One of the biggest challenges parents of bilingual children encounter is finding ways to motivate their children to speak the family’s minority language. Children are pragmatic, so they use the language they feel most comfortable with. When they realize that they can choose their language and still be understood, they often pick their strongest language if they know that the other person understands it. This is when parents should find ways to motivate children to use the family language, to make sure that the child maintains and develops his or her multilingual skills. For a child to choose to speak a language, the child must WANT and NEED to use it. The motivators differ depending on the age, personality, and fluency of the child. These motivators can and do occur naturally, but parents have the possibility to create or enhance these motivators for their children to encourage them to speak a family language
Why do not all children in multilingual families grow up to become bilingual? What are the differences between the families that succeed and those who don’t? First, let’s start with some quick myth-busting: How clever or linguistically talented a child is has nothing...
Visiting your family’s original home country is an excellent way of supporting your daughter’s language development. Not only are the trips fun and you all get to meet your relatives and friends “back home”, but they can give an enormous boost to your daughter’s...
Beautiful flowers with accompanying thistles. Teenagers love to rebel, that’s how it is, has always been and will always be. Better just be prepared for it. If two languages have been the norm so far in the family, you might just be about the experience a major...
Ever felt the frustration of getting a response in the “wrong” language from your child? If you are parent speaking the lesser used language, then the answer is almost certainly Yes! It is one of the hardest situations facing a parent in a multilingual family and also...