Infographics 3.2c

M-LEARNING FOR PARENTS - Step 3. Attending a new school (first weeks, months)

3.2c HOW TO SUPPORT YOUR CHILD IN DIFFICULT SITUATIONS IN INTERCULTURAL ENVIRONMENT? - LANGUAGE PROBLEMS

Learning the new language of the host country is an essential aspect of the immigrant child's adjustment process. This is not an easy task, and the child may encounter obstacles. Two cases can occur: Either the second language has not been adequately learned at a communicative level in a period of 6 months to a year (depending on the language of origin), or it has been learned but understanding the text and interacting with more complex tasks and explanations creates discomfort and lack of understanding, leading to demotivation, insecurity, low self-esteem, and difficulties in comprehension, which have a negative impact on learning ability in general.

Recommendations on how to support your child to deal with language problems

It is important for parents to support their children not to harbor negative feelings toward school, low self-esteem, and lack of interest, which often lead to or exacerbate comprehension and study difficulties. Support occurs in 2 steps:

• Acknowledge as legitimate the child's feelings toward this difficulty.
• Direct the dissatisfaction toward greater effort or attention

Parents should try to increase the level of motivation towards studying and improving the child’s attitude towards the school, which are both essential prerequisites for the language learning process (and any learning). Some strategies for doing this include:

• Setting small goals and celebrating even the smallest successes
• Maintaining constant communication with teachers so that you work in synergy with them.

Parents can collaborate with the child in the learning method; that is very important for the academic success of children with language difficulties and has a very high value for academic results: they can support the child by helping him to improve visual-logical strategies, especially by using mind maps and concept maps. All forms of schematization and advanced organization of knowledge are of great help, in particular: diagrams, timelines, meaningful illustrations, flashcards of rules, as well as the exploitation of iconographic resources and the analysis of textual indices. Helping the child in organizing time and materials also goes in the direction of acquiring a robust study method It is very useful for parents to support as much as possible the possibilities of experimenting with the language, which can be made possible through the creation of afternoon and extracurricular activities, with the aim of experiencing full language immersion, so that school is not the only place where the language is used: either by generating enjoyable knowledge, or by providing attractive books at home and making an effort to watch captivating films together in the language to be perfected. These moments should be directly related to the child's interests and passions, so as to encourage the child to use the language in a context of positive energy

Other things to consider

• The disadvantage of having an approximate knowledge of the host language becomes increasingly important as children grow older.
• The teenager has social needs, with respect to the peer group, that require a solid use of the language. As we move into adolescence, it is increasingly difficult for the parent to choose their children's activities. Nevertheless, it is possible, especially in early adolescence, to propose environments and groups where children can find stimuli for growth.
• In cases where the language of the host country has not yet been fully learned, parents can choose groups where the linguistic component is not an element of judgment and where the children can practice the language (from this point of view, groups where the language of the native country is spoken are certainly a convenient choice for a youngster, but not functional for language learning).

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"The European Commission support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents which reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein" Project No: 2020-1-PL01-KA201-082096