I find that circle time, singing, story telling and using puppets are the best ways to encourage language in young children.

Every year, during the first week, I focus on getting to know my students and let them get to know a bit about me, including expectations, school and classroom rules. In the very first lesson, there are introductions either in the mother language or in English, depending on the age group, English level and, in case there are SEN students, everything goes much smoother and alternating between Portuguese and English; there are also some ice-breaking activities such as songs or a game and then, let’s get started! 

Upon meeting classes students introduce themselves. Till now, I never faced language diversity, so, at the beginning of the year I simply check the introductory knowledge, to plan teaching and tailoring on that specific audience. I'm used to catch special educational needs, but language diversity is a news. This year with CLIL I used and different activity called “PUBLIC PLACE”, first students need to answer the topics about them then they need to find someone with the same answer. 

At the beginning of each school year, my pupils and I (mostly 5th or 6th graders) run a little in-class-survey to create the ethnic – linguistic map of our class. After doing so, pupils with greater efficiency in the Greek language may be assigned to support other pupils of their ethnic group with less sufficiency. When we have a new arrival from an ethnic group we have never had before, like we do this year (Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria), I assign a whole group of pupils to escort the newcomers, not only in the classroom but also in the playground, to gain communicational language. I integrate activities that have to do with arts in the linguistic instruction, like painting or role playing, or even games that anyone can participate. Furthermore, all of my pupils learn to be eTwinners, which enhances their linguistic horizons. 

Usually, in each class, I have four or more students coming from abroad; some of them understand and speak Italian and English others speak only their mother tongue. 

When this happens I ask pupils of the same nationality to communicate with them and then explain to the class what they have said.

Doing so, I know some details about their cultural background and students can gain more and more confidence.

As I’ m a foreign language teacher at a Secondary High School, at the beginning of the year I do some activities not only to get to know new students but also to know their competences and skills. So I prepare the so called “entry test” to get an official starting point for my teaching annual design. Actually the most effective activity that I do in my classrooms is a speaking activity that helps me to know students’ communicative skills. Each studenti is asked to present himself/herself to the classmates and to collect information about the mates thay know least. This activity is also useful to help students to be more friendly with each other. 

In my classes there are usually two foreign students who don’t speak Italian and who haven’t learned enough English to use it as a vehicular language. I always begin the first lesson of the school year by introducing myself in French (name - age – nationality – job) and by asking Italian students who have already studied French at Middle School to introduce themselves too; it’s then the turn of Italian students who have never studied French and finally I invite the non-native speakers to do the same.

I’ve never  really applied a serious strategy to deal with the problem of multicultural classrooms. I’ve always tried to help foreign students but  only recently I become fully aware of need to organize my lessons for examples   with introductions including key words for the the lesson, or  inviting each students to give a short introduction of themself to the class... I’m thinking about all of this...

I teach English at the Junior High school in Italy, I usually prepare some games and activities to learn more about them and of course introduce myself. One of the main activities of my first lesson every year is the creation of an identity card to describe themselves. They complete this identity card with nationality, physical and psychological description, hobbies… and al the thing they think are important. 

Yesterday I saw in the webinar another activity that I use in my first lessons, the hand with the nationalities in the map. 
I think It works!

Thinking about the first activity I did with my students (divided into small groups) at the beginning of this year, I decided to implement a creative activity. I prepared 100 images (photographs) representing very different children’s games, past and present games. I allowed every child to choose just one photo according to his/her taste. Afer that, I asked to provide a title and a short description of it (period of the year, place, number of the children involved, the name of the game, related feelings, explanation of the choice connected with the student’s tastes and memories).
 It was just a funny semiotic activity in order to get to know the new students and to engage the students I had already known.  It worked at every level because I could calibrate it in accordance with children’s age, intercultural and linguistic competence.  During the second activity I asked the children to present themselves and their relatives in order to understand or to remember my students’ origins and their social/linguistic/cultural background. The students who were seven years old were allowed to write this presentation using their mother tongue (arabic), especially to write their names and their relatives’ names. 
Finally, I asked the older kids (8-9-10 years old) to write a short autobiography or to realize a short interview involving two schoolmates (one female and one male) in order to complete their biography. Also this activity worked very well. If I had had more time, I would have liked to realize some big posters, like two years ago. I had asked my students to provide different recipes from their countries and to report them using their first and their second languages. It was one of the most effective, colourful and appreciated activities I did during that first year.  Finally, I would like to hang on the wall a big world map, near a big poster presenting the different words used to greet in different languages (especially the languages spoken by my students). 

Purpose: knowledge and self-knowledge, presentation, self-characterization, question and answer forms

Required materials: writing tool, business cards

How we do: Each student will receive a business card with the following headings: Name

and surname, Age, Place of Origin, Mother / Favorite Language, Hobbies. Students will individually complete their books business cards with personal data, after which the teacher collects each business card and them redistribute to students, this time each student receives a colleague's business card and not his business card. Then, in turn, the students will present the business cards in front of the class.

 where they feel the character's emotions (in the tummy, usually!) and if they have ever felt them, when etc.. We ask them to draw their families and to talk about it, their
We play also games in the gym  (find someone who)

Usually I create a tool (padlet) were each student writes their presentation and it is used to present my class to my eTwinning partners.   

Usually I create a tool (padlet) were each student writes their presentation and it is used to present my class to my eTwinning partners.  

