bilingual is better

Ana and I have a big announcement to make today: SpanglishBaby will soon be a book! We’re writing un libro! A couple of months ago, we were approached by Bilingual Readers – a bilingual publishing house based in Spain which we highly respect and whose bilingual children’s books we’ve reviewed in the past – to see if we’d be interested in taking SpanglishBaby to yet another level by publishing a book about raising bilingual and bicultural children in the UnitedRead More ...

I used to be pretty harsh on myself if I couldn’t finish a sentence without going back and forth between English and Spanish when speaking with other bilinguals, an action commonly known as code-switching among linguists. Like many bilinguals and monolinguals alike, I simply believed this was wrong. I thought it meant I wasn’t really proficient in either language—even when I knew this not to be the case—or that I was simply forgetting my Spanish. I was wrong! In theRead More ...

Before Vanessa started preschool a couple of months after she turned two, I often wondered how she was going to survive for four hours surrounded solely by English.  I worried that others would think she had no manners because even though she already understood the concept of “gracias” and “por favor,” she knew nothing about “thanks” and “please.” I explained the situation to her teachers and they reassured me everything would be fine. You see, up until then, her lifeRead More ...