Welcome, Bem-vindo, Benvenuti, Bienvenue, Bienvenido...

Hello, everybody,

my name is Amanda, I'm from Brazil, and I'm living in Louisville, Kentucky, for this semester. I came to the U.S. as an exchange student in order to get my college degree at the University of Louiville. I'm studying to be a teacher of English and Portuguese.

In one of my classes in the U.S., Inquiries of Writing, literacy has been extensively discussed, and as a final paper, a research project, the other students and I had to talk about some issue involving literacy and to develop a multimodal project about our last paper. I decided to talk about how learning a new language may be beneficial or not to children's literacy skills. Literacy, in my project, is understood as the ability to read and to write. I chose this topic mainly because I'm really interested in the learning process of new languages, as I've already tried to learn some, like Spanish, French, and Italian, but I can only communicate speaking English or Portuguese, my beloved first language. Moreover, I am interested in this topic because I conducted some research in the Brazilian college where I use to study, the Sao Paulo State University, on young children learning English as a foreign language, and it was great.

This blog, therefore, is my multimodal project for my class Inquiries in Writing. My main goal here is to provide room for discussion about anything related to early foreing language learning. I chose to create a blog because I believe that people, in general parents and teachers, have a lot of doubts about this issue, like "is it bad for children to start learning another language when they are too young?", "can the foreign language affect the skills of the first language?", and etc.

In my research project I am most concerned about how the literacy skills, reading and writing, may develop in a different when children learn another language. However, in this blog, I would like people to talk about anything they are concerned about  relating to early foreign language learning. Therefore, your participation is really important. You can ask question, send me interesting texts and videos to be posted, create a discussion among the blog's viewers...well, it's up to you.

It is relevant to say that I am not a specialist in foreign language learning by children. I am only a senior who has already conducted research projects on this topic. My intention here is, besides providing room for discussion, posting sources on the issues concerned. I will be posting some academic articles, videos, and giving some tips about good books to read.

And if you have any tips for me, just let me know. I will be really glad, for sure!!

Thanks,

Amanda