Welcome, my name is Sergi Torné, I am the Dean of the Faculty of Translation and Interpreting. Com sabeu, la nostra universitat és una universitat que pretén treballar i tenir actives tres llengües, l'anglès, el català i el castellà. Per tant, faré servir aquestes tres llengües en aquestes breus paraules que us diré al començament. Molts de vosaltres també sabeu que hem posat aquest any en marxa un pla pilot d'acollida lingüística en català, pels estudiants que no coneixen català, que es puguin integrar a la societat. Catalana té un kit de supervivència ràtica i per tant a mi em sembla que en una facultat i un departament que es dediquen a estudiar les llengües és important fer visibles les llengües. Aquí tenim estudiants de tres màsters, els tres màsters que coordinen el departament, el màster en estudis del discurs, el màster en estudis de traducció i el màster en lingüística teòria i aplicada, i també els estudiants del programa doctorat del departament de traducció i ciències al llenguatge. Com veieu, és un públic molt heterogènic i molt divers, però reflecteix molt el que són els nostres estudis, que són necessàriament transversals i necessàriament multidisciplinars. He dit que us faré les tres llengües, canvio el castellano, us deseu a tots un bon curs acadèmic que sea fructífora i provechoso, a los estudiantes de máster, que este máster que iniciáis sea un máster que satisfaga vuestras expectativas, profesionalizadoras o de formación. También se haga algún estudiante que se entusiasma con el estudio, que se anime a iniciar un doctorado y, por tanto, se emplazo el año que viene a estar aquí en la conferencia inaugural como estudiante de doctorado. Los estudiantes de doctorado, que vais a hacer un paso un poco más largo por la universidad, os deseo también un buen inicio de vuestros estudis de doctorado, que concluya con una tesis dentro de tres o cuatro años, que satisfaga vosotros y satisfaga la comunidad científica en la que os incorporaréis. Sin más, os deseo un au. Bienvenido, os doy la bienvenida y os deseo un buen curso. Y os recuerdo, porque esto siempre agrada, que al acabar tendremos un pica pica ofrecido por el departamento, por la facultad y estáis todos invitados. Hola, Líndea. Please, I am a you. I am a you. I am a you. So, her talk is going to be entitled priorities in applied linguistics in today's diverse world, focus on the communicative needs of bilinguals and bilingual to be preschoolers She's currently Professor of Language Acquisition and Multilingualism at the University of Erfurt, Germany. And she's the initiator and director of the newly founded harmonious bilingualism network, HabilNet, of which I'm sure she's going to be telling us things today. In her professional career, Dr. de Hauer has been invited to speak across the globe, for textbooks and research papers on early childhood bilingualism. Are used as teaching materials all over the world. In addition to bilingual acquisition, her numerous publications cover Dutch child language, attitudes towards child language, teen language, and intra-lingual supply dealing. So an array of topics. Very importantly, she has also carried out a micro sociological survey of home language use, so families, and how they use languages, by 74,000 individuals. That's it, individuals. Her more recent research focuses on the role of input in bilingual acquisition and on bilingual families well-being the idea of the harmonious, behind the harmonious bilingualism network. Now, Dr. de Hauer herself leads a multilingual life, something about which I'm sure she's also going to explain a few more details to us. Three more things. She has extensive editorial experience. She's also editing the New Cambridge Handbook on bilingualism, together with Dr. Lourdes Ortega from Georgetown University in the USA, a major publication, which will see the light relatively soon. Now, at the university where she's a professor, de Hauer is primarily engaged with teaching in the Master of Applied Linguistics and the doctoral program on language use and language proficiency. I will end on a personal note. Professor de Hauer has inspired large numbers of researchers interested in bilingualism in the 90s that was childhood bilingualism, and I am to be counted amongst them. This is why I have the honour, perhaps, today of introducing her. Her main book at the time, which covered a case study growing up with two languages, Dutch and English, inspired many of us taking on also other research studies, case studies, very often on child bilingualism or trilingualism by the same matter. The book was a milestone and many of us have it on our shelf as a precious token. Thank you very much for being here with us. I hope you can hear me. Yeah, the volume turned up. Yes, great. Well, thank you so much, Carmen, for that very nice and personal introduction. Thank you for the invitation to be here. I'm gonna do my best to, yeah, to do what I was asked. Let's see whether they'll be up to you to evaluate. Okay, so you just have been looking at this map from 1581, it's a very old map, yes, for a while now, and as a world and as a global community we've really come a long way. There's been all these major global achievements in many different spheres of life, technology, agricultural education, medicine, science, and what I consider is also extremely important. And there have been also very important ethical achievements. And I don't know if any of you are familiar with the book by Stephen Pinker on the better angels of our nature, the end of violence, where he gives a whole history of human violence for thousands and thousands of years, and he claims that the last century, well, you know, the second half of the last century was a real breakthrough. And indeed, actually since then, pretty much, there's been a wide acceptance of a social justice perspective that fundamentally cares about people's well-being at any stage of life. And I think that the first real milestone there was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in, I think, 1949. And later on also the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and also found the call of Barcelona following the Mayoral Forum on Mobility Migration and Development here took place in June 2014. In Barcelona, those are just a few examples. And this presentation is firmly rooted in a social justice perspective. And it goes on the assumption that applied linguists ultimately have a goal to serve and a moral obligation to serve that social justice perspective. And I'm going on the assumption that our research should in principle be aimed at possibly helping people in their use and learning of languages. And I want to identify today and explain what I see as some of the most urgent topics for applied linguistics research in today's increasingly linguistically diverse world. And I hope to do that in a way, indeed, as I was asked to do, you know, to kind of address many different perspectives here present. Anyway, I hope I succeed a little bit. So my axiom is that applied linguistics research should also first and foremost deal with topics of high societal relevance. You can select to study anything. You can select, you know, why is the lineup of these red chairs? Well, how is it different from that lineup? Is it different? You can choose to study anything, but it's got to have some sense, because it's your time investment. It's investment of taxpayers who pay