Question Hi! I have been subscribed to your newsletter and blog for quite some time and it has been very helpful! Thank you so much! It's great not to feel alone in the journey of raising bilingual kids. Little background: I have two kids 5 and 3 whose majority...
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...
Which strategy should you use to raise your bilingual child? Ask the question and you can be forgiven for getting all confused with the different viewpoints you are offered both by experts and other parents. Today I will take a closer look at the best-known of the...
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,...
Question I stumbled across this website and found it extremely helpful and interesting. I tried to surf through some of the questions and recent posts but my situation does not seem to be covered. My wife and I are talking about trying to have children in the next few...
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...
Your first-born is on the way to become bilingual – you are so happy to see that both languages are progressing well. You have managed to arrange enough exposure for both languages and look forward to repeating the “procedure” with your next child. It should not be...
Question I am Egyptian so I speak Arabic and my husband is Italian. We speak together in English but we don’t speak English with our son. In his daycare they use English and Arabic and a little French. My 3 year-old son is speaking both but he is much, much better at...
Question I live in New Zealand where I am attempting to pass on French to my two children as a non-native speaker. The children are 3.5 and 1.5 years. At this stage there is some passive understanding of the language only. I would like to hire a live-in language...