The number of parents who raise their children in a multilingual environment is increasing. More and more individuals and whole families move from one country to another due to work, studies or other reasons. Couples with different native languages meet and start a...
Question We want our son to be at least bilingual Spanish/English and hopefully have a good command of French too. I look after my son full time since my wife works during the day. So I am desperately trying to work out the best way to approach making sure our son...
Throughout history bilingual people have been (and still are) asked some fairly silly questions. What if the shoe was on the other foot – what questions could we as bilinguals ask? 1 - What have you done to cure your monolingualism? Bilingual people have been classed...
“What if I don’t understand what my child is saying?” is one of the bigger concerns a parent of a budding bilingual child can have. It can be a worry especially for parents in families who follow the one parent, one language (OPOL) strategy. Parents who do not...
Motivation is the key to any language learning, never more so than for a bilingual child keeping up with the minority language. 1 - Habit If you consistently stick to speaking the minority language with your children, they are less likely to want to switch to the...
This is the last post in my four-part A-B-C for parents in families with more than one language. T is for Talk Interaction is the key to learning a language. Talk a lot to your children. Ideally start before they are born – this way you get used to speaking your...
This is the third post in my four-part A-B-C for parents in families with more than one language. M is for Myths There are so many myths about bilingual children and how to raise them that I don’t know where to start. In my opinion, the most damaging ones are: 1. that...
This is the second part in my A-B-C for parents passing on their languages to their little ones. G is for Grandparents Grandparents and other family members can be of great help when raising a bilingual child. This is especially important to remember if you are the...
So you have successfully passed on your language to your children and they are happy to talk your language with you. Maybe they have also spoken your language amongst themselves up to now. Then the language pattern changes and they switch to the majority language....
So you have decided to bring up your son to speak your family’s languages – what will this mean for your family life? What will be different? 1. A little bit of extra effort There is a bit of extra effort to be put in for you to succeed in raising your son to become a...