With the rise of dual language education in the U.S., have bilingual children become a commodity? In other words, are children who walk into the dual language classroom already speaking two languages possessing a highly valued commodity: bilingualism? The question, though, still remains, whose bilingualism is valued? Is it the “middle class” students bilingualism or is it those students who come from “lower class” homes?

To distinguish between “middle” and “lower” I’d like to clarify how I am referring to the two kinds of bilinguals. There are those whose parents have a formal education and belong to a certain (higher) economic bracket and those whose parents have a limited formal education and come from lower economic brackets, generally speaking. Both bilinguals are what we, in academia, call heritage-speakers of a minority language (like Spanish).

This past week my little girl completed her first year at Escuelita del Alma. At the end of each year the escuelita (little school) puts on a recital where each classroom dances to a Spanish song. The theme was “Los Insectos….and Other Little Critters.” One of the many reasons why I love and chose this escuelita for my daughter is because they value linguistic diversity. As you can see in the very title of the production there is a code-switch: Spanish and English are used in a single phrase. I love that because it reflects a common linguistic feature (code-switching) of the bilingual community we live in here in central Texas.

In an earlier post I wrote about my experience while visiting another Spanish immersion school before deciding where my daughter would attend. It was at that other school where I was informed “We don’t use Tex-Mex here.” What they failed to realize is the importance in being able to communicate with members of our local community, in addition to being able to perform linguistically in academic settings, like the classroom. For this reason I decided to enroll my daughter elsewhere, but also because they insulted a key feature of my linguistic repertoire!

My parents were or would be categorized as lower class Mexican immigrants and I was/am a heritage-speaker of Spanish, though when I was in elementary school in the 80’s dual language education was not an option. Now, I am a middle-class and highly educated parent of a daughter I am raising with multiple languages.

I presume her multilingualism will be a highly valued commodity as local schools try to fill dual language classrooms with “native” Spanish-speakers. What I will continue to strive for, as a parent and academic, is placing greater value in the varying ways people use Spanish and English like we do in central Texas!

“Secondo will maintain a topic of conversation with a peer for 3 conversational turns in 4/5 observed opportunities over a two-month period.” 

The IEPs are tucked away in a drawer at home. We are far away at my mother’s in Costa Rica, so I’m not sure that’s how the text reads exactly, but that’s the general idea. The many IEP goals are formal, measurable, and easy to forget unless I dig the papers out and read them once in a while.

I’ve long maintained that autism, special education, IEPs and all, anything my two boys can do in English, they can do in Spanish. And as I mentioned, I don’t exactly keep their formal speech goals in mind every minute of every day — mostly, we just plod along as best we can. The conversational turn-taking goal, though, I always remember. It comes so naturally even to the shyest of us, even if the conversation is purely superficial. Hey, what’s up? Not much. You?

Although Primo and Secondo have made so much progress, this skill has been slow to develop. Often, by the time they’ve put a thought together, their peers have lost interest and moved on. (Their teachers give them “wait time.”) And when it comes to the ultimate exercise in conversational turn-taking, talking on the phone, well, forget it. We’ve tried to use Skype to connect with far-away family, and it always involves a fair amount of wrangling a boy who is trying his darndest to get as far from the computer as possible. They don’t even like talking to ME on the phone when I travel, I tell my relatives by way of explanation.

I had not, however, counted on my brother’s influence this year.

We spent a week with my brother and sister-in-law when we arrived. The boys and their tíos horsed around, went swimming, and played fútbol in the backyard. Tía provided them with an inexhaustible supply of snacks. In the evenings, they ate ice cream together and watched baseball on TV. Our days with the tíos left the boys — and the tíos — happy and exhausted.

When it was time to leave for my mother’s, my brother took them aside and gave them a slip of paper. It was his phone number, he explained, and he expected them to use it to call him. He would miss them and would want to know how they were, and if they called, they could tell him about all of the fun things they were doing. Good luck with that, was my reaction, though I don’t know if I said it out loud or kept it to myself.

Still, on our first day here I suggested they might want to call their tío. Primo still wants nothing to do with the phone. Secondo was willing to try — I think he was mainly intrigued by the novelty factor of actually dialing the phone number. The conversation was tentative, but it was a conversation. By the second day, he had the number memorized. By the third day, he was asking my brother if he could talk to his tía, too.

