miércoles, 10 de febrero de 2021
lunes, 1 de febrero de 2021
Why language skills are so important
Effective communication is at the heart of every business – conversations with customers, suppliers, colleagues and partners. For companies operating internationally, communication is multilingual. While English is broadly viewed as the lingua franca of business, global companies are undoubtedly able to enjoy richer, more productive conversations with stakeholders across borders when they can operate in different languages.
Through language we connect with people, not just through what we say but in the way we understand and relate to one another. Communication is about more than just the spoken and written word - it’s about appreciating other cultures and, in the corporate world, about understanding different ways of conducting business. The nuances and subtleties go towards building strong connections and they can be the difference between winning or losing contracts and establishing - or failing to establish - long-lasting business relationships.
Recognising this, a range of studies have looked into the impact on UK businesses – and the UK as a whole - of a lack of foreign language skills. Indeed, last year the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Modern Languages cites the UK’s language skills deficit is currently estimated to cost 3.5% of GDP. Understandably, this resonates with business. So much so, that a CBI/Pearson survey, recently cited by the government, revealed that almost two thirds of businesses say employees’ foreign language skills are important.
Post-Brexit, corporations will be keen to assert their position in an unfamiliar trading environment. UK businesses with a workforce proficient in no language other than English may find themselves – and the UK as a whole – at a disadvantage.
The importance of language skills
When individuals and teams can engage confidently with internal and external stakeholders across borders, opportunities can be seized and problems more easily addressed. Working relationships can be made stronger and this, in turn, helps improve productivity. There are also day-to-day, practical benefits to in-house language capabilities including cost reductions through a reduced reliance on translators.
These are strong reasons for investing in language learning, but there is also evidence of other benefits that speakers of one or more additional languages enjoy. A number of studies have shown that a range of more general, desirable attributes can come from bi- or multilingualism and these attributes can be valuable to employers as well as employees.
More than just communications skills
There is a correlated link between how many languages someone speaks and their decision-making abilities with psychologists at the University of Chicago suggesting that people make more “rational” decisions when they use their second, non-native language. A Pennsylvania State University study meanwhile, indicates that people with more than one language make better multi-taskers, possibly because switching between languages is a form of “mental exercise” that equips the speaker with mental “juggling” skills.
Fortunately for companies wanting to grasp the opportunities that a workforce proficient in languages brings, technology and digital learning solutions can help assess employees’ current capabilities and language learning needs and deliver programmes to suit individuals, teams and the company as a whole.
Where employees are geographically dispersed and comprise a range of office-based, home-based and occasional office-based workers, digital learning packages provide a higher level of flexibility than purely face-to-face training can. Not only that, it supports the needs of HR and Learning & Development to centrally track and report on team and employee training progress and to measure the overall success of training programmes.
Technology-enabled study can help meet each learner’s own particular training needs by assessing their capabilities up-front and adapting the programme according to learning pace, style and rate of progress. Multimedia formats enhance the learning experience and can help engage employees, while personal feedback helps keep learners motivated.
Languages are to be spoken and listened to, not just read, so it’s important that learning programmes support the spoken word. Simulated realistic speaking situations can be delivered through online learning and these help employees develop and maintain good pronunciation and build confidence in conversing in the language they are learning.
In the global world of business, the ability to communicate across cultures and boundaries isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s a must-have. Many businesses are turning to technology to help them plug their communications skills gaps, and to build language capabilities within their workforces that will help them enjoy fruitful interactions and sustain long-lasting customer and supplier relationships.
martes, 12 de enero de 2021
5 Simple Ways To Beat Your Post-Vacation Blues
Because coming back to reality can be harsh.
You’re back from vacation which means you’re likely feeling relaxed. But then the emails start to pile up, stress rises and suddenly it’s as though everything feels ho-hum again.
Sometimes those post-vacation blues serve a purpose: Experts say they may help you realize you need shake things up at home in order to feel satisfied. But if you’re happy with your home life, it might be more difficult to cope with those negative emotions once you get back.
So, how do you maintain the sunny outlook you had while you were away? Below are some tips for keeping the good vibes going after returning from a dreamy vacation:
1. Plan your next trip.
The happiest part of your vacation may not be the vacation itself, but the moments leading up to it. According to a 2010 study published in the journal Applied Research in Quality Of Life, just planning a trip can lead to increased feelings of happiness.