you for your work, perhaps, for the university where you're studying. So I think it's good to make, when you make a choice as to what it is you're going to be doing, well, this is where I would go for the choices. So in today's world, with so many people on the move, multilingualism is really of utmost concern and importance to very many people. And that's why I've chosen, as Carmen was already saying, this subtitle for my talk where I'm going to focus on the communicative needs and I've added and the well-being of bilingual and bilingual to be preschoolers and of those of newly arrived adult immigrants. Why? Because, in fact, these are extremely underrepresented groups in any kind of applied linguistics research. We know comparatively a whole lot more about school-aged children, so primary school-aged children, even adolescents maybe, but we know very little about these, really the communicative needs of these other populations. So child well-being, that is really of great importance to me and yes, this harmonious bilingualism network that I'm in the process of setting up, it is focused on well-being in relation to bilingualism and in particular to families with young children, but not necessarily only that and I hope that, well, in my next slides maybe, I'll make a few things a little more clear to you. Okay, you all know that Barcelona is a bilingual city with two official languages and what does this mean? There are lots of young children here in Barcelona who do not have an immigrant background who are born here of people, parents who are born here in this area or maybe, okay, a little further afield from other parts of what is still Spain, yeah. So that might mean for them and I used a lot of color coding in my presentation. Green means it's okay. Red means it's not so good, okay? And anything in between is like, oh well, it's in between. So this is green, so that there are lots of children who will just hear Catalan at home and in early childhood education, which I will, in the rest of the talk, I will make that shorter and say ECE. ECE. So that's the Escoles Bressol and Parvullari that perhaps some of you know about. Okay, they can just hear Catalan at home also, but in addition to Catalan, they may also start to hear Spanish in ECE. So they'll go to a bilingual center. They might just be hearing Spanish at home, though, and will start to hear only Catalan in ECE. I'll get back to the color coding in the next slide. Okay, they could also just be hearing Spanish at home. In addition, Spanish, to Spanish, they will also hear Catalan in ECE. Then we have fifth possibility of the six logically possible possibilities. They hear Catalan in Spanish at home, but only Catalan in ECE. And in ECE, they hear the same two languages, so Catalan and Spanish, that they also hear at home. So those are six possibilities for children without an immigration background who are just hearing either Catalan or Spanish or both at home. And so I've listed here all those possibilities that were in the next slide, but, again, you see there's some color coding going on here. So here, this kid, here's just Catalan at home and just Catalan in ECE. So there is a real match, a complete match this child understands, learn to understand Catalan at home and can understand what's going on in ECE. Green, that's good. Same thing with a bilingual child who has just learned to understand Catalan and Spanish from birth at home and is going to a bilingual ECE, well, school, right? And, again, there's a full overlap and the child is also affirmed in the bilingual identity that's coming from the home because, hey, ECE is also bilingual, great. Ah, but then we have this red oval where the child is just hearing Spanish at home and is going to a center where they only use Catalan. Will this child understand anything? Yes, they will because Catalan and Spanish have a lot of overlapping lexes, but it's different. And so the child, if they speak Spanish there, oh, there probably will be understood also. It is being Barcelona. But still, they're not being confirmed in their speaking Spanish there. They've got to adjust at age two or even younger. We're talking about teeny tots. So then we've got a child who's hearing Catalan at Spanish at home and they're going to a monolingual center. So where just one of the languages is being used, well, you know, it's not quite red, it's not quite green, but part of that child's identity, let me put it that way, linguistic identity, is not being confirmed there. And who knows, this might seem strange to the child. Did I forget one? Just Spanish? Yes, I did. What happened to the sound? Is that my problem? I forgot just Catalan at home and having just Spanish. Didn't I? It doesn't matter. You get the picture. So just Catalan at home and then having both of these, well, that's not... That may not be such a problem because there is the Catalan in the school and the Spanish will be on top of that and the child will probably adjust fine. And that's the same with if the child is just hearing Spanish and then gets to a bilingual setting, it'll be okay probably. And there won't be any major feelings of, you know, ooh, there's something else going on that I'm used to that I don't like and that I don't feel good about that my prediction is that it'll be fine. Now, we switch a bit and I'm coming back to ECE in a moment but I want to present to you with some recent data about migration to Barcelona so I really did a lot of work online and luckily I can read a bit of Spanish and a bit of Catalan so I think this is okay. I think I did okay with putting these things on there. So I got it from the statistical department of the Ayuntament de Barcelona and some of that information is also in English. So the last data for immigration into Barcelona are available for January 2016 so about 270,000 foreigners lived in Barcelona then. Of course, you know, that's only based on nationality, citizenship in fact. So that doesn't mean, you know, that doesn't capture necessarily people who have in the meantime been naturalized into being a Spanish citizen who might have a migration background. But these people, and this is the important part, these people come from all over the world. In fact, they represent most of the countries. In fact, when I tallied the countries, I got to a number of more countries than there actually are. So excluding the Vatican, yeah? Excluding the Vatican, okay. And what's important here for ECE is that in 2014-15, 12.2% of children in pre-primary education had non-Spanish citizenship. I think that number is probably rising as it is all over the European Union. And these are, and that's really, I'm not going to read through all of that immediately, but there are huge differences between the numbers of people from a particular country. And here I made the top 15, just limited by the space I have on a slide, basically. So I just happened to take those where there's more than 5,000 residents. And I indicated here, and that's what I added, the main languages, or official languages of those countries. And I think the one thing that you've got to take away from this is that if people are from one country, that doesn't necessarily mean that you know what language they speak. Yeah? That's very important. And yes, there's a lot of countries where supposedly people speak a lot of Spanish, but let's say Peru, well, you know, that person could