In our increasingly multilingual classrooms, digital technology potentially offers infinite opportunities for language-friendly learning. Teachers don’t need to know all the languages their students speak, and still offer their students the opportunity to utilize their full linguistic repertoire to support their learning.
But when Dr. Emmanuelle Le Pichon-Vorstman (University of Toronto and co-founder of the Language Friendly School) conducted a study on the effects of a multilingual web-based platform for learning mathematics, she realized there are challenges. Why are teachers not making more use of digital technology to facilitate language-friendly learning? According to Dr. Le Pichon it is not because students with lower socio-economic backgrounds don’t have access to computers or internet. The main challenges lie elsewhere.
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