Language & Cognition seminar - Prof Victoria Murphy

Language in Education:  Support for multilingualism through educational contexts

Genesee (2017) argued that given children have the capacity to acquire more than one language without significant costs or difficulties, our challenge is create learning environments that allow children to give full expression to this capacity.  In this presentation I will discuss the role of Education as a potential context through which young children’s emergent bi- or multi-lingualism can be supported.  I focus on children who have a home language that is different from their language of education and present a selective review some evidence which speaks to effective ways of supporting young children’s emergent multilingual development through educational provision.   I then highlight the particular importance of developing knowledge of vocabulary as a means of supporting literacy development in linguistically diverse pupils and review the research on children’s developing knowledge of lexical form, meaning and use during the early school years.  I conclude by arguing for a need to have more focused studies investigating multilingual pedagogies that present a balanced and evidence-based agenda for supporting linguistically diversity in all our pupils. 

Genesee, F. (2017).  “Looking back over 25 years of research and moving forward”.  Keynote presentation to the NALDIC25 conference, London, November 2017.