Then there is the question of grammar. Many students will find it difficult to cope with the fact that concepts in English can be expressed in radically different ways in other languages. Although all humans are exposed to the same physical facts of the world – location in space, change over time, duration over time, movement – these things can be encoded in languages in very different ways. Teaching students the relation between language and cognition, and the fact that the underlying core meaning of different grammatical structures is the same can be a great help, and is certainly better for them than learning a set of rules which they don’t fully understand.

The same issues arise when learning English. There is, of course, no ‘correct’ grammar for any language, and many students will speak a dialect which is quite different from Standard English. It will be helpful to teach them Standard English as though it was another language, and emphasise that this is the dialect which everyone can understand, and hence the most useful for communication and employment, rather than anything that is more ‘correct’. Students can also be taught that no language is ever an unchanging monolithic entity, but that languages constantly change, and were not the same in the past as they are now – consider the use of ‘don’t’ in Dickens, for example, where a modern speaker would say ‘doesn’t’, or Shakespeare’s use of double negatives, now not allowed in Standard English. There is also an interesting overlap here with history. Students may be very interested to learn that after 1066 large numbers of French words entered English, and that French was the official language of the country for 300 years.