“I would like to teach my kids to read in Spanish. Any suggestions on materials to use? Thanks.”

Hi Leticia! I love your name! Leticia is one of my favorite cities in Colombia – it’s in the Amazon region and it’s a very beautiful place!

With regard to your question, there are tons of great sites online that can help kids read in Spanish. Here is a collection of some of my favorites. You can also check out my Delicious bookmarks (http://www.delicious.com/miscositas) and my website for updated links that seem to pop up every day! ¡Buena suerte!

America Reads Spanish: this is a great place to start looking for reading materials. On this site you can download a book called: Essential Guide to Spanish Reading for Children and Young Adults, which is an annotated bibliographic list of great reading in Spanish sorted by age level and recommended by librarians and educators from around the country!  http://www.americareadsspanish.org/

World Digital Library: this site makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world; materials are available in Spanish and several other languages.  http://www.wdl.org/en/#

International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL): A digital library of outstanding children’s books from all over the world; read full texts with accompanying images; search archive by country to find books in Spanish – and many other languages.  http://en.childrenslibrary.org/

StoryPlace: A digital online library for kids with stories, games and activities; kids can read along with the story as the audio portion plays. http://www.storyplace.org/sp/

BookBox: A neat site with interesting stories in different languages, with subtitles or without them; you can access a sample of the story for free, but the full story is $2.99 to download and keep; free games and other materials as well; materials available in English, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Hindi and 21 other languages. http://www.bookbox.com/

MisCositas: My site! I have over 20 “virtual picturebooks” that students can read, with challenging vocabulary words linked to a pop-up picture dictionary; after reading the “book,” kids can view the accompanying video on our YouTube channel. http://www.miscositas.com

Lori Langer de Ramirez – Bilingual educator who began her career as a teacher of Spanish, French and ESL. She holds a Master’s Degree in Applied Linguistics and a Doctorate in Curriculum and Teaching from Teachers College, Columbia University. She is currently the Chairperson of the ESL and World Language Department for Herricks Public Schools, New York. Lori is the author of Take Action: Lesson Plans for the Multicultural Classroom and Voices of Diversity: Stories, Activities and Resources for the Multicultural Classroom, as well as several Spanish-language books and texts (Cuéntame – Folklore y Fábulas and Mi abuela ya no está). Her interactive website (miscositas.com) offers teachers over 40 virtual picture books and other curricular materials for teaching Chinese, English, French, Indonesian, Italian, Spanish and Thai. Her areas of research and curriculum development are multicultural and diversity education, folktales in the language classroom and technology in language teaching. You can read her answers here.

Photo by Mai Le

This is our second installment in our weekly series, Ask an Expert, and we are so happy to introduce Barbara Zurer Pearson, Ph.D., author of the informative and extremely useful book Raising a Bilingual Child–among many other qualifications. But before we get into all those, we wanted to thank all of you for sending your questions and remind you that you can continue to do so by going here!

A bilingualism expert with over twenty years of research experience in the fields of bilingualism, linguistics, and communication disorders, Pearson is currently a Research Associate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.  Her pioneering work on bilingual learning by infants and children and on language assessment has been published in scholarly journals and in the book Language and Literacy in Bilingual Children.  As Project Manager, she contributed to the creation of the innovative DELV tests, culture-fair assessments of language development published by The Psychological Corporation.

And, now for the question:

Do children stick to their mother’s native tounge?

The following question was posed by Rick Jervis, a journalist born and raised in Miami to Cuban parents who now lives in New Orleans. He hopes to become a father in the near future and has already started wondering about the process in light of his family’s dynamic.

“What if the dad is speaking the minority language and the mom is speaking only the majority language. Thought I read somewhere that kids tend to stick to the mother’s native language.. (my wife was born in Puerto Rico to a Puerto Rican dad, but her mom is from New York and so was raised speaking only English).”

Dear Rick,

You’re part right. If the mother and the community speak the majority language and only the father speaks the minority language, that’s 2 against 1. Children usually spend more time with the mother than the father, so it might be 3 against 1. But if you and your wife can add other sources of Spanish and if you help your children feel that they really WANT and NEED to learn Spanish, the family can tip the balance the other way.

There is already one very good thing in your favor. Both of you care enough about your children speaking Spanish to plan ahead about it. You probably both have positive attitudes toward Hispanic customs and enough background to give your children the *desire* to learn the language. So, the question boils down to: Will your children have enough *opportunity* to speak and hear Spanish from important people in their lives on a consistent basis?

As a father, you shouldn’t automatically count out your contribution to the child’s language experience. There are several examples in my book of fathers who were the source of the minority language for their children. I also recommend George Saunders’ 1980s book  about how he did it. (It’s described in my book.) Saunders was a native English speaker in Australia who taught his three children German so he’d have people to speak German with.

It can be done, but you and your wife have specific things to consider if you decide to do it. How much time will you be with the children? How many other sources of Spanish will be available to help out? If you were born in Miami, it’s likely that your English is stronger than your Spanish. What steps will you take to strengthen your Spanish, and perhaps learn all the little children’s songs and finger plays that you may have forgotten? Will you have any opportunities to join a Spanish playgroup or find a bilingual school? Will you be able to travel to Puerto Rico (and maybe someday soon to Cuba!) or other Spanish speaking countries, or have Spanish-speaking visitors come see you?

I hope you’ll go for it! What’s the worst that can happen? The children don’t learn enough Spanish to be active bilinguals, but they pick up a good accent (for when they learn it later in life), and they learn about Spanish language and culture in the process.

Do you have a question for our experts? Remember no question is too big or too simple. So, to send us your question, please click here or leave a comment below. Thank you!