It’s time for our fourth SpanglishBaby LIVE Google+ Hangout and we’d love for you to join us tomorrow. This time around we’re discussing bilingualism and children with special needs. For those of you who’ve never joined a Google+ Hangout, you should know that it’s just like hanging out with a bunch of friends, except that you’re not all in the same room.

WHAT: In our fourth Hangout we’ll be discussing the basics of bilingual education and dual language immersion programs as part of Google’s #SpringIntoEducation movement.

WHEN: Thursday, March. 28 at 1 p.m. EST.

WHO: Joining Ana and I will be Liza Sánchez, a bilingual education specialist and 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.

Melanie McGrath the coordinator of dual immersion and transitional bilingual education programs in Southern California. She provides professional development training and assistance to parents, bilingual teachers and administrators in the areas of biliteracy development, bilingual program design and English language development. She can also be found blogging on Multilingual Mania.

There are many ways for you to be part of this Google Hangout online.

1. First of all, RSVP on the event page.

2. Add the SpanglishBaby Google+ Page to your Circles.

3. On Tuesday, March 12, starting at 1 p.m. EST, the SpanglishBaby Live Hangout will go on air and you’ll be able to watch it on the event page and on our YouTube channel.

4. The hashtag for all our SpanglishBaby Live Hangouts is #BilingualKids and you can use it on Google+, Twitter or Instagram and we’ll find you!

5. Once the Hangout is over, a recording of it will be made available for all to view, share and/or embed on the SpanglishBaby YouTube channel.

If you’d like to have your question related to raising bilingual and/or bicultural kids answered by ourselves or one of our experts, please fill out this form. If you’re interested in participating in one of our SpanglishBaby Live Google+ Hangouts, you’ll be able to let us know in the form too.

If you want to learn more about Google+ Hangouts On Air, check out this page. Feel free to leave us any questions or suggestions in the comments area below, on the event page or our Google+ page and Community!

We did our very first Google+ Hangout yesterday and we’re super happy with the results. It felt great to just be able to hang out with a group of moms — including our expert — talking about a topic we’re so passionate about and that we’ve invested in so much.

For our fist session of SpanglishBaby LIVE, we tackled the always popular subject of dual language immersion programs. And there was so much to talk about! From the many DL options available to why you have to be willing to take a leap of faith if you want your child in one of these programs, we spent a good half an hour talking about this type of education.

First off, we’d like to thank our amazing guests for joining us in our first Hangout:

Simona Montanari, PhD, Associate Professor in the Dept. of Child & Family at California State University Los Angeles, specialist in first and second language acquisition in childhood. Simona has been instrumental in the creation and implementation of the Italian immersion program at Franklin Elementary, Glendale Unified School District.

Xochitl is one of our contributors and manager of  SpanglishBaby Playground. Her son is in a DL program in Berkeley where she has volunteered for the last four years and is part of a group of parents and teachers who successfully achieved the consolidation of all the DL programs in Berkeley into one school which will start in 2014!

Rebecca Bernard is the Chief Cultivator of TheCulturedSeed.com, a digital resource for parents that value cultural enrichment and want to grow globally-minded children. She’s also a founding parent of a new Spanish-immersion charter school that will open next year.

Although I feel like I’ve written and researched this subject a lot, I can’t believe I learned so much from this conversation. The two topics that caught my attention the most were standarized tests for kids in DL programs and what happens when a child goes to a DL elementary school, but there’s no such thing at the middle and high school level. You can watch the entire conversation here:

I hope you can take the time to watch it because I promise you’ll learn something new. And be on the lookout for the announcement of our next session of SpanglishBaby LIVE. We plan to discuss another popular subject: how to deal with the bilingual rebellion stage.

One of our main goals when launching SpanglishBaby a year ago was to create the kind of community where parents raising bilingual kids could come and get useful and relevant information. Although we sometimes think we might have the answers to everything, as Ana Lilian likes to point out, motherhood has humbled us and now we know we don’t. Enter our most popular category: Ask an Expert.

We always envisioned having a panel with respected and trusted experts from various backgrounds related to bilingualism and we’re happy to announce that this is exactly what Ask an Expert has become. We currently count with the expertise of eight amazing professionals who take turns answering one of your questions every Wednesday. We feel honored and grateful to have such a distinguished panel, but we’d like to take a moment here to thank two of them in particular who believed in us and supported our vision even before we got started.