 For example this year we have  organized a game of association between the name of some European States, the respective flag, and the memorization of a sentence in the language of the State represented( ex. Je viens de France, I come from Ireland etc.)

When I have new children in the classroom arriving from foreign countries, at the first I look for a contact with the families to know the scholastic trail in the original country and to hear the family project related with the immigration experience. I think is very important for the teacher to know the personal or familiar biographies and the way of each narrations. 
While I contact the families, the foreigners community and the cultural mediators (when we have economic resources), always I organise different activities to welcome new children, generally doing games of knowledge using mime too. Then, starting by the Italian language level, I plan the activities. Often I had children who did not know Italian. So, I adopted a typical teaching of stranger language:  1) beginning each activity with a little and simple conversation; 2) working on semantic fields (school, family, home, body, etc.) for to improve vocabulary using flash card; 3) focusing the grammatical items; 4) drowing and writing simple sentences. 

Filling in ID with details

Multilingual greetings board

Self-Introducing (mother tongue)

Multilingual Basic sentences: excuse me, please, thank you, you are welcome.

Get the whole group together. The leader running the game calls out a category question (for example - what is your favourite colour?). Everyone in the group would then have to start calling out their favourite colour to each other and find the others in the group who have the same favourite colour as them. When a player finds another player who has the same answer, they then join together (by linking arms) and continue to go round the group looking for more people with the same answer. After a minute or so the leader can call "STOP". Each group needs to call out their answer. If there are two people/groups, who have the same answer but are not linked together then they are eliminated from the next round.
 One more “Name gesture” activity.

Start in a drama circle.

Teacher/facilitator models/starts by stepping forward and saying their name with an action. Then steps back and ask the students to follow the example, and then to pass it on to the next student etc. Continue until everyone has been introduced.

At the beginning of the year I usually propose group activities in the different subjects I teach (Art, Italian, English). I know that this kind of work is appreciated by children: they can know each other more and more, it could be a way for including the shy child for example…  They can share emotions, stories, experiences… With this kind of activity I can know them, their skills and their weaknesses. They become more responsable…they grow and start learning team working. 

Sometimes, I ask to introduce themselves and then we ask different questions to each other in order to discover some information about the students.  Every time, I take part in these activities, so they can also know some information about me. 

Unfortunately, I have never asked information about the culture or the language of my students. 

 

1 – the pupils pretend to be at a party, walk around the classroom and ask questions to each other (age, nationality, family, place where they live, hobbies)

2 – they make an online poster with their pictures and add where they are from

3 - they prepare a presentation using ICT tools. They can add pictures or even videos.

Most of the time these activities work though some teens are very shy and have difficulty starting a conversation or speaking in public. If these situations are caught, pair work is suggested to make pupils feel at ease and do their best.

Once a student described the structure of our planet in Arabic. When I asked an African to help me to interpret the content, I was surprise that he concluded writing “thanks”. The essay was well done and I discovered that he could speak French better than Italian. He was an important resource for the other students who were learning this foreign language.  

I only asked them to introduce themselves in L2 and make them change their seats periodically in order to mix the classroom 

So usually, at the beginning of the School year I introduce myselfe and then I ask my new students to introduce themselfe, so I can know some details about their culture, country and tradition. 

I am a Secondary School English teacher and at the beginning of this year, I organized some activities for language and cultural awareness. For example, my students introduced themselves by some ice breaking activities and all the students prepared a board by painting the flags of different countries focusing on the topic of “countries-nationalities and languages” from the curriculum.The students were also informed about the European Day of Languages on the 26^th of September with this activity and lastly our eTwinning project, “Peace at Home, Peace in the World” which aims the awareness of language & culture & heritage was approved and will be started on the 29^th of October.

DINO

In think it works because I give them one example and they get to speak to each other before speaking to the whole class. It’s one of the icebreakers I use in the beginning of the school year with the older students.

I try to talk a lot with all of them, I encourage them to speak about themselves and to share with the classroom some of their past experiences in their countries and in their families (outside the classroom walls). Conversation with pupils’ parents are fundamental!

Sometimes students are too shy or they may have cognitive problems, so my efforts may not works.

I think that a CLIC activity would be great to improve my proficiency, to create a multilanguage dictionary, to improve the curiosity of the classroom and I the same time to integrate the few foreign students.

•Getting to Know You: These are usually short exercises intended to help students say one another’s names out loud and find out a little about one another. These are useful near the very start of an induction programme when students are perhaps a little reluctant to speak to one another.

•Team Challenges: These exercises are slightly different and are intended to encourage students to work with one another on a task. The tasks are usually physical in nature giving an easy point to focus on.

In an English class (pre-intermediate or intermediate level B1), I would pre-teach some vocabulary and then students would watch this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmVLcj-XKnM
Students would do some comprehension exercises about the video and then, following the strategy of “think- pair- share” they would discuss the various verses (with or without the help of prompts or words, depending on the level of students):
“I (Mother Nature) have fed species greater than you and I (Mother Nature) have starved species greater than you.” 
“One way or the other, your actions will determine your fate, not mine (Mother Nature’s)”
“I (Mother Nature) am prepared to evolve, are you?”
“Nature doesn’t need people. People need Nature.”

As a project-work in an English class or on Social Studies, students would do some research on several countries where people’s lives have been affected by droughts, floods or other natural disasters caused by the changes in climate or on animals that have become extinct or that are on the verge of extinction. They would present the results of their research in class or give a presentation to the school community.