Guest post by Tania Czajka (Le Petit Monde Puppet Theatre)

First of all, I want to say that since the day I have learned, I’ve always loved reading and writing. I remember very well the day when I could finally read a whole Oui-Oui book (Noddy in English). I was so excited!! I was going to learn lots of new things, enter worlds of stories I didn’t know! I also remember practising writing the letters of the alphabet in my special book. Fascinating it was!

With reading and mastering writing, came ideas which I put in short poems and I also illustrated them. By the age of 10, I had a wee collection of hand made books which I absolutely loved. This love for writing and reading has never left me. So when I moved to Scotland and – very gradually – improved my English, I naturally started writing children stories using both French and English. I had this strong desire to share my French language with young children but didn’t want to become a teacher.

So in 2008, I set up Le Petit Monde Puppet Theatre and decided my puppets would speak French. By then, I had a good understanding of both languages and could easily ‘jump’ from one to the other – like bilingual children do. So I wrote full bilingual scripts for my shows starring Lapin and his friends. [Read more…]

Post by Dr Thomas H Bak

UPDATE July 2017: Want to hear more? See Thomas Bak live and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival as part of the Cabaret of Dangerous Ideas on Wednesday 23rd August. Click button below for full details.

See Thomas Bak at Edinburgh Fringe 2017

One of the things that I miss most in the current debates on bilingualism is the lack of interaction between cognitive and social scientists. Both disciplines do important work in this field, but it is very rare that they meet, exchange ideas and discuss their respective findings, let alone develop joint concepts and theories. This is one of the reasons why I was so delighted to be invited by the European Commission, Directorate General Education and Culture to join the meeting of the 4^th Thematic Panel on Languages and Literacy in September 2016 in Brussels. This meeting as well as the subsequent one in January 2017, at which I was invited to give a keynote lecture, gave me a chance to interact directly with people coming from very different professional background, working with different populations and using different methodologies.

A particularly important encounter for me was that with Dina Mehmedbegovic, who gave a keynote lecture at the September 2016 meeting. Dina’s background is in school education and she has studied in detail the attitudes to minority languages in England and Wales, which she documented in her book published in 2011. One of the concepts she developed was that of a “healthy linguistic diet” [Read more…]

I was born in England and moved to Pakistan aged 3. I guess I must have started school aged 6 or 7.  In Pakistan I was educated in the national language of Pakistan (Urdu), and speaking the regional language at home (Punjabi). Here I must point out that Punjabi is also the language of the Punjab region of India. The difference in between the Pakistani and Indian Punjabi is that, in Pakistan it is only spoken, where as in India it is a complete language. Almost every child with my background would be  learning to read Arabic (as the Holly Book Quran is In Arabic and is read by many who do not understand the language), often without having any or very little  understanding. Therefore any child with Pakistani background in the UK, would either be speaking Urdu/Punjabi, reading Arabic and speaking, reading and writing English. [Read more…]