Roberto Filippi. 

A multilingual world

It is estimated that more than half of the world’s population – over 3 billion people – can communicate in two (or more) languages. If we consider that our societies are increasingly mobile, monolingual speakers will soon be the exception.
I believe all of us at a certain point in life, being at school, at work or when travelling for leisure, have come across the need to communicate in another language. We might all have experienced the challenges of learning a new language but also the benefits of being able to understand other cultures, to express and understand feelings in other linguistic forms.

For children raised in multilingual families, the simultaneous acquisition of multiple (more…)

Lucinda Platt, Visiting Professor at UCL Institute of Education and Professor of Social Policy and Sociology at London School of Economics and Political Science
Originally posted on The Conversation
As they reach the end of primary school, the UK’s children face persistent inequalities in their cognitive development. New findings from the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS), a survey of children born between 2000 and 2002 across the UK, show that the level of parents’ education and family income both remain clearly associated with children’s verbal skills at the age of 11 – even when taking into account other differences in family background.
The MCS, based at the UCL Institute of Education, London, has followed around 19,000 children since they were nine months old, visiting them and their families again at ages three, five and seven and then most recently at the age of 11.
On each occasion from age three onwards, tests of cognitive skills have been carried out by specially trained interviewers (more…)