listening to the languages of papua new guinea and questioning the notion of a 'universal grammar'

It's clear that language is a human thing.

But how has language come about? What do languages have in common?

Here are some ideas:

the language of thought hypothesis

learning theory: the poverty of the stimulus

paulo freire and the tabula rasa

steven pinker - and language

The most dominant theory comes from Chomsky:

theories of language learning and teaching: behaviourism vs nativism

chomsky and language acquisition

what makes us human: noam chomsky and human languages

behaviourism >>> krashen... pinker... skinner... chomsky

As Wikipedia summarises:

Universal grammar (UG), in modern linguistics, is the theory of the innate biological component of the language faculty, usually credited to Noam Chomsky. The basic postulate of UG is that there are innate constraints on what the grammar of a possible human language could be. When linguistic stimuli are received in the course of language acquisition, children then adopt specific syntactic rules that conform to UG.[1] The advocates of this theory emphasize and partially rely on the poverty of the stimulus (POS) argument and the existence of some universal properties of natural human languages. However, the latter has not been firmly established.

Other linguists have opposed that notion, arguing that languages are so diverse that the postulated universality is rare.[2] The theory of universal grammar remains a subject of debate among linguists.[3]

And the theory is indeed being debated.

This month, the British Academy Neil and Saras Smith Medal has just been awarded to Professor Nicholas Evans for his long and distinguished career working on endangered languages, both documenting hitherto undescribed languages and exploring the consequences of such data for general linguistic theory.

This is the linguist they can’t shut up: 

Nicholas Evans was wading out to a boat moored in the shallow Gulf of Carpentaria, off the northern coast of Australia, when he felt what he thought was a baby shark nipping at his heels. The “nips” were actually bullets hitting the sea on either side of him. They had exited a rifle wielded by a hungover pilot called Fletcher...

And this is his book, courtesy of the New European/World:

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Words of Wonder: Endangered Languages and What They Tell Us (The Language Library) : Evans, Nicholas: Amazon.co.uk: Books

This is quite revolutionary when it comes to understanding human language, because, through a lifetime of deep listening, Nicholas Evans has reshaped the global study of languages:

Evans’ work has made a significant impact beyond academia – interpreting for Native Title cases and cultural heritage documentation, developing writing systems for previously unwritten languages, and helping revitalise endangered languages.

Evans is currently teaching in Garrthalala, Northeastern Arnhem Land at a new ‘bush uni’ initiative aimed at bridging the path to university studies for Yolŋu Matha-speaking students. He will return to Canberra next month to continue exploring how languages shape – and are shaped – by the ways humans think, feel, and imagine.

It’s a reminder that every language reveals a unique act of human imagination, and a testament to a lifetime spent listening deeply to the many voices of our world.

Interestingly, Chomsky was the first to receive the British Academy prize - as reported by the Observer this weekend on Cracking the code of Papua New Guinea’s undocumented languages:

The first winner of that medal, in 2014, was Noam Chomsky. Chomsky famously emphasised the commonalities across languages, the universal template or grammar that a baby is born with, that allows it to pick up any natural language with minimal prompting.

Evans thinks the Chomskyans are looking through the wrong end of the telescope, and that what defines language is its staggering diversity – the vast span of “engineering solutions” that evolution has found to the problem of human communication.

A language must allow a person to express any idea to another person, but it also has to be learnable by babies. These two constraints drive language evolution, but what nobody yet knows is where the limits of the possible lie. How big is the language design space? Or, to put it another way, how complex or expressive of the minutiae of human experience can a language become, before it becomes unlearnable?

The reason nobody knows this is because it is thought that only about 10% of the estimated 7,000 living languages are well documented. Since 90% of those languages are also endangered, with many of the unwritten ones being at the greatest risk of extinction, Evans has long argued for the need to record them.

The linguists who take on that painstaking task are constantly reminded of the ocean of diversity on whose shore they stand. “Almost every new language that comes under the microscope reveals unanticipated new features,” Evans and fellow linguist Stephen Levinson, then director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, wrote in a landmark 2009 paper questioning the mainstream Chomskyan view.

There is another reason why Evans considers documentation so vital. Language infuses everything we do, so studying it is, he says, “mainlining into the human experience” – past and present.

This is the research by Nicholas Evans and Stephen C. Levinson from 2009: With diversity in mind: Freeing the language sciences from Universal Grammar | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | Cambridge Core

The Evans-Levinson work is quite fundamental to what makes us human:

Linguistic diversity then becomes the crucial datum for cognitive science: we are the only species with a communication system that is fundamentally variable at all levels. Recognizing the true extent of structural diversity in human language opens up exciting new research directions for cognitive scientists, offering thousands of different natural experiments given by different languages, with new opportunities for dialogue with biological paradigms concerned with change and diversity, and confronting us with the extraordinary plasticity of the highest human skills.

