Theme: The Multilingual Child and Their Multilingual Community
Convenor/s: Fazana Farook
This Special Interest Group will be an opportunity for beginner teachers undertaking their training year to meet once a term to discuss their experiences working with multilingual children and communities, share best practice and network within a language-focused teaching community.
The multilingual child and their multilingual community
In classrooms all over the UK (and indeed all over the world), we find pupils who use more than one language on a daily basis. Some of these pupils are also new to learning in English. In this meeting we will look at how our multilingual pupils acquire and process two or more languages when they are socialising, playing and learning. We will consider how we can gain a better understanding of our pupils’ home language backgrounds and why that is good practice.
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Speaker: Susan Stewart
Susan Stewart has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Linguistics and French from the University of South Africa, a PGCE from the University of Sunderland and an MA in Applied Linguistics and Communications from Birkbeck College, University of London. She has lived and worked in Thailand, the UAE, South Africa, Belgium, Oman, Sweden and the UK, and has raised two bilingual children. Susan speaks, to varying degrees, English, French, German, Afrikaans, Swedish and Arabic and is a lifelong learner of languages. Susan has a particular interest in the area of language policy as a driving force in promoting multilingualism within families, schools and on a national level. She is active in the local community in promoting the use of home languages, delivering regular parent workshops around the joys and challenges of raising multilingual children in monolingual environments.