And if you’re itching to plan your trip during office hours, you’re not alone: An estimated 69 percent of vacations are researched at work, according to a poll by Travelzoo. Next time you hit the mid-afternoon slump, perhaps browse the web for your next travel destination. You just might perk up.
2. Re-create your favorite meal from your vacation.
Research suggests food and memory are intricately tied, which is why certain foods bring us straight back to childhood. The same could be argued for your last trip.
Make a night of it and whip up your favorite meal from your vacation. Or, if you want to take it a step further, look into perfecting a certain cuisine from your recently-visited location in a more longterm way. For example, if you loved the ramen in Japan or the handmade pasta in Italy, check out local cooking classes to perfect the skill of making it at home. Bonus: Studies show learning a new skill keeps your brain sharp.
3. Clean out your house.
Nothing proves living with less is possible like having to live out of a suitcase for a few days. Allow your vacation to motivate you to finally de-clutter ― and thus de-stress ― your life.
Take a look at your closet as though it’s your suitcase for a trip and keep only the necessities. What are the guidelines for making the cut? Try the Kondo method, which author Marie Kondo outlines in her best-selling book The Life-Changing Magic Of Tidying Up. The Japanese technique has you purge all the belongings that do not bring you joy. And doing so will help reframe your physical space along with your mental one, too.
4. Frame your favorite memories.
Once you’re home and settled back into routine, reserve some time to look through all the photographs you took on vacation. Pick the most meaningful moments from the trip and frame them for your home or share them on social media. Going back through photos and videos from your trip can evoke a sense of nostalgia, which research shows can enhance your mood.
5. Make time for relaxation.
In the same Applied Research in Quality Of Life happiness study, scientists also found that the people who were more joyful also reported feeling “very relaxed” on vacation.
It’s not always possible to find the money or the resources to escape your every day routine, but there are simple ways to have a blissed-out vacation vibe at home. A hot bath or shower is natural relaxer which may also reduce feelings of loneliness. Additionally, you can always go for a short walk, which research shows can lift boost your mood even when you least expect it.
And before you know it, the next trip will be underway.
viernes, 18 de diciembre de 2020
martes, 1 de diciembre de 2020
6 Ways to Manage Your Studies Over Christmas
The Christmas holidays can be a blessing or a curse for a worn-out student.
On the one hand, acres of potential free time to get ahead with work, do some studying that isn’t just about the next exam coming up, or even catch up on some much-needed sleep. But on the other hand, a Christmas holiday – no matter how you celebrate it – is likely to come with a lot of exhausting obligations. If you celebrate a traditional Christmas, then there will be presents to buy, rooms to decorate, cooking to be done and a whole lot of relatives to catch up with. Even if you don’t celebrate a traditional Christmas but just have the time off, there will probably be family demands on your time that you’ll have to balance.
All that free time that you thought was stretching ahead of you can vanish very quickly between shopping trips, family visits and perhaps the occasional indulgent lie-in. There have been no shortage of students who have started the Christmas holidays with a large pile of library books and an even larger pile of good intentions, only to go back to school, college or university with the books unread and the good intentions unintentionally abandoned. With the best will in the world, few of us manage to do all the studying that we wish we could over Christmas; there’s just too much going on. And once Christmas itself is over and done with, there’s the celebrations for New Year’s Eve, which can be nearly as time-consuming.
In this article, we take a look at how you can plan your time and your studying to make the most of your Christmas break – so that you can catch up on your workload and have some festive fun as well.
1. Set a particular time for studying every day (and let your family know about it)
One of the reasons why it’s so tricky to study over Christmas holidays – say, compared to half term or Easter – is that the pattern of days for most people is much less predictable. There might be family dropping in unexpectedly (or unexpectedly to you, even if your parents knew about it), or other demands on your time, such as coming shopping at short notice, or meals out. When at other times of year it’s easier to just say no and hide yourself away in your room with your books, at Christmas there’s an additional sense of obligation to spend time with your family.
The best way to get around this is to pick a particular time of day to get on with some work, and to make sure your family knows about it. If there’s a family planner or something similar hanging up in the kitchen, make a note of your study hours every day. One advantage of this approach is that it means your family might help hold you to your intention to study, but more importantly, if they schedule visitors for those times, they can’t reasonably expect you to be available to spend time with them.
