How to prepare your little bilingual for school? What to do if you get a response in the wrong language? Should you follow the teacher's advice to drop your home language? These are some of the questions that Marianna Du Bosq from Bilingual Avenue and I answered...
Expecting a bilingual baby
"We are expecting a baby and would want her/him to become bilingual. What are the things we should consider and what could we do in preparation for our new arrival?" This is something parents-to-be often ask me, so for this month’s Raising Multilingual Children...
Q&A: Bilingual toddler stops speaking
Question Hello, I have an 18-month-old. I speak only English to him. My husband spoke English and Spanish to him for the first 15 months and then decided to speak solely Spanish to him. He has been speaking to him only in Spanish since then. He started saying his...
From bilingual to biliterate – learning to read and write
I don’t remember teaching my elder daughter to read … because I never did. I do however remember when a carer at her nursery told me that my 5-year-old used to read Finnish story books to other children. They found that she loved reading aloud to others and was able...
Q&A: Choosing a school for a bilingual child – should language decide?
Question What is your position/opinion on a family with a father half Norwegian, half American, a Portuguese mother who studied in France, with 2 year old twin boys living in Portugal, to have the kids in a French school from 3 years old on? I speak Portuguese with...
Bilingual children – global citizens of the future
Bringing up your children to speak more than one language has many benefits – this has been proven both through research and personal experiences of bilinguals themselves. If you have read my posts before, you know that I often emphasize the benefits to the extended...
5 habits for parents raising bilingual children
The custom is to make resolutions for the new year, but as we all know, most of them fall by the wayside well before the shops start stocking chocolate for Valentine’s Day. As a parent of a bilingual child, what could you do instead? My advice is to forget about...
Q&A: What to do about bilingual teenagers mixing languages?
Question: Our children have grown up learning both family languages and they are now teenagers. We are happy they can speak both languages, but are horrified by how much they mix the languages when they speak to each other. When they speak to people who only speak one...
When your bilingual child goes to school…
… do you worry about what will happen with the minority language? Whether it will still be the means of communication between you and your child, or whether the majority language will take over? If you are a bit concerned, you are not alone, but there are steps you...
Bilingual children might surprise you …
Kids tend to come with surprises – raising a child in more than one language can only add to the bewilderment. Bilingual children can certainly surprise their parents (and others), because they … … sometimes refuse to speak one of their languages There are several...