Finding resources to support your child’s language development is something most parents of future bilinguals find themselves doing on a regular basis. It is also the question which is most frequently asked in parents’ forums. Therefore I have decided to start a...
A minority language parent’s attitude to his or her own language can be the deciding factor for how fluently the child will learn to speak the language. This is an interesting find from an on-going small-scale study of bilingual children. According to the study, a...
Today, having helped my younger daughter pack for her trip to the other side of the world, I was again reminded of how travelling has been important, in so many ways, for her and her sister. Apart from the obvious of visiting new and revisiting familiar places,...
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...
"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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Today I want to share with you an interview which the lovely Marianna Du Bosq from Bilingual Avenue invited me to. If you haven't already checked out her site, I warmly recommend her podcasts on the topic of raising bilingual children. We chatted about my book and the...