MEITS Blog


Education is much more than just going to school and bilingualism is an important part of it

by Thomas H Bak

There is hardly an idea as deeply ingrained and universally shared across academia as the belief in the value of education. Education is a good thing, and the more we can get of it the better. Conversely, lack of education is one of the worst evils. After all, education is our profession, our mission and, to a large extent, our raison d’être.

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Multilingualism: More than words

by Jenny Gibson

Can you be multilingual if you don’t talk at all? The question may sound paradoxical but it is one that I’ve been asked many times in my work as Speech and Language Therapist. Over the years, I’ve encountered numerous people who do not talk or who can understand and use very few words. This includes people who have had a stroke or traumatic brain injury affecting speech and language systems in the brain, as well as those with intellectual disabilities that have affected the language development process from the earliest days of life. Some of these individuals come from backgrounds where multilingualism is the norm and their families are often concerned about choosing the language that can best support communication and the development of new skills.

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Healthy Linguistic Diet

by Thomas H Bak

One of the things that I miss most in the current debates on bilingualism is the lack of interaction between cognitive and social scientists. Both disciplines do important work in this field, but it is very rare that they meet, exchange ideas and discuss their respective findings, let alone develop joint concepts and theories. This is one of the reasons why I was so delighted to be invited by the Directorate-General of Education and Culture at the European Commission for the meeting of the 4th Thematic Panel on Languages and Literacy held last September in Brussels. This meeting as well as the subsequent one in January 2017 – at which I was invited to give a keynote lecture – gave me a chance to interact directly with people coming from very different professional backgrounds, working with different populations and using different methodologies.

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On the effects of bi-/multilingualism

by Mariana Vega-Mendoza

Being part of the MEITS project has provided me with the opportunity to work with a fantastic team of researchers and address the important topic of multilingualism. Taking Europe as an example, it is estimated that over half of the population are able to speak a second language at the conversational level (European Commission, 2012) and this pattern seems to be growing throughout the years. But what are the implications of such trends?

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Early years language assessment: the role for EdTech

by Napoleon Katsos

If a parent is concerned about their child’s physical development, all they need in order to confirm that the child is growing well for their age is a measuring tape and scales. They can then check height and weight against widely available developmental charts. If you are a parent living in the UK, you will remember the little red book given by the NHS at the birth of each child, where being on or around the 50th percentile suggests that a child is just fine for their age.

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Bilingualism and Speech & Language Disorders

by Özge Öztürk

Recent research on bilingualism has shown that learning two or more languages at once, far from being a disadvantage, is associated with multiple benefits, as long as the child has sufficient support to maintain all of his/her languages (Uljarević et al., 2016). The bilingual experience has been associated with higher educational achievement (Multilingual Britain, 2013), improved social use of language (Antoniou & Katsos, in press), and enhanced cognitive flexibility, symbolic representation, and other forms of executive control (Bialystok et al., 2009). These benefits are most likely due to the increased demand required for managing multiple languages on a day-to-day basis.

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