We recently posted a fascinating article about how bilinguals switch between languages on our Facebook page. Parents often ask us for advice on raising their children bilingually. Parents want to do it and educators want to help.
Christina Bosemark wrote a series of 6 articles about raising bilingual children, giving loads of insight, advice, and tips.
Raising Bilingual Children: Fact or Fiction? is an interesting article that talks about some of the issues of raising bilingual education. Several key points are made, including concerns over language mixing (it happens, and it’s temporary), and that children get confused learning in more than one language (not really, because they actually learn *better*).
Educators who see children only once or twice a week are usually most concerned with exposure to the language. The more exposure, the better. Games, stories, gestures, and songs are all ways to increase the amount of exposure between lessons and long after the child has left the classroom.
Favorite comment from this section on exposure: “Learning a second language is simple for children, relative to adults, but in the beginning they actually need to hear a word thousands of times before it sticks — unless it’s a bad word, then miraculously you only have to say it once.…”
To be fair, parents and educators can and do face problems with bilingual children. Read about these situations in Raising Bilingual Children: The Snags. Favorite comment on language mixing: “In some ways, the multilingual kid has an advantage — if he can’t think of the correct word in Vietnamese, for example, then he can say it in English. While the rest of us are speechless.”
Want to read more about raising bilingual children? Raising Bilingual Children: Ten Tips for Boosting the Minority Language. Favorite quote on being creative: “The trick is to give the child lots to talk about, so draw out that conversation! Encourage them to make up their own stories, play dress-up and pretend in the second language. Even painting, working with sidewalk chalk, or molding clay usually creates more vocabulary than art!”
And lastly, for a little bit of fun, how multi-lingual are you? In how many languages can you count from 1 to 10? Try this Sporcle quiz and let us know how you do in the comments section below.
Did you grow up bilingual? Are you raising your child(ren) to be bilingual or multilingual? Do you teach children who speak other languages? We’d love to hear your thoughts ^_^.
