spanish

It’s obvious summer is in full swing because I’ve very little to share in this installment of Week in Links for #BilingualKids. Plus, honestly, I’ve been way too concerned with the wildfires consuming my state to be able to concentrate on anything else. Have you seen the images? They’re devastating. Hope you don’t mind me asking you to say a little prayer for Colorado. ¡Gracias! Amazing Bilingual Writers II from Life as a Bilingual/Psychology Today — As a bilingual writerRead More ...

Every time I come to Chile I am reminded of how lucky and priveldged I am to be able to travel and actually have a relationship with my family, that culturally I am well connected and most importantly that I speak the language, without that, I would be lost. I know that many who have come to the US have not been able to visit their country and if they have, maybe it’s once every few years. Growing up, IRead More ...

I hold the following quote by the linguist, Tove Skutnab-Kangas, dear to my heart and one that is always resonating with me during my day-to-day endeavors to raise a multilingual child. Linguicism includes the “ideologies and structures which are used to legitimate, effectuate, and reproduce unequal division of power and resources (both material and non-material) between groups which are defined on the basis of language.” This includes the languages we choose to teach our children and the ways we chooseRead More ...

When my twins were 18 months old, and I was waiting for them to turn babble into words, I still wondered: would they say agua or water? Más or more? Thinking back, it was a preposterous thought. My husband Adrian and I had spoken only Spanish to them since they were three months old. Having English-speaking toddlers was a linguistic impossiblity. Yet I, an Irish-American who learned Spanish as a second language, doubted whether I could really pull this wholeRead More ...

We all have such clear ideas about how we’ll raise our children, even before they’re born. Breast vs. bottle. Co-sleeping vs. crying it out. Homemade baby food. Screen time. And though in some areas I was able to stick to my guns, I was humbled by the fact that many things really didn’t work out the way I’d planned at all. The same was true when it came to raising my children with two languages. I knew we’d probably useRead More ...