Our very first panelist was Simona Montanari, and Italian mom of two trilingual girls and an early multilingual development expert at California State University in Los Angeles. Ana Lilian first met her when she attended one of the popular seminars she hosts in LA for parents raising bilinguals. She immediately knew Simona’s personal and professional expertise in bilingualism and her ease in relating with parents would make her an ideal expert for the panel. In fact, she helped us launch this site by writing the very first Ask an Expert.

Author and bilingualism researcher Barbara Zurer Pearson was the second expert who agreed to come on board without hesitation. Reading her insightful book, Raising a Bilingual Child, was one of the first things both Ana Lilian and I did in the initial stages of SpanglishBaby. It was our bible. I still remember writing Barbara an email explaining what we were doing and telling her we’d be honored if she’d agreed to join us as one of our experts. Getting her positive response remains as one of the most memorable highlights from those early days.

A special MUCHAS GRACIAS goes out to both Simona and Barbara for believing in us way before anybody else.

If you’re new here or you don’t really know exactly how our Ask an Expert category works, it’s pretty simple. If you have a doubt about anything related to raising bilingual and bicultural children, all you have to do is submit your question here. We’ll try to match it to the expert who best fits your needs. Every week we post one of question with a practical answer you can implement in your daily life. Just remember: no question is too big or too simple. If you have a doubt, most likely it’s shared by all.

And, now, just so you get a taste for what we’re talking about, here’s a sample of some of the most popular questions we’ve received in the last year:

1. Should I do Something about my Son’s Grammar Mistakes?
2. How do I Continue to Reinforce Exposure to Spanish?
3. Does my Son Have a Speech Delay Because he is Bilingual?
4. How Do you Raise a Child from an English Speaking Home to Speak Spanish?
5. When Should my Child Learn to Read in a Second Language?
6. What Should I do if my Child Mixes Languages?

I know some of this will surely resonate with you, but this is only a small sample. If you’d like to read more answers to some of the burning questions we all have about raising bilingual kids, go here.

Oh, and don’t forget about our daily giveaways in the SpanglishBabyFinds section in celebration of our first year! We’re having a different one every day this week and you can still enter all of the ones we’ve posted so far!

What do you think of our experts?  We’d love to read your thoughts.

When we launched SpanglishBaby almost six months ago, I wrote a post about why raise bilingual children. In the weeks and months following, we’ve tried to write about or at least mention the latest studies related to bilingualism which have given us even more reasons why it’s such a great decision to raise our children bilingual. But we’ve never really taken a closer, more detailed look at why bilingualism is one of the best gifts we can give our kids.

I guess the most remarkable thing about all these studies is that they prove the human brain is truly amazing. According to the latest study, “babies being raised bilingual — by simply speaking to them in two languages — can learn both in the time it takes most babies to learn one.” The main reason has to do with our brain’s flexibility and how exposure to two languages from early on increases this characteristic.

The study, conducted by scientists in Italy’s International School for Advanced Studies, was published this month in the journal Science and it tested more than 40 12-month old bilingual and monolingual babies. Although it seems kind of impossible to test children this young, researchers do so by tracking eye gazing. Here’s how it works:

“Make a fun toy appear on one side or the other whenever there’s a particular sound. The baby quickly learns to look on that side whenever he or she hears a brand-new but similar sound. Noninvasive brain scans document how the brain is processing and imprinting language. In this particular study, 44 12-month-olds were tested to see how they recognized three-syllable patterns — nonsense words, just to test sound learning. Sure enough, gaze-tracking showed the bilingual babies learned two kinds of patterns at the same time — like lo-ba-lo or lo-lo-ba — while the one-language babies learned only one.”

Hopefully this valuable information will be enough to, once and for all, debunk some of the major myths associated with bilingualism:

Growing up with two or more languages will only confuse your child.

This misconception has been around for a long time and apparently it goes back to issues of immigration in the United States. Educators used to tell immigrant parents that it was better for their children to speak English at home – erroneously stating that early exposure to two languages put children at a disadvantage.

It takes longer for bilingual children to learn how to speak. 

The author of Raising a Bilingual Child, Barbara Zurer Pearson, says this myth is not supported by any scientific evidence. In fact, “with respect to most developmental language milestones, bilinguals are either at the same level as or ahead of monolinguals.”

They will only end up mixing both languages. 

This is inevitable and it’s harmless. But to monolinguals, it’s proof that the child isn’t really able to tell his languages apart. The actual term for this behavior is “code-switching” and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. I do it and it’s not because I’m not completely fluent in both English and Spanish, but because sometimes a word sounds better in a particular language.

