Resources for Languages

Fun Chrome experiment where users listen to a word and then type or say to input the letters. Three difficulty levels available.

"Stay organised as a staff or as a class with media rich collaborative virtual sticky notes. Add text images, files, links, Google Documents and more. You can add due dates and see changes being made by others in real-time. Be organised on the go with the Android and iOS apps."

"It is often claimed that people who are bilingual are better than monolinguals at learning languages. Now, the first study to examine bilingual and monolingual brains as they learn an additional language offers new evidence that supports this hypothesis, researchers say. The study, conducted at Georgetown University Medical Center and published in the journal Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, suggests that early bilingualism helps with learning languages later in life."

"Second-grade students who read aloud to dogs in an after-school program demonstrated improved attitudes about reading, according to researchers at Tufts Institute for Human-Animal Interaction at Tufts University. Their research appears online in advance of print in the Early Childhood Education Journal. Reading skills are often associated with improved academic performance and positive attitudes about school in children. Researchers wanted to learn if animal-assisted intervention in the form of reading aloud to dogs in a classroom setting could contribute to improved skills and attitudes."

"Stories are a part of the bedrock of human evolution sharing wisdom, history and cultural values to citizens growing into their society."

"Dyslexia is a learning difficulty which affects the ability to adopt the automatic reflexes needed to read and write. Several studies have sought to identify the source of the problems encountered by individuals with dyslexia when they read. Little attention, however, has been paid to the mechanisms involved in writing. Sonia Kandel, Professor at the GIPSA-Lab of the Université Grenoble Alpes (CNRS/Université Grenoble Alpes/Grenoble INP) and her team [1] decided to look at the purely motor aspects of writing in children diagnosed with dyslexia. Their results show that orthographic processing in children with dyslexia is so laborious that it can modify or impair writing skills, despite the absence of dysgraphia in these children. The findings of this study are published in the November 2017 edition of Cognitive Neuropsychology."

"A 'fill in the blanks' activity to practise irregular verbs in the past tense."

"A handy blank A-Z Dictionary to support pupils learning dictionary skills, or alphabetic order."

"An adaptable introduction to how to write non-chronological reports in the style of a non-chronological report. Includes a check list of features and an example order for reports."

"As I stood in the school hall, during an assembly on National Languages Day, I felt such pride, but equally astonishment at how the children had embraced the task of saying hello in as many languages as possible. I watched in amazement as the 34th child stood up in front of the school to share his knowledge of yet another greeting from a different country. I don't know whether it was the sheer volume of children or their confidence whilst standing in front of the school and speak a different language that struck me most, but whatever it was, made me reflect on how I had come to be in this moment."

"The teaching of grammar has changed completely in a generation. While formal teaching of spelling and punctuation have been a mainstay of the classroom, just a few decades ago there was very little teaching of grammar. Many pupils formally encountered grammar through the study of other languages. Now SPaG takes up a large part of the primary curriculum, but have secondary colleagues noticed a difference? In this session we are discussion how to improve SPaG skills and usage at all levels of schooling and beyond."

"I have always believed that reading has a significant impact on our understanding and appreciation of the world. As both a life-long passionate reader and an experienced English Language Arts teacher, I have witnessed first-hand the impact that reading has on the ability of learners in terms of comprehension, grammar, empathy, confidence, vocabulary and expression. This has however, only ever been phenomenological through informal observations in the classroom, and in an effort to incorporate sustained silent reading (SSR) as a regular, valid and essential practice, I have embarked upon this research in order to determine the impacts that daily reading has on middle-school learners, not only in terms of English Language Arts, but also across the curriculum."

"A superb resource for learning poets at primary schools. Record pupils reading the beautifully illustrated poems and listen back to them."

"This is an interesting grammar resource. It identifies the parts of speech into separate coloured categories."

"你知道这是什么意思吗？No? Languages can both be barriers and be bridges. They can block access to learning and more, but knowing a little of 'the lingo' can open previously impenetrable doors. This doesn't have to be a language from overseas, but a certain way of speaking which includes speakers or potenticially excludes non-speakers from a group. Teaching, with it's SPaGs, NPQHs and RQTs can make us want to LOL or even go AWOL!"

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Book review and teaching resources

"A fab platform for creating your own ebooks. You can even embed images and videos. There is also a huge range of published work from the community. Invite others to comment and even collaborate on your stories."