Hi everyone, I’m Elisavet Arkolaki, and it’s great connecting with you through Multilingual Families! I’m a multilingual mom raising two beautiful multilingual and ethnically mixed children. I’m also a children’s book author, mainly writing and publishing bilingual books. I have lived in six countries, and my home now, most of the time, is in Norway.
In this post I address the distinction between simultaneous and successive bilingual emergent readers, providing practical, research-backed strategies for working with both groups.
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?
In our multilingual language timeline we can discover how many languages we have acquired or learned along the way.
Children love cartoons, movies, games and we all know that the villains, the “bad guys” are not only characterized by features that make them unpleasant, but also by foreign accents. Sociolinguist Calvin Gidney started to study language patterns in animated kid’s entertainment after noticing that Mufasa had an American accent, whereas Scar, the lion of the
Why do people assume that multilinguals have multiple personalities? Having multiple personalities is a disorder, being multilingual is not!
When parents ask me how to help their not verbal children start speaking I usually suggest techniques that involve music. The same goes with literacy skills. Musical notes and a free style of representing music and the spoken word can help our children understand how language works. How language can be “translated” into sounds, and
When I first heard about baby sign language, my children were already verbal. Here in Europe it seems not as common to teach babies and infants signs if they are not deaf growing up with deaf parents. I have since read about this and met families who have taught their babies how to sign words
When our children are schooled in another language since the beginning, their most dominant language for counting and doing maths is the school language.