Another recent study conducted by researchers at Cornell Language Acquisition Lab concluded that bilingual children are better able to concentrate than their monolingual counterparts. According to the scientists, “children who learn a second language can maintain attention despite outside stimuli better than children who know only one language.” This ability to better concentrate can positively contribute to a child’s future academic success, the study went on to explain.

What parent wouldn’t want to provide their children with that possibility?

As if all these were not reasons enough to raise bilingual children, a Northwestern University study to be published next month, found that it’s easier for bilingual people than for monolingual ones to learn a new foreign language. Furthermore, the advantage “persists even when the new language they study is completely different from the languages they already know.”

In another words, if we’d like to introduce our children to a third language or they choose to learn one later on in their lives, they’ll have a much easier time thanks to our decision to raise them bilingual early on.

Fascinating, no? As I’ve mentioned in the past, no matter how you look at it, raising bilingual children is a win-win situation.

I hope you have the time to read all the studies mentioned here. They are definitely worth it. We’d love to know what you make of the findings, so please feel free to share your thoughts with us!

{image by  emrank }

To continue the celebration of books, today we’d like to share with you a list of ten resourceful books to keep inspiring your bilingual journey.  OK, we know just the thought of reading A book these days is a daunting task, much less ten.  Don´t panic, this is just a list for you to keep in your personal archive and refer to when you need some extra advice and/or expert encouragement.

We compiled this list through our own reading list, research and recommendations from SpanglishBaby experts.  All of these books can be found at, my favorite place, the local library and in La Tiendita.

Top 10 Resource Books for Parents

1. 7 Steps to Raising a Bilingual Child – by Naomi Steiner MD and Susan L. Hayes. The authors explain how the brain learns more than one language, explode common myths, address frequently asked questions, and reveal an array of resources available to families. Packed with insightful anecdotes and powerful strategies, this is a one-of-a-kind guidebook for those seeking to provide their children with a uniquely valuable experience. Naomi Steiner, M.D., is a developmental-behavioral pediatrician at Tufts Medical Center Boston. Dr. Steiner is an expert in the methods that are used to teach children more than one language, and she works closely with many bilingual and multilingual families. She is raising her own two children multilingual and lives in Boston. Susan L. Hayes is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in Parent & Child, Parenting, Woman’s Day, and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn.

2. The Bilingual Family: A Handbook for Parents – by Edith Harding-Esch and Philip Riley. This best-selling book gives parents up-to-date information and advice they need to make informed decisions about what language ‘policy’ to adopt with their children. This new edition also looks at cases of single-parent families with bilingual children, as well as schooling and bi-literacy issues. The authors help parents identify the factors that will influence their decision to bring up their children as bilinguals. The second part consists of case studies of bilingual families, which illustrate a wide range of different ‘solutions’. The third part is an alphabetical reference guide providing answers to the most frequently asked questions about bilingualism. Bringing up bilingual children is a challenge and this book helps parents meet that challenge.

3. Raising Bilingual-Bilit​erate Children in Monolingual Cultures - by Stephen J. Caldas. This book is a longitudinal case study carefully detailing the French/English bilingual and biliterate development of three children in one family beginning with their births and ending in late adolescence. The book focuses most specifically on the children’s acquisition of French and English during their early through late adolescence, in both their Louisiana and Quebec home environments. Stephen J. Caldas is professor of educational foundations and leadership at the University of Louisiana – Lafayette. His research interests include psycholinguistics, socio/psychometrics, desegregation and the social/political contexts of education.

4. The Bilingual Edge: Why, When, and How to Teach Your Child a Second Language – Kendall King, Ph.D., and Alison Mackey, Ph.D. In The Bilingual Edge, professors and parents King and Mackey wade through the hype and provide clear insights into what actually works. No matter what your language background is—whether you never passed Spanish in high school or you speak Mandarin fluently—King and Mackey will help you: select the language that will give your child the most benefits; find materials and programs that will assist your child in achieving fluency;identify and use your family’s unique traits to maximize learning. King and Mackey are linguistics professors at Georgetown University. Between them, they have written nearly a hundred research articles and books on bilingualism and language teaching methods. Also, they are both parents, teaching their children more than one language.