be a Quechua speaker, basically, and know some Spanish in addition, or an Aymara speaker, and know some Spanish in addition, but you shouldn't make any assumptions about people's first languages based on the country they come from. So the expectation for bilingual Barcelona and the larger bilingual region is that there's not only this Catalan, Spanish bilingualism, which of course you knew already, but a very diversified multilingualism, also for young children. So you could have within one group somewhere you could have children basically having 15, 20 different home languages, yeah? Including also, of course, bilingual children have two different home languages than Spanish or Catalan. So let's have a look at what that means for children from that population who come to ECE. So you see already on the slide, there's no green. There's no green. As far as I know, you know, yes, there are some private schools. There are some private schools which may offer French or English in ECE, which may be some families, some home language, some child's home language. Apart from those, basically these innumerable ex languages, I mean, there could be even 5,000, 6,000 languages, actually, we don't know. Well, they're not offered. They're not taught in schools. And they can't. I just want to make that quite sure. It's not possible. I don't think that's going to happen. But so a child that has an ex language and Spanish and who's going to ECE in Catalan, well, you know, maybe it would have been better to take them somewhere where at least one of the languages was present maybe to an ECE school offering, mainly in Spanish. But you don't always have a choice.  It's not a free choice for parents, mostly. Yeah? And the same goes for a child who has ex in Catalan at home and then ends up in a school that uses just Spanish. So that's like a little bit of double trouble. And then you have these children who just hear the ex language at home and then it's regardless of where they are. Nothing's happening, but it's even worse for them in a way because they won't understand anything in principle. Nothing. And if you are like two years old, you have just learned, you know, two. Like this. Sorry, sorry, like this. They have just learned to understand language, to start to understand language, maybe even make themselves understood at age two. If they're two and a half, they have usually learned to make themselves understood to people that know them very well. And they've come to expect that they are understood also. And all of a sudden they're in this situation where nobody understands them and they don't understand anything. It's horrible. It's really terrible. It's not good for little kids' wellbeing. And there are a couple of studies that tell us about that. Then we have something brownish. So it's not really quite red. So these are children who have had Catalan at home as well as the ex language. And so if they're going to ECE in Catalan, that's fine, but it's not completely fine. Because again, like with some of the kids who have Spanish in Catalan at home, one of their languages, one of their identities is not confirmed, is not present. It's not the same as at home. And then we have the ones who may hear Spanish as well as the ex language. We have a similar situation there. Well, I often give talks in service training for people who work with very young children in ECE. And they want to know from me, how should we deal with the linguistic diversity that is present in our childcare centers and in our preschools? I give them general ideas based on my now very long experience. Common sense, ethical considerations. Because for instance, the United Nations, the Convention for the Child Rights, mentions that institutes of education should have respect for children's home languages. So if there is one thing I tell them is do not tell people to give up, parents to give up speaking whatever ex languages is. Because sorry, that's against that convention. That's against human rights basically. Then I talk to them about implications, implications from my own and other people's research. From talking to people and also a few case-based examples from actual practice. But an actual research basis, well this little thing here is empty. There is very, very little actual research basis. Which is a pity. Now, before I go further about that, a little bit more, I want to make it very sure that you understand that I fully agree that learning to speak school type Catalan and Spanish is of great importance for all young children in Catalonia. Yeah, I just want to make that very, very clear. It's important for academic achievement, social life, later job prospects. When people come here, they need to deal with the languages that are here. At the same time, there are all these PISA studies of which you've probably heard through the media over the years that show that adolescents with a language other than the school language at home that they do much less well than adolescents who do have the school language at home. Mind you, a methodological point here that only in the PISA 2012 study were people asked, the adolescents asked about possibly that they might have two languages at home, namely the school language and another language. But they've given that up since then again. Unfortunately, because that was really important. All those lots and lots of bilingual families they shouldn't be forgotten. I'm sure I forgot to mention that if you were raised with two languages and you have to indicate your only choice, it's a dichotomist choice. Did you have Spanish at home? Or did you not have Spanish at home? Or did you have another language than Spanish at home? You can only choose either the one or the other. And what do you do if you're bilingual? La veritat que aquests adolescents, que ja són a l'escola secundària, que realment són un grup, aquests fills amb una altra backgrounds imigrant, que continuen fent malament, en comparació amb les persones non-immigrantes, són de grans polítics socials i també de conseqüències personals per a cada persona individual. Aleshores, hi ha un gran gap d'arriba, de qualitat, i continuem fent això, en spite d'això. I llavors parlo de programes a l'Europa Unió, en spite d'això de moltes iniciades educatius, a suportar els fills en l'escola de l'escola. I també, al mateix temps, hi ha un grup de joves i migrantes, que agraeixen participació en l'escola de l'escola de l'escola. No sé si en germà o en l'última vegada, hi ha hagut un puig, que no tenen l'escola de l'escola. No és part de l'escola d'escola, però hi ha aquests esquitas, aquests centres d'escola de l'escola, i hi ha hagut un puig, i el govern, hi ha hagut un pla de precisament capturar aquests fills imigrants per fer-los un grup d'escola, per donar-los un cap a l'escola de l'escola de l'escola de l'escola. I... Hi ha hagut molt més de l'escola, també, no només en germà, però en altres països, també. I en spite d'això d'això de l'escola, encara hi haurà prou la mateixa. Bé, sóc just d'offer-li una mica de recerca relevant, una quarta. I és una quarta. De les nenes que hi ha una llengua minorita a casa, una llengua minorita, no és l'escola d'escola, ningú que no és l'escola d'escola, no ho expliquen. Una en quatre. A l'acusació de l'acusació de l'escola de l'escola de l'escola, l'acusació de l'acusació és... No és 100%. No és 100% perquè els nenes tenen problemes de l'escola de l'escola, com