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...
Parents in multilingual families face the choice of teaching their child both of their languages from the start or wait with the next language until the first is established and the child is fluent in it. The decision whether to go for one language at a time (also...
Any parent with a teenage daughter in the house has probably at some point had thoughts along those lines. But what if it is a grandmother thinking that? And what if it is actually true? How does it feel not to be able to speak to your granddaughter? How would this...
By now you have probably noticed that I am rather passionate about families passing on their languages to their children. It’s a chance of a life time, far too valuable to miss. So it upsets me greatly when parents say that they don't speak their language to their...
What to do if a teacher tells you that your daughter’s progress at school is hampered by the use of the minority language at home? How to react if the school thinks that you are making her learning more difficult by insisting on her becoming bilingual? Hearing...
After reading the same story multiple times, ever felt the urge to shred the pages of your daughter’s favourite fairy tale book or to accidentally misplace it, so you could read something else? I know I did – I must have read the Billy Goats Gruff story hundreds times...
“Today’s kids don’t want to learn our language”, “Once they go to school it will all be out of the window”, “We really tried but our children just didn’t want to know”. Probably every bilingual person knows parents who have not been successful in passing on their...
“You must start when he is a small baby!”, “No point trying after he has turned three!”, “Definitely begin before he goes to school!”, “Older than seven and he will not get fluent!”, “He’s a teenager – no way!” Those are some of the answers you may get – and do you...
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...
[ted id=1075] Today I want to share with you a talk by Patricia Kuhl, Professor of Speech and Hearing Sciences at the University of Washington. It is a fascinating insight into how small babies pick up distinct features of a language. The talk only lasts about ten...