5. Growing Up with Two Languages: A Practical Guide - by Una Cunningham-Andersson and Staffan Andersson. Growing up with Two Languages is aimed at the many parents and professionals who feel uncertain about the best way to go about helping children in contact with more than one language and culture to gain maximum benefit from the situation.Una Cunningham-Andersson is a Lecturer in English Phonetics at the University of Stockholm and the book’s lead author. Staffan Andersson, her husband, teaches computing and electronics. They are the parents of four children whom they are raising to be bilingual in English and Swedish in Sweden, and they draw on their own experiences throughout the book.

6. Raising a Bilingual Child- by Barbara Zurer Pearson (one of our own experts!) Raising a Bilingual Child is a comprehensive and versatile handbook written with depth and zest. It provides parents with both an overview of why they should raise their children to speak more than one language and detailed steps they can take to integrate two languages into their child’s daily routine. Pearson gives one of the best summaries available of bilingual research, and she successfully explains in down-to-earth language why the studies she discusses are relevant to parents and children in their everyday lives. Barbara Zurer Pearson’s Ph.D. is in Applied Linguistics. She is a Research Associate in Linguistics and Communication Disorders at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and did much of her ground-breaking work on bilingual acquisition and assessment during the 20 years she was at the University of Miami.  Multilingual Living Magazine says, “If you are going to read only one book on multilingualism, we suggest you let it be this one.”

7. Raising Bilingual Children: Parent’s Guide series – by Carey Myles. Written in an accessible, nonacademic style, this resource provides current research and real solutions to everyday problems faced by parents in a bilingual family. This research is used to help children deal with emotional issues and special situations, while helping parents understand language acquisition and cognitive development related to childhood bilingualism, whether by necessity or by choice. Issues addressed include the bilingual brain, school, biliteracy at home, emotional issues, and daily dilemmas. Also addressed are questions and challenges that can arise when raising children bilingually and learning from the experiences and advice of other parents.

8. How I Learned English: 55 Accomplished Latinos Recall Lessons in Language and Life – edited by Tom Miller. All over the world there are people struggling to master the quirks and challenges of English. In today’s America, many millions of them are Latino—and in this eloquent collection, nearly 60 of the best known contribute fascinating, revealing, often touching essays on the very personal process each went through to achieve this common end. Their successes are inspiring. Their pieces, engaging and entertaining all, express the whole range of emotions that learning any new language entails. And of course, every new English-speaker has a tale to tell: an immigrant yearning to assimilate and achieve, or a political exile suddenly far from home and alone, or a child who just wants to fit in. Their fears and triumphs will resonate with everyone who has shared this exasperating, exhilarating experience, whether last year or a lifetime ago. This wonderful, eclectic, inviting collection speaks to—and for—all of them, and goes directly to the heart of the national debate on language and immigration. Tom Miller has been bringing us extraordinary stories of ordinary people for more than thirty years. His acclaimed travel books include The Panama Hat Trail, On the Border, and Trading with the Enemy: A Yankee Travels Through Castro’s Cuba.

9. Growing up Bilingual: Puerto Rican Children in New York - by Ana Celia Zentella. This book provides an inside view of the social construction of bilingualism in one of the largest and most disadvantaged Spanish-speaking groups in the United States. It walks readers through a New York Puerto Rican Community and describes the five varieties of Spanish and English that constitute the community’s bilingual and multi-dialectal repertoire, the four major communication patterns that predominate in the homes of twenty families with children, and the syntactic features and discourse strategies of so-called “Spanglish”. Zentella, an anthro-political linguist, is Professor in the Department of Black and Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, and in Anthropology, Linguistics, and Developmental Psychology at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

10. Parents’ and Teachers’ Guide to Bilingualism -  by Colin Baker. Written in a very reader-friendly style, the book is a practical introduction for parents and teachers to bilingualism. Straightforward and realistic answers are given to a comprehensive set of frequently asked questions about bilingualism and bilingual education. Areas covered include family, language, culture, identity, reading, writing, schooling and issues. Baker is Professor of Education at the University of Wales, Bangor and a Fellow of the British Psychological Society. He has three bilingual children and frequently gives talks to parents and teachers on bilingualism. He is the author of 14 books and over 50 articles on bilingualism and bilingual education, with specific interests in bilingual development and bilingual education. His books include Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (4th edition 2006) which has been translated into Japanese, Spanish, Latvian, Greek and Mandarin. He is the Editor of the International Journal of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education.

Have you read any of these books? What do you think about them? Do you have any other suggestions you can share with us?

{image by  Horia Varlan }