també els nenes biolígics, no importa si et agraeixes monolingual o biolígica, hi ha un percentatge de problemes que aniran a tenir un efecte d'esquena, però no és una en quatre que no en coneixen una llengua. No. Sí. És on aquests dades són d'aquest Belgi i d'Australia. I, sí, no en sabem gaire, perquè aquests són els només serveis que poden parlar d'aquestes. Sí. I els pares senten molt malament si els seus fills no parlen de les llengües a ells. M'he fet una literatura base... Vaig fer una literatura base, una llengua base basada en la recerca que va fer a la Unió Europea. Ells realment senten malament. I m'focussing en els pares d'aquestes joves. We know from the United States that Hispanic adolescents, so with a background that is not purely Anglo, as they say. I don't want to hear started discussion about these categories, although it's very important to have that discussion. Anyway, Hispanic adolescents in the United States feel at a great emotional distance towards their Spanish-speaking parents if they speak English to them. So they will speak English to their parents and their parents will respond in Spanish. And on the other hand, we know from other work from Andrew Fulinne's lab that Latin American and Asian background adolescents in the US can cope much better with the stresses of adolescents, which maybe you remember, if they speak their parents' minority language.  Using the same language as somebody that you feel close to, well, it's kind of normal. It would be really crazy and strange if you had to use another language with them. You would feel an emotional distance. And this is precisely what's going on here. Ah... As a huge survey of, in fact, children themselves from the Deutsche Jugendstitut, Deutsche's Jugendstitut, so they interviewed lots of immigrant background children between the ages of five and thirteen. They interviewed them also about their language experiences. Well, you know, many 15-year-olds, well, 13-year-olds, sorry, they would remember how bad they felt when they were very young and very little that they couldn't speak German or that they were ridiculed for their German and others had no, well, they spoke very badly of their home language. So, that's not good. And at the same time, we know from other research in the United States and that's based on data from Florida that children who speak their minority home language well, at age four, that they make faster progress in their school language, English, a year later. This is the first confirmation of Jim Cummins' interdependence hypothesis from the late 70s, which he didn't... Cummins himself didn't provide any evidence for that, but this is it. As you know one language well, comparatively well, well, you're going to do better, it's going to feed into your learning of the next language, already at that age. And several US studies show, with regard to somewhat older children, so primary school-aged children, that there is a higher degree of well-being in primary school children who hear a minority language at home and who speak both the minority language and the school language well. So it's got to do with bilingual proficiency, high bilingual proficiency in both languages. And also there's a study out of Switzerland which has really shown that parents feel valued when researchers and preschools pay attention to their first language. This is hardly ever happening. Um...  It's no good. Rather than, ha, here it is. Oh, how interesting, and I don't know it, but you know that language, wow. So also, and this I think is one, you know, there is this myth, well myth, there is this idea in early second language acquisition that there is always a silent period in which children don't say anything before they start speaking a new language. We don't have huge amounts of data on that, but, um, yeah, it is true that children who do not yet know the preschool language may spend more than two years in silence. Yes? These kids are just, as you can see, they're depressed. They don't know what's going on. They don't understand, and they've kind of, they've kind of been lost in this sea of sounds that they don't understand. So what does that all suggest? That there is something quite fundamentally important going on that has to do with the relation between children's minority language and the school language. And family's well-being is affected by this relation. And if there's anything that children need, it's their families, it's their parents. They're going to be the ones to support them. So we want that, you know, to run smoothly. We don't want parents of four-year-olds feeling alienated from their kids because their kid doesn't speak their language back to them. So perhaps the achievement gap is somehow related to all this. It's a big question. I don't know. It's just something I'm thinking of. In any event, this regarding young children's home languages in ECE does not support their well-being. In fact, I think that in ECE all the children's languages should be recognized and respected. We're not going to have classes in those languages, but they should be recognized, acknowledged and respected. And I think that it's high time for applied linguists to carry out research and to develop tools that can help support all young children's well-being in ECE, regardless of their language backgrounds, whilst taking into account their language backgrounds, while acknowledging that, yes, they do have a different language background than other children. So these are some relevant questions. How can ECE staff show respect for the linguistic diversity in the classroom? And make sure, at the same time, these people, by the way, ECE staff, I think they should be paid at least ten times more than they are paid. They are doing a fundamental job in all our societies. And they are not very often in our society, respect is expressed in money that you get, in salary, yeah? And they have an incredible job to do. I couldn't do it, I don't have the patience. It's amazing what they do. And how can they make sure that all children get to learn the school language? Because that's also their task. And make sure that, for instance, here in Barcelona, that the Catalan and Spanish-speaking children, that they also are stimulated in their language development. Because, yes, they already have, like, you know, they're further ahead in their language development than those that don't know Spanish or Catalan yet, and they should also be stimulated. And how can we make sure, can they make sure, that all children profit from the linguistic diversity in ECE? And there are many, many more questions. In order to try and tackle this, I think we need to have an ecologically valid approach, which recognizes that language use is really embedded in people's actual lives and deeply affects their socio-psychological functioning. And it also acknowledges that children's language learning is directly related to the language input and is embedded in interaction. This is not always... I'm saying this is probably clear to all of you, but there are many people who are working in ECE that I've met that don't realize this as being of superfundamental importance. And also, you can't do this as just one discipline. You've got to have some interdisciplinary cooperation amongst ECE specialists, psychologists, sociologists, and linguists. And this is maybe one of the most difficult aspects, which is why it's