As for the time to pick, we recommend getting your studying out of the way in the morning, so that you have the rest of the day free. While it can be hard to motivate yourself to get to your books first thing, it’s even harder to do so later in the day, when you might be dragging yourself away from spending time with family and friends in front of a roaring fire. A couple of hours from 10am until midday is a realistic study period, and falls at the time of day when unexpected guests are least likely to show up at your door and require you to spend time with them.
2. Think about how you can adjust your studying to the circumstances
After your schedule being disrupted by family and friends, the next big hurdle to most people studying over Christmas is the particular circumstances of that time of year throwing your work into disarray. You might have planned on accessing the library, only to discover that it isn’t open on Bank Holidays, or – in some cases – you can’t make withdrawals at all between Christmas and New Year. Depending on where you live, snow might also be an impediment to library access. Similarly, if you’re home from university, you might find that the speedy wifi access you’re used to in Halls isn’t available at home, with multiple siblings putting demands on the bandwidth or a single dongle that needs to be shared around between several family members’ laptops.
The difficulties you might face aren’t just about access to study materials, whether in person in the library or online. If you have family members coming to stay, you might find yourself turfed out of your room to make way for an elderly granny or aunt, or that your usually peaceful study space is suddenly full of young cousins, nieces and nephews getting into arguments over toys or board games. Even if your family is mostly adults, having more people in the house can make it harder to concentrate than you might be used to.
The trick here is to consider how you can adjust your studying ahead of time. Do you need to get books out of the library early, or download lots of papers? Perhaps it’s a case of being prepared to pay for more data on your phone so you can have your own source of internet access. Or you might simply need to plan for work that can be done in a busy house – working through textbook exercises, for instance, can be better suited to an environment where you might be disturbed than something more involved like working on an essay.
3. Find somewhere else to study outside the house
Whether it’s slow wifi or your aunt’s dogs barking the house down, sometimes the best way to study over Christmas is to get out of the house. The idea of going somewhere else to study might seem quite strange if you’re still at school, but for most students it’s normal to take your laptop to a coffee shop or somewhere similar, and this can be a great way to get some work done undisturbed. It also helps section off that designated study time – it can be easier to carve out the time if you’re physically removing yourself from the distractions of home. You might be more tempted to let the deadline slip if you’re supposed to have started work by 10am, but if you need to be somewhere else to start work at that time, it can help you be more disciplined.
Where can you go? If you’re in a decent-sized town or city, there are bound to be cafés that will be happy to have you if you buy drinks at regular intervals (one an hour is usually fine). Look out for places that advertise their wifi and have prominent plug sockets, as that’s a good indicator that they’re happy to have people sitting there for some time working quietly. Avoid annoying the owners by choosing the smallest table you can fit on, and use non-leaky headphones if you’re going to be listening to music.
If a drink-per-hour at a café is a bit pricey for you, most towns will have an alternative that’s entirely free: your local library. You might well forget it’s there, but most local libraries will have a quiet study space, complete with the wifi and power source that you’ll need. Their collection of reference books might even furnish you with what you need, and you probably won’t even need to be a member to access any of it.
4. Don’t use studying as an excuse
Christmas can impose a lot of chores that you might not want to do, whether that’s sorting through old clothes, peeling potatoes for an army of relatives, or becoming an unpaid babysitter to their children. And if your family are particularly good at respecting your desire for peace and quiet during study time, it can be very tempting to try and get out of these responsibilities by citing your need to go and do some work for school or university.
It’s tempting, but it’s still ill-advised; it won’t take family members long to notice that you always seem to want to get back to your books when a dull shopping expedition through pre-Christmas crowds is on the cards, and their goodwill towards giving you the time you need isn’t likely to last once they’ve realised your using work as an excuse. This goes double if you claim that you’re studying but end up using the time as an opportunity to hide in your room instead of spending the time with your relatives. What might seem like a white lie now could be deeply irritating in a year’s time when you really do need the time to yourself to catch up on work, only for relatives to remind you that last year, you claim to be doing some advance reading for next year and were instead playing video games.
