This webinar will focus on the benefits of multilingualism and provide guidance on how to support multilingual learners in the classroom and will advocate for simultaneous and balanced support for both community languages and English as an additional language for bilingual learners in schools.

Far too often community languages and English are positioned to be competing with each other for time and resource in the educational space. But there is ample research evidence to suggest that strong maintenance of home languages other than English can benefit the learning of English and the two can support each other in a bilingual learner’s social, cognitive, linguistic and academic development. During the webinar practical recommendations will be made as to how best to support community language maintenance as well as English as an additional language development for bilingual learners that will benefit the individual learner and ultimately enhance the UK’s multilingual capacity.

Areas of focus will include:
• The benefits of multilingualism (supporting the maintenance of a first language(s) as well as learning English as an additional language)
• The evidence on why multilingualism is important
• How to support multilingualism in the classroom.