Have you heard of 'the chimp wars'? Whether or not humans and apes share some of the same language-learning mechanisms is a hotly debated topic.
A researcher called Savage-Rumbaugh and colleagues published several papers in the 1990s about Kanzi the...
Translanguaging is an increasingly popular buzzword in education, but what does it really entail? How can monolingual teachers make use of their pupils' multilingual repertoires?
I think it's understandable that teachers who speak one language (perhaps...
Screen time is such a hot topic in the parenting world… is it ‘bad’ for our kids? Is it ‘lazy parenting?’
At Babel Babies, our weekly resources are largely based around screen time with:
prerecorded videos featuring Cate...
You've been speaking your home language (e.g. Lithuanian) together since they were born. Your little one is about to start school. Should you switch to the majority language, such as English in the UK? That sounds logical, right, and would surely help...
By 12 months, babies understand about 50 words (Fenson et al., 1994) and by age 6 a typically developing child knows between 9,000 and 14,000 words!! That's learning about 9 words a day on average! Linguist Stephen Pinker called them 'lexical vacuum...
Ever wondered why we can identify our own baby's cry amongst others? Some fascinating research I've been reading about at uni this month has a theory that babies' cries are like a little melody, each with its own melodic arc.
German babies cry with...
Far from being confounded by the slew of sounds they hear from birth (and even before), babies are slowly and carefully piecing together evidence of how speaking works, what it's for, how it feels physically and emotionally, what all these sounds mean,...
Let's talk about the damaging and redundant term 'semilingualism' that has cropped up around social media recently.
You might have heard it? Sounds a bit scary. Semi = half. Half-lingual? It's not a term that researchers use now, and it is quite...
Yes, Babel Babies is a multilingual programme, but that's not to say that children can learn infinite languages simultaneously, or that a smattering of lots of languages is enough if there isn't at least one language learned to an age-appropriate...
There is so much confusion around mixing languages, and it worries me that parents and children are often left feeling ashamed of this very natural, normal, and creative by-product of bilingualism.
Mixing languages is a stage in the process of language...
Who doesn’t love a pancake? Whether you’re a savoury or sweet pancake-lover, ‘Pancake Day’ is celebrated around the world in many iterations. The tradition has roots in Christianity and enjoying a final indulgence before Lent...
Over my 20 years as a languages teacher, and the last ten years running Babel Babies, I've heard countless adults tell me they are 'rubbish at languages' and hope they can help their children skip this problem by starting them early.
Let's be clear: if...
