News

Next Guest Speaker

We are delighted to announce that Ms Francesca La Morgia will be joining us for our October session. Francesca is an specialist in multilingualism. She is an academic but has also set up a group to help multilingual familes in Ireland where she is based. Francesca will share with us her expericence and talk a little about the group she has set up: Bilingual Forum Ireland.

Bilingual Babies: The Roots of Bilingualism in Newborns

This is an interesting and new story about piece of research demonstrating that babies that heard two languages spoken regularly during pregancy (i.e. spoken by their bilingual mothers) listened with more interest to both languages than those that heard only one of the languages. The babies were also able to tell the difference between the two languages very soon after birth.

Read article in Science Daily published on February 10th 2010

next workshop - 2nd April 2011

Next workshops at the Limes:

"First Stage" on 2nd of April 2011: Primarly intended for parents of children aged 5 years and above, this workshop will use light hearted exercises, discussions, as well as question and answer sessions to give a basic introduction to what the group members have learnt about what works for and in different bilingual families.

More Workshops

March is Multilingual Month

What is Multilingual Month?

Multilingual Month was first proposed in 1998 as a national annual event to be celebrated in schools on a par with the already established Black History Month in October. It aims to promote a range of activities across the curriculum in schools which explicitly value the cultural and linguistic heritage of their pupils and which promote language learning and anti-racist and anti discriminatory attitudes.

Guest speaker: Charmian Kenner

Saturday February 6th 3.45pm at The Limes Children’s and Community Centre in Walthamstow

Charmian is a specialist in bilingualism and biliteracy (learning to read and write in two languages) and the author of books about biliteracy.

More support for multilingual families

WFBG has written to Lid King who is Director of National Languages Policy at the Department of Children, Families and Schools to ask for more support for multilingual families. We have asked to meet with him and have pointed out that parents raising their children multilingually helps schools teaching languages later. Despite this many parents chose not to speak a language apart from English to their children because of the common myths and misconceptions. We suggest that if parents were given good information at the outset and a small amount of support, far more children in the UK could be bilingual.

Read full text of the letter