanding already in place, allowing you to focus on vocabulary and structures.

Most of the books I’ve browsed have several sentences per page so might need some

simplification, but with ‘pupils accessing authentic texts’ one of the Framework objectives, these are a great resource.
And why not use the fact that many of the books are available in a variety of languages to compare and contrast languages. Are there similar words on the pages? Can you ‘recognise’ any words? How would you recognise a verb? A noun? This book features a dog that is called Schnitzel in Italian and English, Pompom in French and Popi in Spanish. why might that be?
I love getting something for nothing! And I do so love books!

Thanks to the BBC Mundo site for this multilingual greetings clip.

Un saludo diferente. La BBC celebra la llegada del 2010 en todas las lenguas en que su Servicio Mundial transmite programas de radio y publica páginas web.

El siguiente es el orden en que aparecen en el video: inglés, persa, uzbeko, swahili, ucraniano, birmano, ruso, bengalí, dari, árabe, portugués, mandarín, francés, cingalés, pashtún, azeri, serbio, hindi, indonesio, nepalí, kirundi, vietnamita, macedonia, somalí, tamil, kirguís, urdu, albanés, turco, cantonés, hausa y español.

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