Question Hei, in search of advice I have found your webpage and hope you can help me with the following problem: Our family (me, my husband, and two boys, aged 4 and 6.5) are German living in Norway. Both kids go to Norwegian kindergarten/school, so the surrounding...
Question Hello! My husband and I are monolingual but our 5-year-old is fluent in German thanks to a German immersion school. If she no longer attends the school, so her German exposure decreases from 40 hours/week to 3-5 hours a week, is she in danger of "losing" her...
Question Hello I am a school psychologist who has been asked to evaluate a student for special services that is also considered to be English Language Learner (ELL). He is currently six years of age. The records indicate that the primary language of the home is...
I love the African proverb “It takes a village to raise a child” - for the purpose of the topic at hand, I would like to expand it to “It takes two villages to raise a bilingual child”. This is of course not strictly true, but it does describe the need for extra...
Choosing the topic for this month’s Raising Multilingual Children blogging carnival was actually very easy. “What do parents ask me most about?” I pondered and instantly I thought “How to motivate my child to speak the minority language?” My fellow bloggers – who all...
“How to motivate my child to speak the minority language?” is one of the most frequently asked questions to our panel of Family Language Coaches. This challenge will also be the topic of the up-coming Raising Multilingual Children blogging carnival, which I will host...
I am very happy with how my daughters have grown up to speak several languages, and I am looking forward to supporting the coming generation of our family in the quest of learning to speak more than one language. Looking back, there are certainly a few things I would...
When discussing the language skills of children in multilingual families, you occasionally come across the situation where a child has learnt to understand a language, but is unable (or unwilling) to speak it. Quite often you will find this described as passive...
“You must start speaking your language to your baby from day one!” “She is already three and you haven’t started yet? She won’t sound like a native!” “If you don’t introduce the language before he goes to school, you have missed your chance!” “Older than seven and he...
Question Hello! I would very much appreciate your advice on the following situation in our family. My husband and I live in England with our 1-month old son. My mother tongue is Polish, and my husband's is French. Since our baby's birth we have been following the OPOL...