wonderful that you guys are here all together, even though they're like very, very different masters, because it's just by pooling resources and knowledge from different strands, different methodologies and different perspectives that we can really tackle these very complex problems. And also, in working here with people, real people, you've got to recognize the need to include also bottom-up work in cooperation with stakeholders. And for those stakeholders, those are the people who really are living in the world that you're trying to do research on and with. The parents, the children themselves, ECE staff, teachers, funding bodies, policymakers, all these players play a role. Now, in my talks to ECE staff, I make some simple suggestions for giving a place to all the children's languages in the classroom. But these need more support, so tools from applied linguists. And once in place, these tools need to be assessed for their... And that is then applied linguistic research. I'll just give you a few examples. I've got more, but I've got a lot more to say, too. If you'll still stick with me. Oh, boy, yeah. So, here's a suggested action. And then on the other hand, you'll see support tool and research that is needed. One very important thing, try to pronounce each child's name correctly. It seems obvious, but it's incredibly hard to do. Have you heard all these different names from all these different languages? My God, I can't do it. I need help if I want to do that. First of all, you've got to realize that it is important because the child's name is the child's identity.  So, what do people need? They need perceptual help. For those of you who are in phonology, in phonetics. And they need production practice. They need to know how particular names are pronounced. They can ask the parents, but you can only ask a person maybe three times to repeat it and then they've had enough of it. No, you need to then, for a new group of children or new children that are coming, you would be helped by this little app which just repeats the name to you a couple of times and then has also a function where you can speak it in and it tells you whether you're right or wrong until you got it right. Then try to find out what language is the children in a group speak. This is not easy. This is not easy and we cannot expect ECE staff to establish that. And many people, when they're asked about what language they speak, well, they may not want to answer because in their country where they came from, if they said what language they speak, they were shot on site, right? So, we've got to be sensitive to those issues and plus a lot of people, well, they, I once talked to some guys in a supermarket in Germany, I heard them speak a language that I didn't know it was, but I thought, oh, it's not Arabic. So, on the parking lot I said, what language do you speak? Oh, dialect, I said, dialect. Where, you know, we're from, oh, yeah, well, we're from Morocco, so I switched to French with them because of, and that already they like that. There's a lot of French and I said, yeah, but a dialect, maybe it's Berber and they were surprised that I even knew the name of that language. I also know that there's tons of different kinds of Berber, but a lot of people will just say, oh, dialect, meaning it's worth nothing to me. Yeah, Berber is not really a very, in Morocco it's not a language that's given a lot of status at all, yeah? So people also bring these attitudes from where they come, but if you don't have no clue what language it is that these children are speaking, then you're stuck. So what you need is for a particular catchment area, and this is more for the general linguists among you, do some survey work to try and identify the languages that young children there hear. It's not easy, and then, but then it's necessary to find out, you know, for persons in ECE, for the staff, learn to say some basic words and formula in all the children's languages that you happen to have in your group, expand that to numbers and colors once these basic functions are taken care of, but these people, the staff needs help from people like you who have selected basic class or child-relevant word forms, maybe in cooperation with the ECE staff, yeah? And you translate them in all the relevant languages and you help staff also to learn to say them.  Okay, I already went through the fields, so we've got general linguistic lexicography translation and phonetics covered here. That was from the position of respecting children's home languages and trying to pull them in a little bit by showing, hey, I'm doing my, this is my symbolic best, you know? Which already makes kids feel better, that you acknowledge. And later on, as an ECE staff member, you can say, I'm sorry, I don't speak your language, you know? I can't help it, and wow, that's great that you can speak. Now, this is about some examples as regards to societal or school language. So what does ECE staff have to do? In Germany, they call it Sprachliche Bildung. It's basically language input, language teaching, not really, but really language in use, basically. That's what Sprachliche Bildung is. So use linguistic structures and discourse strategies that support children's comprehension and production of the school language or languages. This is what people have to do. Children do not learn, that we know, by grammar lessons. They learn, by example, by using language and by hearing it. And what's the research needed? And here I'm looking at the people who are working in the discourse area. Well, you've got to identify what are supporting discourse strategies and structures. And we're not starting here from zero. We know from studies of child directed speech what kinds of discourse strategies might be important. But also, we have to make decisions. Like, should we tell ECE staff that they first have to just use single words to talk about things? To these kids who are no longer that little, you know, who may be three years old, or should we start with simple structures or should we immediately use full and long sentences? How about, because that's at the beginning, when the kids, in fact, don't understand anything yet? So how is this going to work? Once they start to say a little bit, should we repeat what they say? Should we give positive corrective feedback, negative feedback? Should we recast just what they say if they make mistakes, what are mistakes, etc. And so we need for that to work and to know what we should do and how we should best do it. I think we need observational discourse-based studies. Here are some more specific questions for research, but maybe I will skip those for now because I really do want to get to my adult hub. But this one here, a role for interpreting, because I know there are interpreters here too. You know, in ECE there will be a lot of... there's need to communicate with parents and you may not have a language, a lingua franca, that you can communicate with. So there is a need for interpreting and how do you communicate with a child where you have no common language? Of course, nonverbal speech with little kids, nonverbal speech with communication with very little children is, of course, also important. But what is the role for community interpreting? Using older children to help out. Those are also... I just want to shift now because time is running away to adults. So many adults who live in Spain are