Others have followed this up, looking at the myth of language universals and the myth of universal grammar:

It has been widely argued that an innate Universal Grammar (UG) must be postulated to explain two key observations: first, that languages share putatively “universal” patterns, which appear arbitrary from a functional, communicative point of view; and second, that children acquire language so readily from an apparently impoverished linguistic input (the “poverty of the stimulus” argument). The second point has been the subject of considerable recent interest, with many theorists arguing that linguistic input is richer than has previously been suspected (e.g., Pullum & Scholz 2002; Reali & Christiansen 2005) or that modern learning methods are richer than is often presumed (e.g., Chater & Vita´nyi 2007; Harman & Kulkarni 2007). The first argument, based on language universals, has gone relatively unchallenged in the cognitive science literature– but no longer. Evans & Levinson (E&L) provide powerful evidence that language universals are myth rather than reality, and hence, that this line of defense of UG is swept aside. It remains to be explained, though, how languages came to display such stunning diversity, and this is where research on language evolution may offer some insight.

Finally, another [Vyvyan] Evans has written a more accessible book challenging The Language Myth - but it was really not liked by the academic establishment:

In 2016, Language, the flagship academic journal of the Linguistic Society of America published a series of "Alternative (Re)views"[12] by six leading linguists, all addressing The Language Myth. Evans was originally invited to contribute a response to those articles. However, his submission was rejected by the journal's review editor.[13] Evans wrote an open-letter to the linguistics community claiming that he was being censored.[14]

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the cosmopolitan, the multilingual, the multicultural: we are all citizens of somewhere

CITIZENS OF SOMEWHERE

The former UK prime minister Theresa May made a conference speech back in 2016, where she said:

if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word ‘citizenship’ means. [see the Video]

But others would disagree.

In the annual set of Reith Lectures on the BBC, Prof Appia said: 'Mrs May, we are all citizens of the world,':

Real cosmopolitanism is not a privilege; it is an obligation. It does not belong to the rarefied circles of some frequent-flyer upper class.It belongs to anyone who cares about global justice, about the environment, about the alleviation of strife and carnage beyond our immediate national borders.

A disease that starts, unnoticed, in an African forest can devastate a Manchester family; CO2 emissions from India can derange the weather around the Gulf Stream; an ideological pathology that incubates in schools halfway around the world can bring down jets and skyscrapers.

We can be tempted to imagine - like children who think they can hide by closing their eyes - that our human concerns can stop neatly at the border, with a wider world kept forever at bay. But that is the unaffordable luxury.

If cosmopolitanism involves a simple recognition that our lives are interrelated in ways that transcend boundaries and that our human concerns must, too, it has brute reality on its side. A citizen of the world? Better believe it.

But where do the prime minister's ideas come from? Here we look at How Theresa May Understands People as 'Somewheres' and 'Anywheres':

One of these commentators is David Goodhart, whose book, The Road to Somewhere, ... manages to state the intellectual case for Mayism in a very concise way. The book’s central distinction – repeated ad nauseam throughout – is cleaved through the middle of the UK population. It is between “Anywheres”, who make up roughly 25 percent of the population, and “Somewheres”, who make up about 50 percent (the rest are “Inbetweeners”, although we’re never told very much about them).

The Anywheres are the hated metropolitan elitists of the Mayist narrative: high-achievers whose worldview values “autonomy, mobility and novelty”, placing a much lower value on “group identity, tradition and national social contracts”. They are comfortable with immigration, pro-international development and have progressive views about minority rights. Typically, they have what Goodhart calls “portable, achieved” identities – which means they’ve left the area they grew up in to attend a residential university and now live in London, or “even abroad”. The Anywhere worldview encompasses a broad swathe of educated society from “polished business executives to radical academics”.

Somewheres, by contrast, are the real bloody people of the UK. “Socially conservative and communitarian by instinct,” they have “rooted, ascribed” identities based on “group belonging and particular places”. They feel “uncomfortable about many aspects of cultural and economic change – such as mass immigration… the reduced status of non-graduate employment and more fluid gender roles”... 

Goodhart’s central distinction is bogus. Somewheres are supposed to be authentic, rooted in space and place; Anywheres, meanwhile, are inauthentic elites who have abandoned their roots to pursue personal success.

This doesn’t work for at least two reasons. On the one hand, Goodhart struggles throughout with the fact that – far from being placeless – Anywhere identity is in fact associated with one very specific place: London, which has a distinct culture of its own. On the other, it is conveniently forgetful of the very real financial struggles that young Anywheres in particular often face: leaving your hometown and moving to London is hardly any guarantee of great wealth...

