“The 2024 GCSE results reveal that more young people in schools in England, Wales and Northern Ireland are opting to study a language. (…) However, while these modest gains are encouraging, (...) the number of GCSEs in many languages has not risen proportionally to the overall population of 16-year-olds who took their GCSEs this year ”, argues Sascha...
New article by Cassie Lawrence entitled Endangered Languages: Loss, evolution and academia out in Women Rise includes interviews with Dr Diane Nelson and Prof Janet Watson.
“Language learning and international mobility go hand in hand in fostering essential qualities such as curiosity, empathy and effective communication. (…) It is time to shift our mindset towards valuing language skills and international experiences, ensuring that future generations won’t lose out.”, argues Sascha Stollhans from School of Languages, Cultures and Societies in his new piece The UK is...
The more time pre-schoolers spent in childcare during the first year of the pandemic, the more their vocabulary grew, a new study has found.
We're delighted to share with you a call for submissions to a special issue of The Language Scholar in 2024: ‘Developing Contexts of Scholarship’. We welcome submission under all journal categories; Narratives of Scholarship, Works in Progress, Scholarbits, Papers and Reviews. The descriptions of the different TLS submission categories can be found at https://languagescholar.leeds.ac.uk/categories/ We...
Findings from the DART project have demonstrated the potential of computerised dynamic tasks of decoding and vocabulary learning to improve screening for reading difficulties especially in children with English as an Additional Language. https://dart.leeds.ac.uk/findings/
On 31st March 2022, TES reported on research by Julia Snell (School of English) and her colleague Ian Cushing (Edgehill University) which exposes the role of the school’s inspectorate, Ofsted, as institutional language police. Julia and Ian systematically searched inspection reports of primary and secondary schools and found a huge number of reports where the inspectorate criticise teachers...
This double-length article reports on a multifaceted investigation of the environmental and cognitive predictors of proficiency in English as the school language, in a diverse group of 5- to 7-year-old heritage speakers of a variety of other languages. It adopts a data-driven approach to compare the informativity of alternative predictors (e.g., current vs. cumulative language...
With our great pleasure, we would like to inform you that the new issue for the Language Scholar journal has been just published and ready to read from the link below. https://languagescholar.leeds.ac.uk/ This is another special issue after we published Issue 6 on Arabic language teaching in May, and the current issue showcases the work...
LCS Postgraduate Researcher Sophiko Daraselia has published two new corpus-based dictionaries: a Georgian-Abkhazian-English Frequency Dictionary and Georgian-Ossetian-English Frequency Dictionary. The work has been carried out in collaboration with the State Language Department of Georgia. The dictionaries include 3,500 entries representing the most frequently used modern Georgian words translated into Abkhazian, Ossetian and English languages. The...