recent arrivals, they're mothers, fathers, who emigrated out of economic and or political necessity and many will have had deeply traumatic experiences before arriving in Spain. Just think of all those people who are actually... Yeah, dying to get here, yeah. If just that, the trip. So refugees, asylum seekers, do these people get any specific help or support to help them with the trauma? Now you're thinking, well, now she's going too far. I mean, we're not psychologists. True, but such apparently non-linguistic questions play a role in language learning. People who are depressed are likely to avoid communication and may thus isolate themselves from language learning opportunities. So it does feed into language learning, definitely. And a British report from 2007 reports the need for safe learning spaces for traumatized asylum seekers and refugees. It's something that's often just forgotten about, basically. And just very recent research by Zandagat in Sweden shows that traumatized refugees have memory deficits because of their trauma that impact, so that have an effect, on the speed of their language uptake. So these are really important things to remember. Now newly arrived refugees, they need to learn the new language fast. And we have just one major study. So there are some of these huge studies. This is a longitudinal one from Canada. There's only one that actually focuses also, not just on all kinds of immigrants, but specifically also on refugees. So in this quite unusual study, there are 7% of the 6,090 adults that were studied, were refugees, and there was a difference. In how fast that they picked up either English or French, the societal language, many had far lower new language skills, so I'm calling the new language, the destination language, that's also another term that's being used in this literature. Many had lower new language skills at arrival than other types of immigrants, because you can, yeah, that's understandable because a lot of these refugees, they're really not there out of choice. So they might never have chosen to go to a particular country, and often also they don't have a choice in which country they end up in. And also these refugees have less pre-migration language capital, meaning they know fewer languages, they have lower levels of literacy and so forth. And so they need much more support to learn the new language. So beyond psychological help for refugees, what kind of learning support for the new language is best for newly arrived immigrants beyond refugees? Well, we really don't know much about this, and there's a whole lot more that we don't know about adult immigrants' new language learning, yet it's important to find out, because their new language learning is important for their socio-cultural and civic integration, and it's also important for the actual, the receiving country. There are differences amongst countries in how important they find that, but still it is important. Now, what little research there is has found that, again, this pre-migration social capital, so this language capital is important, and that immigrants make the fastest gain at the beginning. In fact, in the very first months after they arrive, and then also, well, up to two years after reliable, and then a kind of plateaus for many of them. Of course, many of them then stop going to classes, whatever, or think well, they can communicate well enough and so forth. And learning a new language and adulthood can be really quite a challenge for non-refugees, especially in the beginning as research from Australia shows, and the opportunities for real interaction, so outside of language classes is rare. Well, that's kind of obvious. And what's very important is post-migration exposure to the new language, so they need to hear it a lot, and this is where media can play a really important role. For the rest, we really just don't know much, but we do need some answers fast. Newly arriving immigrants are urgently in need of efficient new language support, and we've got some general guidelines from the Council of Europe from a few years back. And the problem is that many of these new language classes seem to be preparations for tests, because very often tests are used to include or exclude people. They have to do well after some time on some particular test, and if they don't, well, they no longer get any housing. In fact, they may no longer have the possibility to stay in the country and so forth. So these are really... Yeah, this is actually pretty shameful that that exists. So, and a lot of these classes, well, they're just like test-preparing classes, rather than really looking at what these people need for their communication. And also, as the person working in Sweden showed, is that these rules and tests place extra stress on this vulnerable population of refugees and asylum seekers. Now, in some other avenues that are likely not a good idea is putting refugees together in classes with economic migrants or other types of new language learners, as often happens. Everybody is just going to a class. Everybody is put together. That really is very hard to work with. You know, you've got, in your group, you've got well-educated literate immigrants who perhaps already know French or English or another language lingua franca, together with much less well-educated illiterate immigrants. It's normal that in teaching, you would start to really talk a lot more to those literate educated people, and you would kind of leave the others and not give them that much. It's a normal effect, a normal human effect. It's not a good idea. Also, a lot of new language learning focuses tremendously on literacy instruction and stays focused on that while people need to talk and be able to communicate first and foremost. So, that goes into, you know, not paying attention to really what kinds of language use immigrants might need in their immediate lives. Focusing mainly on grammar rules, well, at the very beginning, people need words. So, some good practices could be to attempt to build small homogeneous classes. It's, you know, these are ideas. I realize that there is a lot of work here. I realize it's easy for me to say all this. But if we don't say it, then it's definitely never going to happen. Engaging caring interpreters to help with communication in the initial stages. This is happening already in a lot of countries, it is. But more haphazardly, haphazardly, not necessarily systematically. Also, engaging volunteers as individual mentors and buddies for interaction in the new language outside the classroom. In fact, I have to say, I've been really impressed with what's been going on in Germany in that very, for that very point. You know, there's been so many volunteers who are really like taking Syrian refugees, shopping, going... etc. Oh, all of a sudden, the sound went away. And students' psychological needs, so learners' psychological needs must gain more of a central place. And teaching methods must also be tailored to this specific population. Think of these trauma-related memory deficits in some people. So, building up new language vocabulary rather than first focus on grammar, I think is also important. And then, slowly, you can introduce some limited amount of targeted reading of things that are really important. Street signs, directions and so forth. You've got, in real life, you've got to be able to interpret those rather than silly