How multilingual dreams are connected to language learning – Quiz

1.  Read the text and answer the questions. 

1. What does the World Health Organization say are the benefits of eating fruit and vegetables?

The World Health Organization says eating a minimum of 400g of fruit and  vegetables a day helps to lower the risk of serious health problems, such as  heart disease, stroke and some types of cancer.

2. According to research, how many lives could be saved if people in the UK followed dietary guidelines?

Research by the University of Oxford found around 33,000 lives a year could be  saved if everyone in the UK followed dietary guidelines.

3. Why might drinking orange juice not be considered a healthy option as part of our five-a-day?

Counting orange juice, for example, as one of your portions isn’t so beneficial  because it contains sugar.

4. True or false? Dr Peter Scarborough says that we don’t have to limit ourselves  to five portions of fruit and vegetable a day.

True. Dr Peter Scarborough told the BBC: “According to our model, the biggest impact would be eating more fruit and veg. But this doesn’t mean you should just stop at five – the more the better.”

5. Which are richer in nutrients – fruit or vegetables?

Vegetables are richer in nutrients.

2.  Choose the appropriate words or phrases to complete the following sentences.

1. My diet hasn’t been great recently – I’ve been eating too many takeaways!

2. The footballer’s premature death came as shock to the fans. He was only playing football last week.

3. My doctor has told me to reduce my cholesterol. I need to eat food that is high in  fiber .

4. It’s important to eat good food to be fit and healthy, that’s why people say  we are what we eat .

5. My intention was to start cycling to work every day, but I decided it was easier to take the bus. 

How multilingual dreams are connected to language learning

It is often said that if we dream in a foreign language, it’s a sign that we are making progress in learning that language. But is it true?

Before we can look at multilingual dreams, first we need to look at sleep. The link between sleep and language can be applied to how we learn any language, including our mother tongue. Even adults still learn about one new word every two days in their first language, but, if we are going to have a firm grasp of that new word, we need to link it to our existing knowledge. And in order to do that, we ‘need to have some sleep’, says Gareth Gaskell, a psychology professor at the University of York.

It’s during sleep that the integration of old and new knowledge happens. At night, one part of our brain – the hippocampus – takes whatever new information it soaked up in the day, and passes it on to other parts of the brain to be stored. The role that dreams play in this night-time learning process is still being studied, but ‘it’s entirely possible that during multilingual dreams, the brain is trying to connect two languages’, says Marc Züst, researcher at the University Hospital of Old Age Psychiatry and Psychotherapy in Bern, Switzerland.

So having multilingual dreams could mean that our brain is trying to master a new word or phrase, for example, but it could also have an emotional significance. Danuta Gabryś-Barker, a professor of psycholinguistics at the University of Silesia in Poland, suggests that multilingual dreams can express ‘fears and desires‘ around learning a foreign language, including the wish to be a native-like speaker or to be accepted within a certain community.

We clearly still have a lot to learn about multilingual dreams, but one thing seems certain: if you’re trying to learn a new language, you should definitely sleep on it.