Jonathan Freedland also doesn't like the easy divisions in his look at The Road to Somewhere by David Goodhart

First, in his sympathy for Somewheres he caricatures Anywheres. Too easily does his category – which, by his measure, should include between 8 million and 10 million people – collapse into an upmarket version of the hated “metropolitan liberal elite”. He makes the same mistake as Theresa May did when she declared last year: “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.” This is to assume that those who look outward are automatically disconnected from the people around them. But a visit to even the much derided, ultra-remain districts of, say, north London would show areas that are still genuine communities, right down to their neighbourhood street parties for the Queen’s 90th birthday. Anywheres come from somewhere too...

Where Goodhart goes wrong above all is on Britain’s ethnic and religious minorities. Even though he concedes that these groups can exhibit Somewhere-ish attitudes – prioritising stable families, for example – he frames them throughout as the cloud on the Somewheres’ horizon, the blot that has darkened the Somewheres’ previously sunny landscape. It is their arrival that has changed Britain beyond recognition, their presence that has to be dealt with.

Perhaps my own experience as a member of Britain’s Jewish community has skewed my perspective, but I’d suggest that the very qualities Goodhart most admires among the Somewheres – including neighbourliness, trust and a sense of shared destiny – are to be found in Britain’s minorities. They have not caused the social fragmentation he laments: globalisation, automation and a thousand other shifts bear more blame than they do. If anything, and especially in the cities, they point to a remedy for those Anywheres Goodhart believes have become unmoored. Minorities might be more of a model than a threat, more to be emulated than to be feared.

Even if that is asking too much, surely the task now is not to look back to the time when homogeneity made a cohesive society easy, but to ask how today’s heterogeneous society might be made more cohesive, despite the difficulties. Goodhart is right that people are more inclined to share with those they regard as their fellows: so the challenge is to make all citizens, including the newer ones, appear to each other as fellows.

COSMOPOLITAN, MULTILINGUAL, MULTICULTURAL PLACES

Firstly, a good question on Reddit: What are/were a few traditionally multilingual towns/cities around the world? : r/linguistics

HOIMA:

As for the most multilingual/cultural continent, it is Africa that is so linguistically diverse:

A study conducted by Shigeki Kaji of Kyoto University in 2013, centred on inhabitants of the Ugandan town of Hoima, found that the average inhabitant knows 4.34 languages. Interestingly, Uganda has no lingua franca, i.e. no common language used by speakers with different native languages. The average Ugandan therefore has to employ multiple languages during the course of daily life, depending on where he is and to whom he is speaking.

Such multilingualism is impressive, particularly when one considers that we are not talking about language scholars, but about average citizens just going about their business and flicking effortlessly between four or more languages.

WREXHAM:

We can consider Wales as Britain’s hidden corner of bilingualism:

Tucked away in the corner of the UK, one of the world’s most monolingual countries, you’ll find a beacon of bilingualism for the rest of the world: Wales. Out of the four home nations that make up the United Kingdom, Wales has led the way in its efforts to revive and promote the Welsh language, and has set a precedent for other countries all over the world. What makes this more impressive, is that it has managed to do so while living side-by-side with global giant English.

And Wrexham has been chosen as a bilingual town to promote the Welsh language...

SARAJEVO:

Today, there is life beyond war in Bosnia’s capital Sarajevo 30 years on. And despite all the attempts at ethnic cleansing, multicultural Sarajevo is the most diverse city in Europe.

CHERNIVTSI:

In his book Borderlines: A History of Europe in 29 Borders by Lewis Baston, the author walks us across these European borders and shares their stories. The book is named 'one of the most engaging and fascinating histories of Europe I've read for years' in a review by Dominick Sandbrook, the history podcaster.

Lewis Baston finishes his book by looking at Chernivtsi - "Secret Capital of Europe."

Deutsche Welle takes us to the undiscovered charm of Chernivtsi in a nice little video and there are many webpages looking at this town in the borderlands of Ukraine/Romania/Hungary/Slovakia/Poland, this place on the Brink: The forsaken Paradise , or this Little Vienna of the East.

Here's a very touching piece on coming across the book by someone whose grandparents lived there: Crying in bookstores, thinking of borders. And they finish:

Today, I teared up in a bookstore. Today, I bought a book because the first two paragraphs of its final chapter made me feel like crying. I picked it up and leafed through it to kill time, and because the title, Borderlines, caught my eye. I picked it up with some cynicism, wondering what this book might have to teach me about borders. I went to the last chapter, ‘The secret capital of Europe (Ukraine/ Romania)’ because I was curious what this book had to say about a border that tore hearts in half in my family. I read the first paragraph and I felt like crying.

Cernăuți (Chernivtsi) was my paternal grandparents’ birthplace, a home they fled under duress as young people, and where they never returned. A childhood home my grandmother spoke of often, when I went to visit her in the summers. These few lines, read by chance today, seemed to echo her words. Her voice, and not the writer’s, filled the page under my eyes.

