Cricklanguages

Powys lead IL practitioner. Director of Learning for Languages, Crickhowell High School. French, German, Welsh, Mandarin, Arabic, Spanish! 30yrs + in education.

[Cricklanguages @cricklanguages]

This is very true! 🤩

[Christopher Hughes MBE @chrislinguist]

A year abroad isn't where you learn a language. It's where you live it. Through shared flats, new friendships, cultural surprises & everyday adventures, you gain far more than words: adaptability, confidence, perspective & a home from home. It changed my Spanish, and changed me.

[Tom Sherrington @teacherhead]

The choreography of teaching 30 children at the same time > quite a long read but dare I say I think it's worth it. Nail this, you've nailed it! https://t.co/R9fxgXRcgK via @teacherhead

[Christopher Hughes MBE @chrislinguist]

It doesn’t matter where your language story starts. It might be school French, Spanish from a treasured holiday, German because it’s close to English, Welsh, Gaelic or Cornish as part of your heritage, or the challenges of Chinese or Arabic. It's a whole new window on the world.

[British Council Schools @Schools_British]

See the latest update on the UK-Geman Study Visit by @ukgconnection

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

[Christopher Hughes MBE @chrislinguist]

I’ve seen languages open doors, build trust and create moments of genuine human connection that no algorithm could fully understand. Of course, AI has its place, but professional linguists still matter because meaning is human, context is human, and responsibility is human too.

[Christopher Hughes MBE @chrislinguist]

When you speak another person's language, you connect with their heart and soul. You show that you respect their identity and heritage. You're open to their outlooks and traditions. You're not limited to one narrow worldview. You meet other people on their own terms. You thrive.

[Christopher Hughes MBE @chrislinguist]

If it weren't for school French and German, I might never have discovered Romanian and Dutch. Spanish nudged me towards Portuguese, Catalan and Italian. Albanian set me up with Farsi and Turkish. Then Fate took me to Mandarin. Languages are journeys with endless destinations.

[Cricklanguages @cricklanguages]

Hollywood actor to join Welsh soap after learning language https://t.co/jwALlPJMme

[Cricklanguages @cricklanguages]

@ick_real My grandmothers were Agnes and Eleanor & my aunts were Edith and Gweneira

[Cricklanguages @cricklanguages]

@ThoNg676733 So handsome ❤️

[Cricklanguages @cricklanguages]

I’m this old 😂

[HeadteacherChat @Headteacherchat]

Teaching in the 1990s: A Look Back at an Era of Creativity, Change, and Camaraderie
https://t.co/jt3beYDstz

[MFL Mentoring Cymru @MFLMentoring]

Our April resource is here! 💰

Explore Money through language, culture, history & numeracy.

Free for Primary and Secondary teachers

#MFLMentoring #CurriculumForWales

[British-German Association (BGA) @BritGerAssoc]

We’re very excited to announce that our new free Associate membership is live!

Exclusively for teachers and students of German, you’ll have access to our free online events with UK-German experts from the worlds of business, culture, and academia. (1/3)

[Christopher Hughes MBE @chrislinguist]

Every now and again, a new language isn't just words on a page, or unfamiliar sounds and signs. It's a wholesale transformation. Spanish and Albanian touched me in ways I could never have anticipated, and built unforeseen connections. You thrive in a language that inspires you.

[British Council Schools @Schools_British]

Our free short online course, Learning for Sustainable Futures, is now open for enrolments! 🌍💚🌱
This week, we'll be examining our own understanding of #Sustainability and consider different perspectives.
Enrol for free today: https://t.co/OPF9nZ3D4a

[Cricklanguages @cricklanguages]

Pasg Hapus! 🐣 @crickhowellhs

[Cricklanguages @cricklanguages]

Highly recommended! Looking forward to hosting for the sixth time in September 2026 @crickhowellhs !
A wonderful asset to any school linguistically and culturally! All our assistants have been truly inspiring! @Languageasst @BCouncil_Wales

[British Council Schools @Schools_British]

⏰ deadline approaching! Looking to host a Chinese #LanguageAssistant in 26-27? Applications close 1 Apr. We offer FREE support to help you find the perfect match and guide you every step of the way. Don’t miss out, apply today: https://t.co/WQGNZCaFHs

#EduTwitter #mfltwitterati

[British Council Schools @Schools_British]

⏰ deadline approaching! Looking to host a Chinese #LanguageAssistant in 26-27? Applications close 1 Apr. We offer FREE support to help you find the perfect match and guide you every step of the way. Don’t miss out, apply today: https://t.co/WQGNZCaFHs

#EduTwitter #mfltwitterati

[British Council Schools @Schools_British]

Inspire pupils to progress with languages! This webinar introduces 3 speakers from different backgrounds who talk about their language learning journey and how they use languages in their work. Open to schools across UK. 🔗: https://t.co/6HxrNIGrrx

#edutwitter #mfltwitterati