Revisiting one of my favourite topics – love for books, and why reading is so beneficial to a child’s language (and general) development! 1 – Reading time is bonding time Sitting down to read to your son or daughter gives you the opportunity to bond with them in a...
Q&A: How can monolingual parents keep up with their bilingual children?
Question Hello! My husband and I are both monolingual English speakers living in the southern United States. When our daughter was born, we fell in love with a Spanish-Immersion daycare in our area and our daughter has attended full-time since 14 months old (she is...
Q&A: How to cope with multiple languages in a family?
Question My wife and I are having a baby, we are truly excited but we are scared about the language in how to educate our child. We are of different nationalities, Portuguese and Russian, we live in Germany (since one year) and our common language is English (our...
Q&A: How to teach a non-native language (English) to a toddler
Question Hello, I am from Poland and the father of a 20 months old daughter. For me and my wife out mother tongue is Polish. I caught up an idea to introduce another language to my child from TV cartoons … let me explain. Here in Poland in national television, there...
Family language strategy – a must-have for raising bilingual children?
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...
Q&A: Can I teach my son Spanish during the weekends?
Question Hello, My son is five and his mother tongue is English, I'm trying to speak in Spanish with him. He is interested in learning Spanish and already knows some words, but what would be the best method to turn him bilingual? He is with me on weekends and I am the...
Two parents, two languages – 2P2L, double the benefits of OPOL?
In my series on different strategies for raising a bilingual child, I will today introduce an approach, which you may not have heard about: two parents, two languages (2P2L). Previously in this series, I have written about one parent/person, one language (OPOL),...
Time and place – T&P as a family language strategy
When raising a bilingual child, it is always good to plan ahead so that everyone is clear about who is going to speak what language in the family when the new baby arrives. This post is the third post in my series of different approaches parents can take if they...
Q&A: Will parents mixing languages confuse a bilingual child?
Question Both my husband and I are bilingual in French and English. We have exposed our daughter to both languages and I now realise that we may be confusing her as we both speak both to her... We currently live in an English-speaking country and plan to move back to...
Minority language at home – mL@H: use it if you can!
The first post in the series about bilingual family language strategies was about one parent/person, one language or simply OPOL as it is generally known. Now it's the turn of the approach called minority language at home, with the slightly more complicated acronym of...