Thus it was that, picking up a book at random in a listless moment, I found myself fighting back tears in a little bookshop in a quiet seaside town more than 1,400 miles away from where my grandparents started their lives’ journeys.

I am tired of tyranny, greed, and borders seared with violence, borders that shift with the desires and interests of small-minded men.

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generation alpha in the esl/esol/tefl classroom

Do we know what the Generation Alpha is all about?

We need to look out for the Gen Alpha Characteristics To Know For 2025:

They’re still in school, but don’t be fooled - Gen Alpha are already steering spending decisions, redefining what fun looks like, and making their presence felt across screens, stores, and society.

Born from 2010 onwards, they’re the world’s youngest generation, but they’ve got plenty to say. And thanks to over 20,000 kids across 18 global markets telling us exactly what’s on their minds, we’ve got a front-row seat to what they think, feel, and do.

But first we need to ask Generation Alpha: What Is It? Is It Real?

And then we can look at: What do Gen Z and Generation Alpha want from their education and beyond?

The E L Gazette tells us about Generation Alpha in the Classroom: New Approaches to Learning - looking at a new book just out:

Firstly, a few questions. Over their careers, how many generations of learners and their various attributes are language teachers expected to be able to understand and react to? How, when and why did Generation Z expire? Lastly, how is Generation Alpha (GA) different to the previous ones? These were just a few of my thoughts before I opened this title.

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how to write digital materials using ai for the english-language classroom

Twenty years ago, it was all about 'what are we going to do with the internet' as teachers?!

Using the internet 2 | TeachingEnglish | British Council

It then moved onto 'what are we going to do with digital'?

Teach with digital – using digital tools to improve writing - YouTube

And now it's all about 'what are we going to do with AI'?!

How to Create Quality English Materials for Teaching Online Using Generative AI

The latest E L Gazette looks at the issues:

Fabio Cerpelloni sits down with Billie Jago, a writer and teacher trainer specialising in digital learning materials and assessment resources.

From classroom to content: A teacher’s guide to materials writing - E L Gazette

And there are lots of materials online to help us create our own materials online:

AI in education: how to use AI tools in your classroom

An introduction to the use of generative AI tools in teaching | Centre for Teaching and Learning

5 AI Tools That Will Save You 10+ Hours a Week as a Teacher - YouTube

Using AI in Teaching - Tools for Course Creation - YouTube

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conspirituality

Some five years ago, we had a lot of things coming together: Covid conspiracy theories, and a proliferation of mis/disinformation and fake news.

We even saw the creation of a lunatic fringe in a sleepy ye Olde England...

This is a reflection of what is seen as the disturbing phenomenon known as Conspirituality:

a portmanteau neologism describing the overlap of conspiracy theories with spirituality, typically of New Age varieties

From the Journal of Contemporary Religion from 2011: 

It offers a broad politico-spiritual philosophy based on two core convictions, the first traditional to conspiracy theory, the second rooted in the New Age: 1) a secret group covertly controls, or is trying to control, the political and social order, and 2) humanity is undergoing a "paradigm shift" in consciousness. Proponents believe that the best strategy for dealing with the threat of a totalitarian "new world order" is to act in accordance with an awakened "new paradigm" worldview.[4]

There's a website with regular podcasts and blog pieces devoted to looking at conspirituality:

Investigating the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.

And it's a book:

Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat (Audio Download): Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, Julian Walker, Matthew Remski, PublicAffairs: Amazon.co.uk: Audible Books & Originals

It asks questions, as in this interview in Rolling Stone magazine: What is Conspirituality? Here's How Wellness World Got Red-Pilled

Why Are So Many Popular Wellness Influencers Red-Pilled?

Derek Beres, co-author of 'Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracies Became a Health Threat,' talks the rise of misinfo in self-help spaces

EJ Dickson - June 13, 2023

A few years ago, around the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, there was a perplexing shift in the wellness space. Yoga teachers, holistic healers, crystal sellers — people who had never posted anything remotely political, seemed, all of a sudden, to start posting about the dangers of 5G radiation, surgical masks, blood-drinking pedophiles, and “gender ideology.” And while a few major influencers in the space spoke out against this trend, it seemed as if more and more wellness figures were getting red-pilled by the day. 

This was the seed for the creation of Conspirituality, a podcast by Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, and Julian Walker about the intersection of the wellness space and (largely, right-wing) conspiracy theories. All three had a vested interest in investigating this topic: both Beres and Walker were involved in the yoga community for decades, while Remski was involved in several self-help groups that he later referred to as “cults.” And with the rise of the pandemic, with everyone and their mother seemingly posting baseless claims about Wayfair sex trafficking children and Covid vaccines killing young people, it was an opportune time for them to launch a podcast calling them out. (Editor’s note: the author of this article appeared on an episode of the Conspirituality podcast to discuss natural childbirth influencers.) 

