CLIL means learning a language by using it to learn something else. It invites children to learn history, science, stories, games, and projects in the target language, whether it is the community language or a heritage language.
Writing Development in Simultaneous and Successive Bilingual Learners Writing is one of the most demanding skills children acquire because it requires thinking, language knowledge, motor skills, and cultural awareness to work together. For multilingual learners, this complexity increases further, as writing develops across languages with different structures, scripts, and conventions. Joan Sedita’s Writing Rope offers
If you are the only speaker of your language in a mixed-language family, you may sometimes feel pressure or hesitation about which language to use with your child. You may also worry about their future, thinking that strong skills in the dominant language are essential for school success, friendships, and social acceptance. These feelings are common and do not mean you are failing.
When we speak about literacy development in multilingual families, we often picture clear, parallel progress across all languages: a child learns to read in one language, then transfers those skills into the next. However, real multilingual development unfolds in waves, sometimes accelerating in one language while temporarily pausing in another. The pattern of literacy development
Across the world, multilingual families are navigating rapidly changing linguistic landscapes. Children grow up in multicultural societies, in homes where several languages coexist, and in classrooms that reflect a global mosaic.
When families move to a new country, parents often carry a big dream: they want their children to learn the local language for school and community life, but they also hope to keep their home language alive. After all, language is more than words; it’s a connection to grandparents, culture, memories, and identity.
When you raise your children away from your homeland, you quickly realize that the task is not only to keep a language alive. For many of us, it is about passing on a whole world of feelings and identity.
When families live abroad and raise their children with multiple languages, their experience rarely follow a linear path. Parents often tell me “My child spoke only German at home, but after starting school in France, suddelny French took over”, or “After a summer with grandparents, my children’s Italian became much stronger again, but then it faded once school resumed”.
For multilingual families it is natural for adults to blend words or phrases from multiple languages. This “mixing the languages”, or code-mixing, is very normal in multilingual communication. However, it is not advisable to use it consistently when speaking to and with young children, i.e. babies and toddlers in one-on-one situations.
As the school year wraps up, many parents feel a mix of pride, relief, and exhaustion. But if you’re raising multilingual children abroad, this moment carries an extra layer, one that often goes unnoticed.