sentences like, he walked the dog, stuff like that. But it's all in those books, in those practice books, unfortunately. Now, there's many things like for ECE, so I'm getting close to my end here, so bear with me for a little longer. There are many things that you could eventually do, maybe not yet, but maybe later. Maybe assess the most pressing lexical needs. What are the kinds, what's the kind of words, formulas that people need when they've newly arrived in a new country? What is it? Where are those lists? I'm not talking here burlitz lists, those are for tourists, but maybe something similar to a burlitz list. Develop Targeted App, because if I've learned anything, also a lot of people these days, including newly arrived immigrants, they have a smart phone. Develop Targeted Apps that translate these lexical items from many different languages and into many different languages, both in a written and in an oral form, and that people can kind of hear. We know, a lot of this already exists, but maybe not in a targeted way. And for oral language use, and this is where we need the phoneticians, analyze minimal pairs per language combination, for instance, Catalan-Russian. There are probably specific problems between Catalan and Russian that are not relevant to Catalan and Turkish, for instance. Yes, try to identify what they are and incorporate that in some exercises to help people become aware of these differences that are important for communication. If I misunderstand you, because you're saying a sound wrong, that's not good. I don't care about accents, I care about true miscommunication. Develop apps that will also help with pronunciation, that give you some practice, rather than talking to your fridge, to practice your pronunciation, as I often advise or use to advise my students to just speak aloud at home. No, you need somebody to give you feedback as to how good you're doing. Develop maybe scripts for teachers to use, for effective and respectful teacher discourse sequences in the first new language classes. And work out ways in which interpreting services could also be used in these first stages of new language learning. And in all this, do not forget the potential usefulness of bridge languages like English or French, which are widely known to some extent by many immigrants, not necessarily both of them, but either English or French. Many immigrants these days do know a little bit of them, especially people from Africa who will know more French depending on where they come from. And also for TV, and that I think is really a resource that can be used right now, is to have, it's much easier when you hear these programs and you see these programs in Catalan and you are just starting to learn Catalan. It's very difficult then to follow what's going on, but it would be much easier if you had subtitling in your language and then you could follow what's going on and you could learn more Catalan that way because you'd be slowly, by watching more and more TV, you'd be like, ah, oh, that's what, ah, yeah, well, that's that, and you'd be learning a lot more. So this interlingual subtitling, I think there is really huge potential there and also, of course, you could have the intra-lingual subtitling, so Catalan subtitled in Catalan, but that's probably not as useful for immigrants. And these days, you have all these smart TVs that give all these technical tools to do all this, but of course, it's got to be done in different languages. So we need tools, we need research, we don't have time for big longitudinal studies, we need to find out from learners what they think helped them, didn't help them, we need a bottom-up approach, we need to find out from teachers what they think helped, didn't help, again, a bottom-up approach, we need to document actual practices, for instance, testing practices, should be scrutinized, and we need also a transdisciplinary approach. And there's, with regards especially to refugees, there was a special issue of the Swiss Journal Babylonia, just recently come out, which is very relevant here. So, to sum up, as applied linguists, we must try to effectively engage with actors and stakeholders. If we don't do it, who will? It's hard, so success is not guaranteed. Engagement and respectful dialogue are really key here. Top-down approaches don't help. No ECE, no woman I know in ECE, will just accept something just because I'm a professor and she's not. No, you have to engage with people and listen to what they have to say. And indeed, by showing that we don't just operate from our expert ivory tower, but I ground it in the real world and aim for social justice, we can hopefully gain enough respect from non-linguists that they will be willing to engage with us. So, let's give it a try, is what I would say. Thank you very much. So, Darren, let me... and here are some of the sources, thank you. Okay, sorry, I took a little longer. I think you've given us many ideas for future studies, maybe for your TSNs, that you will have to decide on the master's thesis in only a couple of months. Practical ideas and lines of understanding, actually the role of the profession many of us are here to be pursuing. So, I think this was extremely eye-opening. Thank you. Do we have some time for questions? A few minutes? Many people are already leaving. But I'd be happy, yeah. I'd also be happy to field questions over wine, over the reception. I don't know. Oh, yeah. Did I make a mistake? Oh, no, but us. Yeah, on the Spanish-Catalan predictions that you were making, right? I mean, we have a highly bilingual society, so if a kid enters elementary school, normally they have had a lot of contact with the other language, if not at least 20% of the time. I mean, there is TV programs, you go shopping. I mean, you have a lot of... So, presumably, I see like a very... I felt like it cannot really be compared, like the Catalan-Spanish situation with, you know, some immigrant that comes in and it's like, you know, like 10, 15 families talking only in this language and have new contact with. So, yeah. I mean, I just wanted to hear you, but we were very proud of our system and we think it works. It has been, you know, also assessed. Oh, yeah. Oh, no. I was feeling a little bit... Oh, I see. Oh, no, no, no. This is not meant as a... This is not meant as a criticism. At the same time, though, for just these... If, like for these kids... Here we are. Right. So, if a child just has Spanish at home and just goes to a Catalan preschool... Well, the thing is that it... It doesn't... Well, according to the information that I have, because I looked at a whole... I found a whole overview of language use in ECE, in Barcelona, and it was all listed in particular areas of the city. You tend to have more bilingual preschools. In other areas, it was tend to be more Spanish only. In others it was more Catalan only. So, there is that difference. So, it is possible that children go to a non-bilingual preschool. Yeah, that's the case that you have depending on the... Exactly. Depending on the... ...and the more common area. But also, you know, when you go to school, there's a variety of languages being spoken by the children and also by the teachers. Even though there is an immersion programme, there is all these, you know, common things happening. So, it's a bit, you know, too much, saying just the Spanish, since it's... Right. Well, I think that definitely the bilinguality of Barcelona, not of any bilingual city, because I'm well aware of Brussels, it's completely different from Barcelona. But the openness that exists in Barcelona towards bilingualism is, of course, of great help to also children who don't know Catalan or Spanish. There will, I think, generally, but this is for you guys to do studies on about the attitudes of people in early childhood education towards other languages than Catalan and Spanish. Maybe I'm hoping that, yes, this being used to having a... you know, living in a bilingual city, that it gives people a more general openness. In fact, there are some studies suggesting that bilinguals in general are much more culturally open. I hope for this to be true, yes? But we need some of the evidence, yeah? We need some evidence.  