5. Be realistic about what you can achieve
You might have read the above recommendations about when to study – for instance, a couple of hours in the morning – and thought that that wasn’t really a lot of time. You might have plans to use this time off like study leave, and write a short essay every day, or get through three books in the week. But Christmas holidays do have a way of stealing time from you and it’s best to get more work done than you expected to than to come back to school or university with lots of things left undone that you were expecting to have finished by Boxing Day. This is doubly the case if you haven’t really worked over Christmas (or any other holiday) in the past, as you won’t have good habits to fall back on and your family might assume, regardless of what you say, that you will have a lot of free time.
You should probably assume that your average day over the Christmas holidays will be as busy as an average day at school or university, so think about what you can usually achieve in ‘homework’ time and allow roughly that amount of work per day. Of course, you should bring some surplus things to do – after all, you might end up snowed in and have a lot of opportunity to get work done. But you shouldn’t make plans to have a lot of work done by the time the new term starts, so you’re likely to end up disappointed.
6. Take the day itself off
If you do a proper, traditional family Christmas – whether those traditions are midnight Mass and all the relatives over, or focus more on pigs in blankets and Doctor Who – then there’s nothing that will make your family unhappier than saying you’re going to keep up your studying routine on Christmas Day itself. Studying from 10am to 12pm on Christmas Eve and then heading out for last-minute shopping and an evening with the neighbours is sociable; insisting on keeping to that schedule on Christmas Day is unfriendly at best.
You might have ideas of getting involved with the morning Christmas traditions, gathering under the tree and then having a Christmas lunch before sneaking off to get a couple of hours of work done. Our advice? Don’t bother trying. Aside from the fact that every difficulty of studying over the Christmas period is quadrupled on the day itself, if your family is trying to dissuade you from studying on the days leading up to Christmas, you can get a lot of mileage from saying, “of course, I won’t be doing any work on the day itself.” Then throw yourself into all the fun and tradition of it, and they might be more prepared to forgive you when you have to go back to your books on Boxing Day.
lunes, 3 de agosto de 2020
What is the best age to learn a language?
When it comes to learning a foreign language, we tend to think that children are the most adept. But that may not be the case – and there are added benefits to starting as an adult.
I
It’s a busy autumn morning at the Spanish Nursery, a bilingual nursery school in north London. Parents help their toddlers out of cycling helmets and jackets. Teachers greet the children with a cuddle and a chirpy “Buenos dias!”. In the playground, a little girl asks for her hair to be bunched up into a “coleta” (Spanish for ‘pigtail’), then rolls a ball and shouts “Catch!” in English.
“At this age, children don’t learn a language – they acquire it,” says the school’s director Carmen Rampersad. It seems to sum up the enviable effortlessness of the little polyglots around her. For many of the children, Spanish is a third or even fourth language. Mother tongues include Croatian, Hebrew, Korean and Dutch.
Compare this to the struggle of the average adult in a language class, and it would be easy to conclude that it’s best to start young.
But science offers a much more complex view of how our relationship with languages evolves over a lifetime – and there is much to encourage late beginners.
Broadly speaking, different life stages give us different advantages in language learning. As babies, we have a better ear for different sounds; as toddlers, we can pick up native accents with astonishing speed. As adults, we have longer attention spans and crucial skills like literacy that allow us to continually expand our vocabulary, even in our own language.
And a wealth of factors beyond ageing – like social circumstances, teaching methods, and even love and friendship – can affect how many languages we speak and how well.
“Not everything goes downhill with age,” says Antonella Sorace, a professor of developmental linguistics and director of the Bilingualism Matters Centre at the University of Edinburgh.
She gives the example of what is known as ‘explicit learning’: studying a language in a classroom with a teacher explaining the rules. “Young children are very bad at explicit learning, because they don’t have the cognitive control and the attention and memory capabilities,” Sorace says. “Adults are much better at that. So that can be something that improves with age.”
In a long-term study of almost Catalan-Spanish bilingual learners of English: the late starters acquired the new language faster than the younger starters
A study by researchers in Israel found, for example, that adults were better at grasping an artificial language rule and applying it to new words in a lab setting. The scientists compared three separate groups: 8-year-olds, 12-year-olds, and young adults. The adults scored higher than both younger groups, and the 12-year-olds also did better than the younger children.
This chimed with the results of a long-term study of almost 2,000 Catalan-Spanish bilingual learners of English: the late starters acquired the new language faster than the younger starters.
