Question Hello, I am so glad I found this website, I just realized I did a big disservice to my kids. I am Italian, live in the States, my husband is American, both of our kids were born and raised here, I have lived here for 12 years now. In the beginning I was...
After taking into consideration all the points raised in the first part of this series, you have decided that you want to give your child the gift of another language. My presumption is that you have discussed this with the rest of the family and everybody agrees that...
Question Hi, I follow your blog and have found your advice extremely helpful in bringing up my daughter as a bilingual child. A little background, my husband and I are both perfectly fluent in English and Spanish both verbally and written and in professional and...
One of the most common questions we get to our panel of Family Language Coaches is from parents thinking about teaching their child a language of which the mother and/or father is not a native speaker, and whether this is a good idea. My short answer to this question...
Question I am a Swedish national living in the UK with my husband and 10-year-old daughter. The main language we speak at home is English, and Swedish is the minority language. My husband does not speak Swedish, whereas our daughter speaks it more or less fluently,...
This is an extended version of a post from January 2013. If you are a bilingual like me, you know we all do it – mix our languages when we speak to other bilinguals. When we cannot think of a word in one language or if there is a better expression for what we want to...
Question Hello, We are a family of four, two kids, age 5.5 and 2. Father is fluent in Arabic, French and English. I, the stay-at-home mother, am fluent in English and semi-fluent in Arabic. We live in the US, talk to Arab relatives on Skype weekly, and spend a month...
When you are raising your child to speak more than one language, it is important to know how to go about it – this is the raison d'être of my blog! It is however equally important to be aware of the things you should avoid when bringing up a bilingual child....
When I write reviews they are normally about non-academic books that I recommend for ALL my readers. Today’s book, Assessing Multilingual Children (subtitle: Disentangling Bilingualism from Language Impairment, edited by Sharon Armon-Lotem, Jan de Jong and Natalia...
For the last four weeks I have written articles on different family language strategies: one parent/person, one language (OPOL), minority language at home (mL@H), time and place (T&P) and two parents, two languages (2P2L) and today’s question is: Do you HAVE to...