With secondary schools in the UK and the Netherlands closed for the next couple of weeks, let’s have a look at some good ways to encourage the language learning at home. Besides doing the work set by the teachers there are some good ways to just make use of the time at home to give this little extra boost.
The most important point here is motivation. Culturally speaking, it is harder to convince an English teenager for the need to learn another language than a Dutch one. In dutch society it is taken for granted that you learn at least English as a second language, and last year the Dutch came out on top as the best English as a second language speakers in the world. Since English is widely spoken everywhere, British teenagers can get by with English only, so the motivation to learn another language is automatically less high. However, learning another language has many benefits, besides communication. Not only does it help your career prospects, study also shows that reduces the risk to dementia later on in life.
So, how can motivation be found? For one, when teenagers get in touch with other people that speak more than one language, peer pressure helps a lot. Monolingual children that move to another country or go to a bilingual school, learn a second language relatively fast. It does not necessarily become easier for them to learn, but they get the motivation. Not everyone can go to such lengths of course, so I would recommend encouraging children – under suitable supervision – to reach out via video games and play and speak to people from other cultures. Also, check with schools to see if there are any exchange programs organised, and organise holidays abroad, preferably in an environment with few speakers of your native language.
In the meantime, at home, some good resources can be found:
- Watch films/tv in the original version with subtitles.
- Read another language book. Even if you don’t understand much the first 3 books, it helps enormously. Don’t look up every word, just the keywords that keep on coming up, and soldier on. It does amazing things for vocabulary and unconscious picking up of grammar. E-books are a great way to access many foreign reading books.
- There are free apps like DuoLingo.
- For school, BBC bitesize is offering lots of resources
- Podcasts: there are many podcasts available in various languages. For example in Spanish.
If there are any tips out there you would like to share, let us know!
DC