Today is International Mother Language Day. WebEnglish.se suggests specific activities for this week in order to show respect to all the mother tongues that our students have in our classes. Engaging your students in discussions about each other’s languages can strengthen the group’s oneness, raise the immigrant students’ self-esteem and give everyone a bit of knowledge and understanding of other cultures. Examples of activities that need no preparation before the class:
– Make a poll of how many languages each student can speak.
– Count how many languages you have all together in the classroom.
– Choose a word or sentence that everyone learns in each of the languages.
– Let students with a common mother tongue work in groups and choose something they want to teach the others.
– In case you use Swedish “translations” during the lesson. let your multilingual students give their “translations”, as well.
Link: The benefits of a bilingual brain (5:03) An animated TEDtalk for intermediate students