Now, Beres, Remski, and Walker have coauthored a book: Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat, which documents the modern-day rise of wellness gurus and misinformation peddlers like Kelly Brogan and JP Sears while probing the age-old racist roots of practices like contemporary yoga. Rolling Stone caught up with Beres to discuss celebrity influencers (and who he finds the scariest), Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s run for office, and Oprah’s surprising role in the misinfo space. 

What is Conspirituality? Here's How Wellness World Got Red-Pilled

And finally, concern is going mainstream, with this recent piece in the New World/European magazine on the sick age of conspirituality:

The sick age of conspirituality

Egged on by Trump and RFK Jr, a deadly blend of conspiracy theory and wellness woo-woo is going mainstream

Matthew d’Ancona 1 October 2025

Two crazy old guys talking nonsense about public health policy – right? Well, yes. Last week, Donald Trump, flanked by his health and human services secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, declared that pregnant women who take Tylenol (paracetamol) increase the vulnerability of their babies to autism: a lie.

The president claimed that the Amish, many of whom shun modern medications and vaccines, “have no autism”: another lie...

The sick age of conspirituality - The New World

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the addiction economy

Some questions about how we behave:

Should we ban smoking? And should we allow the use of opium for personal recreation?

Are we too trusting of the promises of technology? Are we aware of the creepy ways video games are trying to get us addicted?

Is diet or exercise better for us - and especially for children?

This is the 'addiction economy' - as featured in the New World/European:

Everyone is addicted to everything

Big tech is using the ‘nanny state’ arguments pioneered by the tobacco and alcohol industries to convince us that their freedom to sell equates to our freedom to choose. The opposite is true

Joe Woof - 8 October 2025

Where does your brain go when you see an obese person eating a pastry in public? Or a drunk friend making a fool of themselves and passing out, yet again, at a party? What about the smokers on their drips outside the hospital, still lighting up? Or the person who gambled away their savings, lost family, job, self-esteem, and yet carries on in the hope of winning it back? Or the depressed, anxious young person who spends hours on their phone looking at who knows what and doesn’t seem to see the connection?

Everyone is addicted to everything - The New World

…

Hilary Sutcliffe and Joe Woof are the co-leads of The Addiction Economy initiative.

This initiative is not about heroin addicts in doorways or ‘the war on drugs’.  It’s about how and why mainstream addictive products have been allowed to flourish for the benefit of companies at the expense of the rest of us. And how to stop them. The Addiction Economy describes those industries who knowingly and unashamedly erode our ability to control our usage of their products beyond the point at which it harms us.

Our White Paper exploring the 5 Drivers of the Addiction Economy draws cross-sectoral lessons and we explore how they play out in 9 industries: 4 physical - unhealthy and ultra-processed foods, cigarettes, alcohol and vapes and 5 digital, social media, gambling, pornography, computer games and chatbots .

We also explore how the widespread focus on the lack of will power of individuals derails policy action and hampers effective unaddiction strategies.

The Addiction Economy

It's very much about how children are targetted:

“Just Say No’ isn’t working. Do we need a new approach to teaching about addictive products in schools? YES! — The Addiction Economy

And others have been looking at this phenomenon too:

Addiction Economy | No Mercy / No Malice

The Economics of Addiction: Turning a Profit on One of America’s Greatest Problems – Michigan Journal of Economics

Here's a video to finish:

The Addiction Economy - YouTube

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should immigrants be encouraged to use their mother tongue?

It has become a very politically-loaded question to ask if immigrant children should be allowed to use their mother tongue in class.

Even more so would be the question of whether immigrant children and their families should be actively encouraged to use their mother tongue.

Firstly, there is the question of whether immigrants should be taught in their mother tongue at schools

"I think there are different reasons that may explain this paradigm. The first is the notion one nation, one language, which is an old idea" affirms Dr. Ellen-Rose Kambel, Executive Director of Rutu Foundation. "Moreover, there is a general lack of awareness and information about the damage that could be done to children when their mother tongue is not valued, and also a lack of information on what teachers can do to develop a multilingual approach".

Allowing children to communicate in their home languages in school strengthens their cognitive and social skills. Not only does this improve pupils' skills in the school language, but research shows that they are likely to have better critical thinking and problem solving skills, and have greater cultural awareness. The translanguaging method can be applied to both newly arrived and second generation children...

Indeed research shows that training in mother tongue strengthens the linguistic and academic development of the bilingual child as well as the development of a secure identity. The role of families and education of parents is also vital: parents who speak the instruction language fluently are able to help their children far more effectively than parents with a limited knowledge of the language.

