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...
Q&A: How can we help our bilingual child become fully fluent in both languages?
Question My wife and I live in Trinidad & Tobago (my wife is a native, I am German) and we now have a 10 month old that we want to raise bilingually. I speak to him exclusively in German and my wife in English, but I speak to her in English even when he is around. In...
Q&A: Bilingual child minders speaking more than one language – good or bad?
Question Hi, I'm a Spanish-speaking mother married to a German speaker, living in Germany. Each of us uses our native language when interacting with our 4-month daughter - basically: one parent one language. I am now looking at kindergartens for my daughter to go to...
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...
Q&A: How to handle different character sets when raising bilingual children
Question I love your website! It has helped me so much in learning how to raise our son and daughter in a bilingual home. My husband is Thai, and I am American, and we live in America. I'm a stay-at-home mom, and conversational in Thai, so I speak Thai at home with my...
Q&A: Choice of languages when raising a trilingual child
Question Dear Multilingual Parenting team, This is a trilingual situation: My husband (native American/good Greek speaker) and I (native German/very good Greek and English speaker) currently live in Greece with our 19 month old son and are planning on moving to...