The researchers in Israel suggested that their older participants may have benefited from skills that come with maturity – like more advanced problem-solving strategies – and greater linguistic experience. In other words, older learners tend to already know quite a lot about themselves and the world and can use this knowledge to process new information.
What young children excel at is learning implicitly: listening to native speakers and imitating them. But this type of learning requires a lot of time with native speakers. In 2016, the Bilingualism Matters Centre prepared an internal report on Mandarin lessons in primary schools for the Scottish government. They found that one hour a week of teaching did not make a meaningful difference to five-year-olds. But even just one additional half-hour, and the presence of a native speaker, helped the children grasp elements of Mandarin that are harder for adults, such as the tones.
Easy acquisition
We all start out as natural linguists.
Infants already babble in their mother tongue
As babies, we can hear all of the 600 consonants and 200 vowels that make up the world’s languages. Within our first year, our brains begin to specialise, tuning into the sounds we hear most frequently. Infants already babble in their mother tongue. Even newborns cry with an accent, imitating the speech they heard while in the womb. This specialisation also means shedding the skills we do not need. Japanese babies can easily distinguish between ‘l’ and ‘r’ sounds. Japanese adults tend to find this more difficult.
There is no question, Sorace says, that the early years are crucial for acquiring our own language. Studies of abandoned or isolated children have shown that if we do not learn human speech early on, we cannot easily make up for this later.
But here is the surprise: that cut-off is not the same for foreign language learning.
“The important thing to understand is that age co-varies with many other things,” says Danijela Trenkic, a psycholinguist at the University of York. Children’s lives are completely different from those of adults. So when we compare the language skills of children and adults, Trenkic says, “we’re not comparing like with like”.
She gives the example of a family moving to a new country. Typically, children will learn the language much faster than their parents. But that may be because they hear it constantly at school, while their parents might be working alone. The children may also feel a greater sense of urgency since mastering the language is crucial to their social survival: making friends, being accepted, fitting in. Their parents, on the other hand, are more likely to be able to socialise with people who understand them, such as fellow immigrants.
The emotional bond is what makes you better at language learning – Danijela Trenkic
“Creating the emotional bond is what makes you better at language learning, in my view,” says Trenkic.
Adults can of course also create that emotional bond, and not just through love or friendship with a native speaker. A 2013 study of British adults in an Italian beginners’ course found that those who stuck with it were helped by bonding with the other students and the teacher.
“If you find like-minded people, that makes it more likely that you’ll push on with a language, and that you’ll persevere,” Trenkic says. “And that really is the key. You need to spend years learning it. Unless there’s a social motivation for it, it’s really difficult to sustain.”
Even native speakers learn almost one new word a day in their own language until middle age
Earlier this year, a study at MIT based on an online quiz of nearly 670,000 people found that to achieve native-like knowledge of English grammar, it is best to start by about 10 years old, after which that ability declines. However, the study also showed that we can keep getting better at languages, including our own, over time. For example, we only fully master the grammar of our own language by about 30. This adds to a previous, separate online study that shows even native speakers learn almost one new word a day in their own language until middle age.
Trenkic points out that the MIT study analysed something extremely specific – the ability to pass for a native speaker in terms of grammatical accuracy. To the average language student, that may not be all that relevant.
“People sometimes ask, what is the biggest advantage of foreign languages? Will I earn more money? Will I be cleverer? Will I stay healthier? But actually, the biggest advantage of knowing foreign languages is being able to communicate with more people,” she says.
Trenkic herself is originally from Serbia. She only became fluent in English in her twenties, after she moved to the UK. She says she still makes grammatical mistakes, especially when she is tired or stressed. “Yet, despite all that – and this is crucial – I can do amazing things in English,” she later writes in an email. “I can enjoy the greatest literary works, I can produce meaningful and coherent texts of publishable quality.”
In fact, the MIT quiz classified her as a native English speaker.
At the Spanish Nursery, where the teachers are singing ‘Cumpleanos feliz’ and the book corner stocks The Gruffalo in Hebrew, the director herself turns out to be a late starter. Carmen Rampersad grew up in Romania and only really mastered English when she moved abroad in her twenties. Her children absorbed Spanish at nursery.
But perhaps the most adventurous linguist is her husband. Originally from Trinidad, he learned Romanian from her family, who live close to the border with Moldova.
“His Romanian is excellent,” she says. “He speaks it with a Moldavian accent. It’s hilarious.”
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