Last but not least, the policy of ignoring mother tongue teaching for migrant children is not only in contradiction with research evidence but also with UNESCO's globally agreed Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). The respect of children's cultural identity is set within the international policy framework and according to UNESCO, "equitable quality education and lifelong learning for all is only possible when education responds to and reflects the multilingual nature of the society. Children, adolescents and adults require learning opportunities that are relevant to their lives and needs, in and through their own languages. Since SDG 4 is so foundational to the other Sustainable Development Goals, without mother tongue-based multilingual education the other 16 goals will remain unachievable" (UNESCO 2017).

Secondly, there is the notion that we should preserve immigrants' native language and cultural identity in multilingual and multicultural societies - which is what many countries are or have become:

Preserving cultural heritage alive is a daily celebration in our house, but it doesn’t feel like a chore or something that we have to actively work at doing. It is truthfully second nature in our household because we live and breathe it every day through food, music, storytelling, and the way we talk (I speak home language with my family and as much as I can to our kids, plus my husband uses Trinidadian dialect and slang with his family that the kids also hear). Our children are lucky to have older relatives in their lives still from both my husband and my side of the family to talk to and spend time with periodically. Preserving our cultural and family heritage is important to us and so far, it seems to be important to our children as well because they are often asking us questions about the past and our family relatives. And that’s a beautiful thing.

Thirdly, we can look at whether first-language training matters for immigrant children’s school achievements:

Immigrant children fall behind their native peers in terms of educational attainment in many Western European countries. Policies with the aim of closing this immigrant-native educational gap are often implemented, however, more rarely evaluated (Paola & Brunello 2016). One such measure is first-language training for immigrant children that has been a source of much debate among policymakers in the Nordic countries. Advocates of this education argue that mother-tongue proficiency contributes to immigrant children’s academic achievements in general and that it helps with learning the host-country language in particular. Opponents have instead emphasised the importance of focusing on the host-country language in schools and that teaching should be conducted in this language only...

Increasing educational attainment of first- and second-generation immigrants is important because they are falling behind in the Danish labour market. This is particularly true for individuals originating from countries other than countries of the EES and the EU. The political aim of the policy reform introduced in 2002 was to increase the assimilation of these groups and by removing mother-tongue training, it was believed that immigrant children would increase their proficiency in Danish, which would, in turn, increase labour market integration. This study shows that such positive effects of the reform are not found. Rather the opposite has occurred; the removal of mother-tongue training leads to lower grades in Danish for boys and in mathematics for boys in general, and boys and girls belonging to the second generation. Although effects are modest, this study provides evidence that mother-tongue education matters for the educational achievement of children with a background in countries other than the EU and the EES. If the motivation of Danish educational policies directed towards first- and second-generation immigrants is to enhance immigrant integration, the removal of mother-tongue education should be reconsidered.

Fourthly, there is the question of how effective bilingual development in children of immigrant families is:

Early exposure to two languages is widely thought to guarantee successful bilingual development. Contradicting that belief, children in bilingual immigrant families who grow up hearing a heritage language and a majority language from birth often reach school age with low levels of skill in both languages. This outcome cannot be explained fully by influences of socioeconomic status. In this article, I summarize research that helps explain the trajectories of observed dual language growth among children in immigrant families in terms of the amount and quality of their language exposure as well as their own language use...

Evidence of the factors that impede optimal bilingual development in children from immigrant families can inform efforts to support successful bilingual outcomes in these children. Such support is important: Children from immigrant families need strong skills in the majority language to succeed in school (48, 49), and they need skills in the heritage language to communicate well with their parents and grandparents (50). Furthermore, bilingualism is an asset for interpersonal, occupational, and cognitive reasons (25). Children who hear two languages from birth can become bilingual, even if that outcome is not guaranteed. The findings I have discussed suggest that bilingual development is supported when children are exposed to both languages in ways that do not diminish the amount of exposure to each more than is necessary. In addition, to support bilingual development fully, children’s exposure to each language should come from highly proficient speakers, children’s heritage languages should be valued by society, and children should be given opportunities that encourage them to use both languages.

Finally, there is the question of how literacy is essential to refugees and migrants to rebuilding their lives in the language of their new country - and whether we should use mother tongue reading materials as a bridge to literacy. So, should we be developing a mother tongue program with standards and community resources?

Every bilingual student has a story to tell about language, culture, and identity. As a child growing up in New Jersey, my non-English speaking stay-at-home mom was communicating in her mother tongue--Italian--the only language she knew at the time. My father, on the other hand, was speaking to his five children in broken English while he was learning English through immersion on the job.

