multilingual

Our little multilingual family has some exciting news! We will be moving to South America (Ecuador) in 2014! This definitely poses new challenges and exciting opportunities as a family who has multilingualism at the center of mostly everything we do (i.e., doctors visits, children’s books). We are already thinking about how our linguistic interactions will change as we establish ourselves in our new home aka the middle of the world. For example, we have considered changing our use of Spanish forRead More ...

I’ve always been a shy child. But I’ve always been extremely proud of speaking another language. Here are five ways being bilingual helped boost my own self-esteem: 1) It has given me strong communication skills Remember the first time you tried out your newly-learned language skills and managed to get out a full sentence and get a reaction that wasn’t confusion, but rather an answer to your question or a response to your request? Remember how confident you felt? TheRead More ...

I am Polish, my husband is German and we live in the Netherlands. I was raised in a multilingual family — my mother speaks English and my father speaks French and they both speak Polish and German. With our children, we have naturally assumed the OPOL approach in which I speak Polish with them and my husband speaks German. I read a lot about bilingualism. All the books warned that it is normal for children to rebel against parents andRead More ...

At my son’s preschool, they periodically do developmental screenings. I have never given much thought to these assessments since, having been a teacher for almost 20 years, I felt pretty confident that a learning disability or developmental delay would be obvious to me. Imagine my surprise when I learned that he had failed the speech and language screening. While discussing the evaluation with his teacher, I was shocked to learn that all of the children who spoke Spanish had failed.Read More ...

Recently my husband and I decided to go through the process of trying to get our daughter enrolled in a prestigious and private dual language school in our city. I honestly did not imagine having to go through what seems like a rigorous process this early on in her academic trajectory. She is almost three, which means she qualifies for the primary school grade classrooms. We learned that there were a limited of spots (~30) with over 125 applicants! WeRead More ...