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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
My daughter, Vanessa, loves languages. Nothing could make me happier because I love languages too! We’re about a little over two months into our Trilingual Adventure with Little Pim – our journey to expose Vanessa to her third language: French, and I’m happy to report that things are going much better than I expected. I try to speak to her in French every single day, even if it’s not for an extended period of time. We either listen to LittleRead More ...
Ana
Roxana
We are two Latina moms – best friends since college – who are extremely passionate about ensuring our children not only speak both our languages, English and Español, but that they also grow up proud of both their cultures, Latino and American. Over three years ago we realized there's was a lack of information available for parents raising bilingual + bicultural children, so using our background in media, we launched SpanglishBaby.