Though both of my parents were college educated, my dad having a PhD in Chemistry and my mom with an undergraduate degree, they still did not have a strong idea of how to raise literate children in a foreign country. In our home, my father did not want us using Italian--nor eating too much garlic--because in 1960's America, an Italian immigrant wanted to integrate as quickly as possible. Identifying with the American culture and language, my father thought, was the quickest way we as family would develop the one language that counted: English. The worst misconception about language that my father had was that speaking only in English to his children would improve our academic language at school as young children. This is unfortunately a common fallacy among immigrants that minority languages do not count and “privileged languages”--national languages-- must be learned at all costs, even at the cost of losing a home language.

Thanks to my mother, I grew up speaking, reading, and writing in Italian at home along with my siblings. I would speak with my mom daily in Italian, as well as enjoy tutorials from her in reading and writing over time. It was there that developing a richer academic language in English began as I transferred skills from my home language to the school language through my mother's attempts at maintaining our heritage language at home.

Ultimately, though we surely need to challenge the idea that a migrant's mother tongue is a language with no value:

Europe places a high value on multilingualism and language diversity, but the emphasis remains more on European languages than on the languages spoken by many newly-arrived migrants. The use of other languages is often seen as a barrier to integration. Clear evidence however shows that supporting and preserving migrants’ mother tongues has benefits for the whole of society...

Whereas multilingualism, and in particular the teaching of mother tongue languages is promoted at an official European level, the reality in many European schools is different. The majority of publically-funded schools in Europe take a monolingual approach in the classroom, a report released in January by the European Commission's education information network showed. Only a few countries (in 2017, six countries) offer tuition in the languages of newly-arrived migrants or a form of bilingual teaching in class.

One country that has tried to offer support for mother tongue languages in schools is Sweden, where the right to Mother Tongue Tuition is governed by legislation. The aim is that children are given support to develop both the Swedish language and their own mother tongue from pre-school onwards...

Many studies have shown that bilingualism or multilingualism in general, regardless of what the languages are, enhances cognitive ability, improving concentration and focus, memory, attention and control.

Research has also shown that supporting children in their mother tongue improves their results in other subjects. And even though some still insist on an "either-or" approach, evidence shows that tuition in the mother tongue makes it easier, not harder, to learn the host-country language...

Deema speaks Arabic at home, and once a week she goes to Arabic class. In North Rhine-Westphalia, children at primary and lower secondary levels who like her are growing up bilingual are offered extra classes in at least 15 home languages. The majority are European languages, plus Arabic, Farsi, Kurdish and Turkish.

But a large number of schools in Germany and Europe don't provide this level of support for mother tongue languages. "I think it's a sort of waste," von Dewitz says. "It would be much more helpful to see every student with all his or her languages, meaning that even if you may not have a very high proficiency in German yet, it doesn't mean that you don't speak a language. Of course you do."

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should immigrant children be allowed to use their mother tongue in class?

There has been quite a debate in Germany - with this story from two years ago: Immigrant children must only speak German at schools, conservative lawmaker says

Mario Czaja, secretary general of the Christian Democratic Union, claimed that many immigrants are poorly integrated into society due to insufficient German language skills, and called for new measures at schools. “Care should be taken to ensure that German is the main language spoken in schools. It is not acceptable for languages other than German to be spoken in the schoolyard,” Czaja told the Die Welt newspaper. The senior politician of the Germany’s main opposition party argued that more language experts, social workers and pedagogues should be hired for schools in places where many migrants live.

And indeed at the same time, there was a general push for better language skills: German chancellor calls for regular German language tests in schools

Others would disagree:

Immigrant organizations criticized Czaja’s controversial remarks, which echoed previous suggestions by right-wing politicians, who called for banning speaking of foreign languages in the schoolyard. Berin Arukaslan, co-chair of Turkish parents association in Berlin-Brandenburg, has underlined that speaking mother tongue is a fundamental human right, guaranteed by the constitution.

To what extent should we go the other way and allow immigrants and their children learn their own mother tongue? 'I can't say my own name': The pain of language loss in families - BBC Future

"I discovered how often it happens that bilingually raised children don't speak two languages," explains De Houwer, who is also the president of the International Association of the Study of Child Language. The survey and later studies by De Houwer and others across different countries and languages found that between 12% and 44% of children who grow up hearing two or more languages, actually end up speaking only one language. "Most babies start by learning words in both languages. But when they go to preschool they only continue with one. And why is that? Because suddenly there is only a focus on this one part of them and children soon sense that their other language is worthless. Worthless!"

In my case, there were actually two losses. I didn't learn my mother's native language, Polish, either. When I was growing up, my parents were warned against teaching me Bengali or Polish. They were told that if children learn more than one language simultaneously, they won't learn any of them properly. As if their languages might contaminate the "real" language – in this case, German.

