Lingo: A Language Spotter's Guide to Europe

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Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount. All the titles are beautifully illustrated, many by artists who work very regularly with the publisher and have extensive experience in the teaching and caring professions.

There is some mystery surrounding his cause of death. Some said brain fever, others claimed a surfeit of pork chops. Gordon, D. (2018), Using dual language story books to foster biliteracy, EAL Journal Blog, 12 November 2018, https://ealjournal.org/2018/11/12/using-dual-language-story-books-to-foster-biliteracy/ (accessed 16 June 2019) Let’s turn to your first book, Jon Camden Hotten’s A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant and Vulgar Words. This was first published in 1859 – why is it still relevant today?It’s full of slang. There are 350 different uses of slang in it, which is a lot for a single book and that makes it exciting to me. It’s also slang that I haven’t come across before in many cases, and it’s slang of a certain culture. As a slang lexicographer one is an appalling voyeur. And there’s no doubt that if you’re white, middle class and live in England, then reading The Corner is a very voyeuristic experience. I have varied opinions at different moments about how I feel towards the voyeuristic side of what I do, but The Corner is a fascinating book because of the language that is used. There is no artificiality, there is no putting slang in for its own sake. This is how the characters are speaking. His work was very much informed by his World War One experiences, and there is a lot of military slang in his book.

There’s no shame in starting “small”—what I mean is, keep it basic to begin with. You don’t need to grab “War and Peace” for your first e-book—or even your twenty-first. Children’s books or comic books are solid reading materials and both are available for bilingual e-reading. Start with what you know It’s now almost a year on from the invasion of Ukraine and sadly it seems that this conflict is not about to end any time soon. The UK has welcomed almost 200,000 Ukrainian nationals [1] so far and had offered school places to 20,500 children by the end of September 2022 [2]. Many of these children arrived with limited English and teachers and support staff were understandably looking for appropriate resources to ease their transition into school.For instance, FluentU pairs short videos by native speakers with bilingual subtitles. Instead of pausing to look up words in a dictionary, you can also just hover over the subtitles to see the meaning of any word. There are transcripts for each video, and you can save new words in flashcards for later review. Bilingual families and multilingual families, those teaching multilingual classes and learners, librarians with multilingual and bilingual collections and library users – all would benefit from having access to dual language books. Whatever your situation, dual language books offer a bridge between cultures, generations and divisions.