trilingual

How Bilingual Parents Can Raise a Trilingual Child

Posted by: | 10 Comments

  A few months ago I let my Facebook friends know that Sabrina used three languages in one day for the first time! This, of course, was a milestone because we have been speaking entirely in Spanish to her, though she hears English daily, and is exposed to French in very contrived settings, like through read alouds and French children’s videos. Before our daughter was born, almost two years ago, we decided to attempt to raise her with three languages.Read More ...

Who Is A Native Speaker And Does It Matter?

Posted by: | 5 Comments

Recently a question in the Ask an Expert column really grabbed my attention since the writer wanted to know if she should speak a language to her child that was not her mother tongue.  The main concern being that her daughter would not be getting much native input in this second language. This article really made me stop and think because I have been speaking to my sons exclusively in Spanish since the day they were born, and I amRead More ...

Teaching Baby Sign to Our Trilingual Daughter

Posted by: | 5 Comments

Call me crazy but I decided to complicate my attempt to expose my baby to multiple languages by adding another element: baby sign. Maybe it’s not too surprising given my level of interest in teaching Sabrina three languages. I wanted to keep teaching her sign language as simple as possible because it seems that our lives are already a bit chaotic. I contemplated between using American Sign Language (ASL) versus Baby Sign because ASL is actually recognized as a languageRead More ...

How Much Does It “Cost” To Become Multilingual?

Posted by: | 5 Comments

Who gets to be trilingual? The situation always seems to present itself as such: one parent speaks one minority language and the other parent another minority language and they live somewhere, where the majority language is spoken. What about those parents who are monolingual? What about parents who are both what they call heritage speakers of a minority language, like myself? What about parents who would LOVE for their children to speak more than one language, but can’t afford toRead More ...

Living a trilingual life: It’s not all black and white

Posted by: | 2 Comments

As I typed out the title of this posting I could not help but form a smirk on my face. Here’s the deal. The further I delve into the work of identity construction in my doctoral program, the more I realize that individuals take on multiple identities depending on the context they are in, including several other elements that come into play. Even in the previous sentence I wrote there are several words I would have to define to explainRead More ...

Page 1 of 3123

Recent Posts