USEFUL INFORMATION

Helpful Links

The Extensive Reading Foundation is a charitable organization whose purpose is to support and promote extensive reading worldwide.

The foremost promoter of pleasure/extensive reading is Stephen Krashen.

Literacy Education and Second language Learning for Adults promotes research, practice and policy relating to adult immigrants with little or no home language literacy and/or formal education.

The EU-Speak project, led by Newcastle University, offers free on-line modules (courses) to teachers; these include one on the psycholinguistics of reading in a second language.

The Digital Literacy Instructor provides beginning reading software for adults in Dutch, English, Finnish, German and Spanish.

Research

OUR ACTIVITIES

Magic Mondays

The activity was introduced in October 2018 in the North East Solidarity and Teaching (N.E.S.T) programme, by a team consisting of three second language acquisition specialists (Enas Filimban, Egle Mocciaro and Martha Young-Scholten) and a creative writing specialist (Pedro Monteiro). Established in August 2016 to address needs expressed by local communities and councils of newly arrived Syrian refugee families, N.E.S.T began off campus with one family and a few volunteers, and quickly filled the provision gap left by underfunded local authorities to expand to an on-campus programme with students recruited via Newcastle University Students’ Union ‘Go Volunteer’, and through required volunteering for undergraduate degrees such as pharmacy for which community experience is helpful. Organized into three divisions – operations, logistics and provisions – led by volunteers, an average of 100 Newcastle University students volunteer for five hours each week to help deliver 11 weekly sessions and extra-curricular activities to 400 children and adults in the local forced migration community.  Magic Mondays is one of these sessions, held in a large, flat classroom after teaching has ceased for the day (the University offers very few evening classes). Follow them on Facebook to see the other activities they are offering: https://www.facebook.com/N.E.S.T.NUSU/

2019 World Book Day Contest