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 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”.
In multilingual families, multiple languages tend to be used on a more or less regular basis. When one (or more) languages are not used or used less for a longer period of time, it can lead to language shift, ans sometimes even language attrition and language loss.
Are you visiting your heritage country with your teenagers? When our teenagers grow up abroad and we are the only ones or one of the few they get to speak our language with, meeting family, friends and peers who are immersed into that language is not easy. When my children were preteens, I observed
In this post you can find a list of strategies that support multilingual students in the most effective way
When raising children with multiple languages our vision is for them to become proficient in more than one language.
When I came across the video by Brooke Alexx the other day, I had to write about it. It is a very touching song, but also sad, as she thinks that she missed the chance to learn Japanese and about one of her heritage cultures. The feeling she shares in this song is what every
How multilinguals can adopt the Dominant Language Constellation to explain their language use.
There are many different approaches, theories and practices about how to start fostering reading skills, and they all differ across languages and cultures.
The Reading Rope by Hollis Scaraborough, a leading researcher of early language development and its connection to later literacy, is very helpful to illustrate what learning to read and becoming a skilled reader entails. But how does learning to read in one language differ from learning to read in several languages (almost) simultaneous differ?