10 reasons why your bilingual child has an advantage at school “Should we drop a language to help our bilingual child do better at school?” is a question parents occasionally ask me when they are concerned about their kids’ educational progress. The answer is a...
Can monolingualism make you ill? “Is monolingualism making us ill?” was the somewhat provocative title of an excellent talk by Dr Thomas Bak, neuroscientist and dementia researcher at the University of Edinburgh, which I was fortunate to listen to last week....
Question Hei! I am a German single mom to a soon 4-year-old boy. He was born in Finland and we've been living here all the time. At home I only speak German to him. He started to attend Finnish daycare at age 1.5 (part time), full time from age 2.5. Although...
This week’s topic is another manifestation of bilingual living: translanguaging. If you look up the term in Wikipedia, it is described as “the dynamic process whereby multilingual language users mediate complex social and cognitive activities through strategic...
Every single child is lovable and should be loved, just for existing in this world. Today, my list is about the specific lovability factor of bilingual children, as they are my favourite topic: Create and maintain relationships The more languages bilingual...
Throughout history bilingual people have been (and still are) asked some fairly silly questions. What if the shoe was on the other foot – what questions could we as bilinguals ask? 1 - What have you done to cure your monolingualism? Bilingual people have been classed...
Every child is good at something and as parents we love seeing our children do well. Bilingual children have an added advantage in different situations in their lives – and they often get really good, and – depending on their personality – sometimes cheeky with their...
This post is also available in the following languages (click on the picture to read the post). More translations to follow: [mlp_include id=4168] 1 - It doesn’t happen by magic Children do not become bilingual “by magic”. There is a persistent myth claiming that...
I have been reading many articles on the benefits of bilingualism lately and I decided to gather some of the best ones into one post and share them with you. This is one of my favourite topics, so I have already written about it on different occasions: how languages...
Today I am starting a four part A-B-C for all you parents passing on your languages to your children – or maybe you are planning to do so, but haven’t quite made up your mind yet. A is for Advantages The list of benefits that accompanies being bilingual is long,...