How to help your children with their language GCSEs
Friday, 11th September 2009
If your children are studying languages at GCSE they will benefit from any extra help you can give them.
Perhaps the most important thing you can do is help them find opportunities to practise using their languages as often as possible.
If you speak the language(s) their studying, you could help by speaking with them in those languages, and by encouraging them to speak to you. You could also help them with their reading and written work.
For parents who don’t speak the language(s) in question, there are other ways to find opportunities for practice. For example, you might have friends who speak the language, or there might be families in your neighbourhood who do so and who you could get to know. If they have children of the same or a similar age to yours, even better. There might be foreign students at a local college or university who would be willing to help your children with their language(s) too. Of course, you could always take up the language yourself. Evening courses are available throughout the UK and would mean that your child has a ready-made study companion!
There are many language learning resources online, some designed specifically for children doing GCSEs, others for anybody learning languages. You could help you children find such sites and encourage them to visit them regularly. There are many other sites in which could be useful to your children, including online newspapers and magazines, and online radio and TV in the languages they’re studying. There are also sites where you can find pen-pals and language exchange partners which could be useful to your children.
You could ask your children’s school whether they can arrange exchanges with children in other countries, and if they can’t, try to arrange such exchanges yourself. Alternatively, you could encourage your child’s school to arrange a study trip abroad. Sometimes this option can be less daunting than an exchange, especially for children who are less confident. There are many companies that can organise these trips for you, including Cactus. The company is very experienced in arranging this type of trip, and has a wide range of trusted partner schools in a huge range of destinations.
If going abroad with the school isn’t a possibility, spending time in a foreign country as part of a family holiday can be equally as beneficial. Any exposure to the foreign language in its native environment will really help your children to improve their knowledge and understanding of it.
It’s a great idea to find ways to enthuse your children about the language. This might include going to restaurants run by people from the relevant country, which would give your children a taste for the country’s food, and will probably give them a chance to hear the language(s). Another useful and straight-forward way to get some exposure to languages is to watch any foreign films that come out, or even watch English films with foreign language subtitles on DVD.
Tags: children, language learning, language, languages, german, learning, french, spanish
Posted by Simon Ager 2009-09 under Attitudes to Language Learning,
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