This website is packed with resources and strategies for pre-primary and primary teachers and educators to help young children to develop their linguistic and intercultural competences. These take account of the linguistic repertoires of children – the different languages they encounter at home, at school and in society – so that they can engage successfully with linguistic and cultural diversity.

This resource contains:
• six guiding principles for early language learning;
• inspiring stories about language learning in different contexts;
• resources and practical examples for inspiring language learning;
• a ‘myth or fact’ quiz, FAQs;
• reading recommendations on the benefits, for young children, of learning languages.

Six principles to guide inspiring language learning in the early years

The principles help to create a common understanding of what characterises inspiring language learning for young children and frames their early language learning in an educational setting (crèche, kindergarten, preschool, primary school).

Inspiring practice

A selection of Inspiring stories about language learning are presented for 3 age groups: 3 to 6 year olds, 6 to 9 and 9 to 12.

A series of resources for inspiring language learning offer learning and teaching methods as well as concrete didactic resources (games, books, websites, ICT tools etc.) illustrating how the guiding principles may be brought to life.

Quiz & FAQs

‘Myth or fact’ quiz: teachers, educators and parents often have preconceived ideas about languages and language learning. This quiz is an opportunity to explore these ideas and to reflect on whether they are true or not.
Teachers frequently ask questions about coping with multilingual classes and are worried about how to deal with linguistic diversity – including children’s linguistic repertoires in their classrooms. This section on the website provides responses to these concerns.

A video inviting users to reconsider assumptions about plurilingualism is available on the website.

Target group(s): teachersteacher educatorsparents

Publication year: 2021

Author(s): Schank Flore, Kirwan Déirdre, Musilova Dana, Birnie Ingeborg, Patekar Jakob

Promotional documents:
Flyer (EN)
Dépliant (FR)
Flyer (DE)

EN

FR

Resources