"That's not a thing of the past, unfortunately," says De Houwer, referring to the long-disproven idea that bilingualism might hold children back, or confuse them. In fact, research has shown that bilingual children's speech is not delayed, and their tendency to sometimes mix their languages (known as code-switching, or translanguaging) does not mean they are confusing the two. Rather, it is a sign that they are using their dual vocabulary resourcefully, picking the most appropriate words for any given context...

In 2020, a nine-year-old girl was reprimanded by her teacher for speaking Turkish to her friend in the playground of their school in Germany. As punishment, she was ordered to write an essay titled: "Why we speak German in school." The resulting essay included lines such as: "We are not allowed to speak our mother tongue. So that we improve our German". Her family made a formal complaint with the support of a lawyer, who questioned whether a child speaking English during breaktime would have been punished in the same way. There is a saying among Germans of Turkish ancestry: Turkish isn't a language you learn, Turkish is a language you forget as quickly as possible.

When my hometown in Germany, Düsseldorf, put up a street sign in Arabic as part of a celebration of multilingualism, it was smeared with racist graffiti, and attracted online comments demanding that "they" should learn German. While a street sign in Japanese that was put up at the same time was fine.

What explains this dramatic difference in how languages are valued?

Research suggests that it's often not about the languages at all – but about social attitudes, especially to immigration.

"[In Germany] immigration is still viewed as the exception to the rule, as not normal. Children who speak another language at home are seen as children who don't speak German at home," Mark Terkessidis, a well-known author in the field of migration and racism studies and member of the Academie der Künste der Welt, the academy of the arts of the world. "So when these kids come to school there's a focus on the deficit and not on the resource."

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Lexical Lab: learn languages with an online teacher through everyday english and common words, chunks, idioms, phrasal verbs, phrases and expressions used in spoken language

Experienced teachers Hugh Dellar and Andrew Walkley have put together an online learning and teacher-training platform: Language Learning and Teacher Development | Lexical Lab

As this intro video says, it "looks at everyday English and common words, chunks, idioms, phrasal verbs, phrases and expressions used in spoken English".

Yes, it's using the lexical approach to learning a language!

There are very positive opinions about the site and service: Lexicallab Reviews | Read Customer Service Reviews of lexicallab.com.

They've got a blog.

And they've got a mailing list.

Looking at more about Lexical Lab, we learn that:

We have written one five-level General English coursebook series: Innovations, which was nominated for ESU award and two ELTons, and one six-level series, Outcomes, which is now in its third edition and has received widespread acclaim.

As trainers and methodologists, we have been strongly influenced by lexical views of language and by practice derived from lexical approaches to language. This led us to write a methodology book, Teaching Lexically, part of Delta Publishing’s multi-award-winning teacher development series.

To finish, here's the Hugh Dellar Interview - Teaching Lexically, Lexical Approach LEGEND! - YouTube

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how government policies on migration impact language schools in the uk

It seems rather too easy for governments to bring down 'migration' numbers by bringing down the number of foreign students - and this is having an effect.

In May of this year, the future of English language schools were in limbo after Starmer's visa crackdown:

English language schools fear they will go bust following the Government’s visa crackdown. Monday’s immigration white paper called for a review of short-term student visas, a route allowing those 16 and over to study an English language course in the UK for a duration longer than six months but no more than 11 months, over discrepancies in rejection rates. The review has left uncertainty for the ELS sector over fears it could be scrapped or severely restricted.

At the time, the UK government put together a press release, that its immigration white paper is to reduce migration and strengthen border - and at the same time it put together its evidence for the policy in its Student route evaluation (wave 2):

In May 2024, the Government introduced several policy changes designed to limit the number of student arrivals in the UK. The Home Office is keen to build an evidence base on the Student route to inform future policy and underpin assessments of economic impact.

This was the response from the ELT/ESOL sector: Breaking: UK Graduate Route reduced to 18 months under immigration white paper and Why ESOL Funding Must Address UK's Language Learning Crisis

With more from the wider press: Skilled visa rules, deportations and higher fees: what’s in the immigration white paper | Immigration and asylum | The Guardian

The latest news this week in the E L Gazette looks at how UK political shifts are impacting the English Language sector:

At the Labour Party conference, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced a plan to consult on new, tougher conditions for migrants seeking permanent residency, including learning English to a high standard. This proposal is expected to sharply increase demand for ESOL courses and accredited language testing, as failure to meet these standards may mean migrants are not automatically entitled to remain in the UK...

Speaking to The Times last week, Chancellor Rachel Reeves also advocated for an “ambitious” youth migration deal with the European Union (EU) to boost the economy. The scheme could allow EU nationals aged 18 to 30 to stay for two or three years, a move seen as a major opportunity for the ELT sector.

So, is this 'good news' for the ELT/ESOL sector?

Here's more analysis from the wider media: Migrants told to learn English, avoid crime, and volunteer to stay in Britain, Home Secretary to say | LBC

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