Comments on: Ask an Expert:What language should I read to my kids in?

By: Katie Goggin

Katie Goggin — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 06:59:57 +0000

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.

By: Deanna Lyles

Deanna Lyles — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 09:16:09 +0000

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 =-.

By: Maria

Maria — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 03:32:30 +0000

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.

By: Adriana

Adriana — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 01:53:38 +0000

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.

By: Kat

Kat — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 01:06:52 +0000

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.