Now, a couple of weeks into it, Secondo calls the minute my brother gets home from work, and I get such joy from listening to his side of the conversations. There are descriptions of his day, of the pool, or what he had for lunch. I listen to him giggle as my sister-in-law tries to bribe him if he’ll eat his fruits and vegetables. On and on they talk, until Secondo is done, and sometimes until my brother cuts him off because he just won’t stop talking. The bonus is that all of it is in Spanish. Their tía is the closest member of our immediate family that doesn’t speak English, a fact I bring up when I explain to Primo and Secondo how important it is for them to speak Spanish. It occurred to me the other day that I don’t know if the boys even realize that their tío does, in fact, speak English.

We rely so much on high-tech tools for communicating with our families, and to make speaking other languages more fun or novel for our kids. And there’s no question that the iPad games and Skype are useful. But when I get home in a couple of weeks, I’m typing up a list. At the top will be the number and password for my international phone card. There will be a list of phone numbers — their Costa Rican relatives, their relatives in the Midwest, numbers for anyone else I can think of. I’ll post it next to the phone, and tell the boys they can use them whenever they want. And I hope to get to listen to many more one-sided conversations, in both English and Spanish, in the fall.

{Photo via eyeliam}

If you grew up like me, you remember being pushed to give an abrazo to relatives you didn’t remember or who just plain gave you the heeby jeebies. I survived all those awkward moments, but I’m not planning to put my children through them.

When Ana recently posted about piercing her daughter’s ears, it was the occasion for our first disagreement (friendly, of course). In explaining my reasons for not piercing my girls’ ears, I referred to my belief in bodily autonomy. This is a family value that sometimes clashes very distinctly with my familial and cultural traditions.

I grew up a part of a very affectionate familia — hugs, kisses, cuddles all around. I have fond memories of lying like a litter of kittens all on my mom’s bed to watch T.V. or smushing ourselves onto a couch too little for the many of us at the holidays. I have long equated love and caring with physical touch.

I think that for many Latinas this is the case — entramos con abrazos y besos and even if it means we kiss 40 people before we sit down, that’s what we do. The same ritual is practiced when it’s time to go home. The physical connection with friends and family members is second nature to me and helps me feel connected to those I care about.

Even as a teacher, one of the sweet things about teaching Latino/a students is that outside of class they are the only students that will come give me a hug and kiss. It’s a shared cultural bond that brings us closer in a way that is quite lovely.

So it’s been a pleasure for me to see how my girls have adopted a lot of my affectionate ways. I wrote about this cultural body language when I noticed it first with Marisol. However, since then, I’ve also learned about the reasons why I should not enforce this custom.

To put it bluntly, forcing my girls to show physical affection is dangerous. It teaches them that they do not have control over their body and that they will be forced to do things that make them feel unsafe or uncomfortable in order to please someone. Even if it pleases me to see my girls give Abuelita a big sloppy kiss, it is not worth teaching them that they owe anyone a physical act of affection.

I know this sounds extreme. But the facts are these:

• 90% of children who are sexually abused knew the perpetrators
• 1 in 3 girls and 1 in 7 boys will be sexually abused
• One of the top safety guidelines given to parents in order to protect their children is to not enforce physical affection and to respect their “no”s.

Photo by dino_olivieri

We’ve spent the last four days introducing you to our recently chosen regular contributors. Today, we bring you our fifth one. But before we let you meet her, we’d like to recap who the first four ones are and what you can expect to read in their posts.

Chelsea – a 20-something single mom of a little boy she’s raising bilingual even when Spanish is not her first language!

Susan – a non-native Spanish speaker mother of two boys she’s raising trilingual (English/Spanish/German).

Elsie – a Latina mamá of a daughter she’s raising bilingual and multicultural even though it’s not as easy as it might seem.

Kimberly – a bilingual and bicultural mom who’s bringing up her twin boys—both of whom have special needs—bilingual against all odds.

Finally, we’d like you to meet Suzanne. She’s about to become a mamá for the first time, but she already knows she’ll be raising her child not bilingual, but trilingual. She’ll bring an interesting perspective to raising children with more than one language both as a mother and as a student of bilingual education.

Suzanne Garcia Mateus is an expectant first-time mother and a first-year doctoral student in bilingual and bicultural education at the University of Texas at Austin. She continues to explore her research interests and the various ways to nurture a trilingual home via her blog titled: Interpretations of a Bilingual Life

Bilingual Parents in Search for Adding One More Language into the Mix

As I research the Internet for useful sites or literature about how to raise a trilingual child I am stunned with the simple fact that there is very little information available. I have found several parents blogging about their attempts to raise trilingual children all hoping to receive tips from others trying to do the same. I have to stop and ask myself, “What does this mean to me as a future parent? What does this mean to me as a doctoral student in bilingual and bicultural education? What can I do with this lack of information and how can I contribute to the missing pieces as a parent and researcher?” So many questions!

