ml@h

This post was originally published on February 18, 2009. One of the biggest challenges we face in our bilingual journey is being consistent and finding ways to nurture the minority language outside the home. No matter which method your family chooses to use–OPOL (One Parent, One Language) or mL@H (Minority Language at Home)–it’s important to have resources and strategies to immerse your child in the second language in fun and playful ways. I know, for a fact, that my daughter,Read More ...

The research I've read - and there isn't a lot out there - talks mostly about families using the OPOL method and it suggests that parents tend to be less strict about using the method once a sibling is born. Since this is not our case, I don't really know what happens in families using the mL@H method. I mean, we pretend to continue doing the same thing we've been doing all along, mostly because as I've explained in the past, it's what comes naturally to us. In terms of what happened at this weekend's party, I had actually expected Vanessa to use mostly English. But I was happily surprised, again! She actually did her own share of code-switching between English and Spanish and for no apparent reason. I wonder i ...

From all the reading I’ve done since the creation of SpanglishBaby, it seems to be that one of the biggest issues parents who are raising bilingual children eventually face is that their kids won’t answer back in the minority language – particularly after they start school. Although I really can’t envision this being a problem for us, I know I’m delusional – especially now that we live in Colorado! As I’ve mentioned in the past, I helped raise my nowRead More ...

Why is it that even though you’ve read tons of books and sites on the subject, and have freakishly asked all your friends-who already went through it-for advice and have been reassured that it’s totally normal, you still panic when it starts happening to you? OK, here’s the issue: my daughter, Camila, started going to daycare last November for two days a week. She was 15 months at the time. Until then, her primary source of language-learning was at homeRead More ...