Autumn is here, and that means it’s time to look at some of the issues facing parents of school-age bilingual children.

Our kids are in school, and every day we ask the usual question: “How was school today?”

Their unchanging reply: “Good.”

Keeping the Bilingual Focus

Like most parents raising their children bilingually, we always want them to talk more in the minority language.

Unless your children attend a bilingual or immersion school, their minority language probably isn’t used during the school day.

That means that the parents need to bring the language back into use as soon as the kids get home!

Open-Ended vs. Close-Ended Questions

Conversation with small children requires a lot of prompting.

Drawing your children out, especially in a minority language, requires you to understand the difference between open and closed questions:

• Closed-ended questions only have a limited number of responses. Yes/no questions are closed questions, as are questions that present limited options, such as “Do you want to read your book or go outside and play?”

• Open or open-ended questions do not have a limited number of replies. They require the child to imagine a new response of his or her own.

Most advice will tell you to focus on open-ended questions as a way to develop your child’s speech abilities. Making up a reply requires more language use than repeating something you’ve said to the child, so open questions are more interactive.

For bilingual children, however, it’s important to remember their limits and to use a mixture of questions. Simple, closed questions can be a good way of easing them into the use of their minority language.

How to Draw Your Child Out in a Second Language

Our system for asking our children about school is built around a mixture of closed and open-ended questions:

• First, we ask short, positive questions or statements for the child to confirm: “Wow, that is a lot of drawings you did!”

• Next, we offer a closed question that uses school-specific vocabulary: “Did you go to the special class with the art teacher or did you stay with Mrs. Hanes?

• After that, we stay on the same topic, but ask an open-ended question: “What did you like most about the art class?”

• When they reply using a mixture of languages or the majority language, I make sure to restate their reply entirely in their minority language: “Oh, the big picture of flowers on the wall was your favorite? I like flowers too.”

• Finally, we finish off with a positive, exciting statement: “What a wonderful day you’ve had!”

This helps start our children with easy answers, then moves them into newer and more school-specific vocabulary, and finally leaves them feeling good about their conversation in their minority language!

You can’t always come up with an exciting question every day, but keep at it — and don’t be afraid to use toys or playtime to slip the questions in! Sometimes your child would rather tell Batman or Barbie what he or she did at school than talk to you about it. Encourage them to do it in their minority language, and then sit back and let them run the show.

Olena Centeno a Ukrainian who lives in USA, a happy mom of three wonderful kids ages 2 to 9 and a wife to the great man. She speaks three languages herself and is raising her kids to be multilingual in English, Russian, Ukrainian and Spanish. She founded Bilingual Kids Rock where she helps families on their bilingual journey. She also enjoys photography and video making as a way to preserve precious moments of life.You can connect with her at bilingualkidsrock.com

I recently read a fascinating study about how dinnertime conversation supports literacy development. Although the study was conducted in English, the fundamental findings seem to apply in all languages: family mealtimes were more often a predictor of academic and social success than even time spent studying, or participation in sports or church.

Regardless of family demographics, teenagers in the U.S. who eat with their families five times a week or more have higher rates of academic success, and lower rates of alcohol and drug use.

Obviously families who eat together are more likely to spend time keeping an eye on their kids and their activities and friends, but there seems to be more about family dinner conversations that help keep kids out of trouble. When we engage our kids in meaningful conversations at dinner, we get a glimpse into their world, their opinions, and their fears. Parents don’t only learn more intimate details about our kids and their friends, in family chats we have the opportunity to:

• teach them social etiquette
• show how to debate a topic
• practice expressing their opinions, telling stories, and understanding
• see other perspectives
• learn new words/concepts

One of the greatest benefits of mealtime conversations is the language development. As the parent of four kids ages 5-8 (who speak English all day at school!) I am always looking for more ways to get my kids speaking in Spanish. My husband and I sat down and came up with 56 questions to stimulate conversation in Spanish. The questions ask about wishes, likes/dislikes, opinions, friends — great for parents and kids to answer together and hopefully get everyone involved.

Here’s how you can participate: print out the list, cut apart the questions and fold them up. At dinner, have family members take turns picking out a question and answering it. For the little ones who can’t read yet, let them pick out a question and have an older sibling or mami or papi read it. Don’t worry about grammar or mispronunciations — enjoy the moment and focus on the content of what’s being said. Turn off the TV, relax, laugh and have fun!

For a printable version of the 56 conversation starters in Spanish click here.

How often does your family get to sit down and eat dinner together? How do you get your kids to speak more Spanish at dinnertime?

{Photo courtesy of Becky Morales}

References: Snow, C., & Beals, D. (2006). Mealtime talk that supports literacy development. In Larson, R., Wiley, A., & Branscomb, K. (Eds.), Family mealtime as a context of development and socialization (pp. 1-15). San Francisco, CA: Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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.