Luckily, I have a tentative plan. My husband and I will speak in Spanish to our baby. S/he will learn English because we live in the US, learning English should be inevitable, and s/he will attend French immersion schools. Done deal. Problem solved, right?

I wish it were that easy. As a bilingual teacher, I know it will take more than my tiny, tentative, and well-intentioned plan. I decided to start with what I know works best when learning two languages based on my experiences of growing up in a bilingual home.

As I prepare to register for my baby shower I plan on adding French and Spanish books for my guests to purchase to develop a multilingual book collection for my baby. My husband has promised to practice his conversational french by attending “French meet-ups.” I will continue to learn french the best way my schedule will allow me to: via videos and CD’s. My goal is to eventually attend beginning “French meet-ups.” These are some of our short-term goals.

Our long-term goals are much more adventurous and unpredictable at this point in our journey. We plan on taking advantage of my summer breaks by traveling to Spanish and French speaking countries for an extended period of time. This will allow the whole family to use and practice the targeted languages in authentic settings. In addition, we will also be exposed to French and Spanish-speaking cultures, which I believe is crucial in order to fully become multilingual.  It’s not enough that we just learn how to speak the language(s). Luckily, we have the best of both worlds living in North America. Mexico is a five-hour drive and Quebec, Canada is a lengthier “road-trip” away. One-day and six hours to be exact! In addition, I plan on gathering literature that will guide us in this trilingual venture as a family and meet other families in our local community who are trying to do the same.

My most recent search has led my to a book called, Growing up with Three Languages: Birth to Eleven (Parents’ and Teachers’ Guides) by Xiao-lei Wang. Dr. Wang is a professor at Pace University in New York City in their School of Education. What I love about this book, as simple as it may be, is that it was published in 2008, which means the ideas are current and that there is bound to more literature in the making for parents and educators interested in raising trilingual children.

So, as I prepare to head off to the overly anticipated sonogram appointment that will determine whether our baby will be named Sebastian or Siena, both names we consider to be “multilingual,” my mind continues to stir as to how we will create lives that will embrace and nurture three languages.

We hope you’ve enjoyed meeting all our five regular contributors! You should expect to find their regular posts every Thursday beginning in a couple of weeks. Plus, we’re almost ready to unveil our new look and couldn’t be more excited!! So go ahead and subscribe either by email or RSS so you don’t miss out!

Photo by Markus Rödder

Happy 2010 to all of you! After a much needed break, SpanglishBaby is back in full force! Since we’re starting a new decade and will be celebrating our first anniversary next month, we’ve decided to make a few changes to our growing online community. Although we’ll reveal most of them at a later time, we are at this time announcing our call for monthly paid contributors.

What we’re looking for:

Whether you’ve been following us since we published our first article or you just stumbled upon our site a few days ago, you should know the main idea behind SpanglishBaby is to create a community where those of us who are raising bilingual + bicultural children can share our trials and tribulations – as well as our successes, of course – and thus learn from each other.

With that in mind, we’re looking for other bloggers writers who’d be interested in writing about their experiences raising bilingual + bicultural kids once a month. Whether you’re using the OPOL method, your children attend a language immersion school, or you keep our Latin culture alive through your delicious recipes, we’d love to have you be a part of our family. More than anything, we’re hoping the articles are personal, useful and fun.

We don’t really have any particular topics we’d like you to write about, we’re pretty flexible and open to your ideas, although  we would like for one of the contributors to have older children – at least kids in elementary school. It’d also be great if we could get a father’s point of view…

This will be a great way for you to get exposed to our growing audience as well as to get traffic back to your own site. Your profile and links to your personal blogs will be included in our special Contributors page.

What you need to do:

If you’re interested, please send us the following by Friday, January 29th to madre (at) spanglishbaby (dot) com:

• A post between 500 and 1000 words.
• A photo (or more) to go with the post.
• A short bio with a link to your site.
• If you’d like to write about a specif topic, please let us know.

We will choose FOUR paid contributors who can commit to writing a minimum of once post a month. As soon as Ana Lilian and I make a decision, we’ll be in touch with you. Thanks so much for your interest and please feel free to let us know if you have any questions. We can’t wait to hopefully welcome you to our SpanglishBaby family!