House of Knowledge regularly hosts educational workshops for parents to learn about a number of important subjects, including children’s behavior, psychological development, effective emotional communication, and to help parents understand how children learn and grow.
Yesterday, Farshad Danicek, Reggio Emilia education expert and co-founder of House of Knowledge, shared useful tips how parents can support their children in learning a new language.
Lots of examples were shared by Mr. Farshad Danicek from his decades of education experience, so as to help parents understand how children acquire language. Topics included milestones of language development for a child, the best way for parents to teach language at home, and how to stimulate motivation to learn a new language.
Mr. Danicek emphasized that parents should connect actions to the words they speak to the child to make the language experience. Parents should repeat full correct sentences to the child when the child didn’t pronounce correctly. Most importantly, though, all conversations should be positive and get the child motivated to learn.Hearing two languages spoken at home is a real advantage to the child. If a child hears two languages from birth, they will maintain the ability to hear the sounds of both languages and be able to speak each language with the accent of a native speaker.If parents each speak a different language, it is helpful if the child hears the same language consistently from the parent who is its native speaker. If, for example, the mother is a native Chinese speaker and the father a native English speaker, it will be less confusing for the child to hear each parent speak in their native language.
In the closing “Q&A” session at the workshop, Mr. Danicek answered a variety of questions from parents such as “Should family members talk to the child in dialects?”, “What to do if a child goes through a silent period and may not talk much after starting learning a new language?”, as well as how to capture a child’s interest and curiosity to connect the language learning to it.