In shopping, yeah, kids might hear something, but if they're, like, two and a half, they're not necessarily paying any attention to what somebody is saying, some adult is saying to some other adult about something they're not engaged with. So, I think we have to make a difference between these very young children and older children. Very young children, they have very small lives and it's what happens in their immediate vicinity that really matters for their language acquisition rather than what is present in the community as a whole. A child can be leading a totally Turkish-only life in bilingual Barcelona. It's completely possible, for instance. Yeah. So, we've got to realize that. And, of course, we want to change that. We want to open up that child to other languages, obviously, yes. But thank you very much and I'm sorry if I gave that impression, I didn't mean to do that. Yeah, no. Thank you. Yeah, yep. Hi. So, I'm really interested in subtitles. And... Ah, yeah. It's potential... Well, in general, potential of, you know, multimodality for language learning. Has there already been some research? Not with immigrants, but I've done research on this myself, with 12-year-old children in Belgium, in the Dutch-speaking area of Belgium, who we... It's research under my direction that was done where we gave them language tests. They had never... In English. They had never had any English classes. They had nobody in their personal lives that they used English with. They had never been to an English-speaking country. But we also asked them about their media use and about their media habits. And we actually tested these children on their knowledge of English in the beginning of secondary school, which is when in Belgium, in Flanders, that's only when they start to learn English. And a lot of teachers had already told us, well, you know, I got these kids, you know, in my classroom, I'm starting at the beginning level of English, but there's already some that know so much English and others that know very little. So we knew there was something going on, which is why we did this study. And we worked... I think it was like 380 children that we had, so it was a pretty large sample, and it was very clear. Those kids who watched mainly English-language TV, which in Flanders, in Belgium, is subtitled in Dutch, yeah? So they'd been watching this, like, for three years, you know, every day they watched these English-language TV programs. That was the one factor compared to kids who didn't watch that much or who tended to watch other kind of programming, which wasn't English-language. Well, those kids who watched all that, they did much better on the four. We had four little tests, some of which we just developed ourselves, because what are you gonna do?  So we tried, what can we do? So we had a few translation tests, we had a few imitation, we had an imitation task, and, you know, some kids scored, like, top on everything. So there was a lot of variation between children, and it was correlated completely with their TV-watching habits. Thank you. It's worth pursuing. Just to compliment your answer to the question, the answer is yes, and some of the research has been carried out here as part of the European Research Project, subtitled The Language Learning. Oh, great. Thanks very much. Didn't know about that. Not addressed specifically to very young immigrants. No, but... As a general question, it's subtitles can help people a language. Yes. Oh, great. I'm so happy to hear that. Sorry? S-L-L, subtitles for language learning, funded by the European Commission. Thank you. Great. We also had another project, which was not watching, but actively doing. So in schools and in distance learning, where one can actually do the subtitles or dub. Okay. And that project is called Glypflare. So... Great. Even here. Great. Wonderful. Yeah. Yeah, because I think that there there are... you know, all TV... In Germany, you know, it's just German that you hear on TV and everything is dubbed. And it's such a wasted opportunity for foreign language learning. Not just of English, but of any other language. And you don't hear all these different sounds. And that, I think, is so important also in ECE. Just the very fact that ECE staff would use, would be able to say different forms or words in different languages. And also would then help all the other kids in the classroom to say those. You know, it just can maybe keep the ears open. Because this is really important for learning another language, is to have open ears, that you're willing to listen, that you're willing to pay attention, that you've learned from early on, not just, you know, beyond the first year of life, that keeping your ears open, that the sounds can be different. And that is so important for learning it, for just having an entrance into a new language. Once again, thank you very much. You're very welcome. Thank you. Thanks.


Now, the leader of the Mi'ete Alla Cato Brothers Association in Plateau State has denied allegations that herders killed 17 people on Sunday. Mohamed Abdullah is also accusing the governor of Plateau State of ethnic bias when handling issues that border undisputed between foreigners and persons of other tribes. Jacinta Obuco tells us more. A dozen people were killed in Kuzhetown in Kuru district of Plateau State by gunmen on Sunday. Five other people were killed in another town in Plateau State at the same time and on the same day. The locals in both cases said Falani headers were responsible. But the state chairman of the Mi'ete Alla Cato Brothers Association of Nigeria, Mohamed Abdullah, says the allegations are untrue. A lawyer who has been fighting for justice for victims of attacks in Plateau State disagrees. He says there was power intelligence that the areas would be attacked. Mohamed says Falani's have also been victims of attacks and accuses Plateau State governor Simon Lalung of bias. When it comes to Falani being killed they never mention it in any media they are not issue out statements condemning such an act. But when it is other side of the story they try to control people that are affected and then they visit them, they assist them and other things like that. But the government of Plateau State are doing some of the security agencies is a bias in mind in treating these issues. Both the young Mohamed agreed that security agencies need to do better. Governor Lalung has in the meantime directed the state police command to investigate the killings. Jacinta Obigu for PLOS TV Africa. Hello hope you enjoyed the news please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.