This week’s Ask an Expert question was sent by Lisbeth Bosshart.
“I’d love an opportunity to Ask an Expert. I’m trying to develop a plan for teaching my children Spanish in addition to their learning English. Spanish is my second language (my parent’s first language which I learned growing up). I plan on speaking Spanish to my little ones, but I want to read to them in English so that they can develop strong early reading skills. So I guess the method would be direct speaking in Spanish, community would be English, and reading would be English. What I’m not sure about is should I speak in Spanish while reading in English or switch to English completely?”
Dear Lisbeth,
Thanks for your question! It’s great that you are focused on helping your little ones become bilingual and reading to them is a big part of making that happen.
Given the difficulty of maintaining Spanish in an English-speaking community, I would highly recommend you read to them in Spanish, at the very least during their early years. Reading in one language and discussing what is being read in another is quite challenging and will likely sabotage your efforts of keeping your relationship in Spanish. Most importantly, the strong reading skills they develop while reading with you in Spanish will transfer to English when they start reading in English.
The best thing you can offer your children is a love of reading, an appreciation for the written word and exposure to letters, sounds, symbols and the structure of books while maintaining your home language. I wish you luck with your bilingual and biliterate children. Lucky them!
Liza Sánchez – A bilingual education specialist who received her MA in Education at UC Berkeley and has spent many years teaching in both public and independent schools. She is the founder and Board Chair of Escuela Bilingüe Internacional (EBI) in Oakland, California. EBI is the first independent school in California to offer a Spanish-English dual language program, extending from pre-K through 8th grade. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area and is fluent in Spanish and English, speaks conversational German and can understand quite a bit of French, Portuguese and Italian. You can read her answers here.
As always, feel free to leave your thoughts or advice about this in the comments below. You can also leave your own question for the Experts here.
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We’ve reached this very point with our oldest very recently, we had books in English and Spanish available for them. She’s gotten more and more interested in learning to read and write, and I always knew it would be my roll to teach them how to do it in Spanish we were very happy with it. Well having the books in both languages was confusing her and she started arguing with us about the letters in witch a word started, for example she would say that “cocodrilo” started with and A (alligator).
So we decided to put away the books in English and only leave the ones in Spanish available, it has made a big difference, now we just need to make our collection bigger.
My son is only three but we have decided to teach him the alphabet and reading/writing in Spanish first. I only read to him in Spanish. We do not see his grandparents often, but when we do they read to him in English and he is fine with that. One time I was curious to see his reaction so I started reading to him in English. He was NOT happy. Since he associates me with Spanish, he only wants to hear Spanish from him. I am sure that he will learn to read and write in English when he goes to school. For now we want to strengthen his Spanish skills.
My language background is similar to yours and I have 3 kids (6, 4, 18m) and my advice is to speak and read, only in Spanish. I think it is a common fear that their English literacy will suffer, but I can tell you as an educator, and as a mom, that is not the case. Despite ONLY reading and speaking and listening to music with my kids it has taken more and more work to keep up Spanish as they have gotten older. And as told above, the early literacy skills are not language dependent. All the skills they learn from Spanish exposure to reading will transfer over. And don’t forget many of the letters have the same sounds so even those transfer. My son read first in Spanish, but had no problem beginning to read in English soon after. Best of luck.
Hi Lisbeth,
I agree that consistency is key when you’re trying to reinforce a minority language, but I also understand your concern about reading to your children in both languages. Reading is such an important part of language acquisition that it does make sense for your children to be read to in both languages. My advice would be for you to stick with reading in Spanish and find another person in their life who will commit to reading to your children often in English. If you live in the US, I imagine it probably won’t be too difficult for you to find a close friend or relative who is willing to make this commitment. Bilingual books can be a great resource for this sort of home reading program, because reading the same story in both languages will help reinforce the same vocabulary and sentence structure in both languages (you also get two books in one!). Good luck and let us know how it goes!
.-= Deanna Lyles´s last blog ..The Making of Bilingual Readers Week =-.
My spanish has been better I think I am fluent but find it very difficutl to keep it up in my monolingual world. I have been trying to teach my daughter Spanish since she was born and now she is 22 months. I sometimes speak to her in Spanish, phrases here and there. I find myself quite frequently saying it once in Spanish and then again in English. If I remember any French I throw that in there. I know she has learned her body parts because she points to them when I say them. Her English is really bad, she is slow to speak. She can only say about 20 things and im sure 30 would be the max. She opens her mouth like a bird for water, points to my chest for breast milk, you get the idea. She is behind. she seems to understand almost everything I tell her in English. I am a single mother, everyone around us speaks English. We watch PIm in English and French. We have done that forever and she loves it. We have very simple spanish and french books. Should I keep repeating English and Spanish all day or maybe choose an hour or so to just do Spanish. Im afraid my Spanish isn’t good enough to only do Spanish because there are lots of words I don’t know although I do know lots of words. Im not native. We listen to Fiesta from sesamee street and we are looking for other sources, especially something like Pim as I find this very good. Please give me some focus and an idea for a plan. I would hope to take a vacation maybe in a year or 2 to Spain to stay w/some friends. Im kind of afraid to travel w/my daughter to Mexico because of the corruption.