Great Guest Posts Archives - Bilingual Monkeys

Guest Post: Why Your Child Understands But Won’t Speak (And What “Copying” Can Teach Us About Bridging That Gap)

March 4, 2026

I grew up in Germany as the child of immigrants, and for as long as I can remember, I lived between two worlds of language. At school and with friends, everything was in German. At home, my parents spoke their own language, and I understood every word. But for a long time, I mostly answered in German. Not because I didn’t know the other language, not because I didn’t care about it, but because understanding it and actually producing it felt like

Guest Post: How Meaningful Conversations Strengthen Both Language Learning and Family Bonds

April 8, 2025

When we think about raising bilingual children, we often focus on books, songs, and exposure to the target language. But one of the most powerful tools for developing fluency—while also strengthening family connections—is simply asking great questions

Guest Post: The Power of Plush: How Stuffed Toys Boost a Child’s Bilingual Ability

June 14, 2024

In just a couple of weeks, my son will celebrate his fourth birthday. The realisation that he has transitioned from toddler to child is astounding on its own, but it also marks another significant milestone: four years of communicating exclusively with him in my non-native language, Italian. Throughout this time, I’m fairly certain I’ve only spoken to him in my native language, English, a handful of times

Guest Post: Our Language is Everything!

May 11, 2023

X’unei Lance Twitchell, professor of Alaska Native Languages and language revitalization advocate, once said, “Our language is everything. It’s the air we breathe. It’s the blood that flows through our veins” (as cited in Ohle & Bartels, 2016, p. 2). I did not come to understand the depth and beauty of these words until the end of my parents’ lives

Guest Post: How Can I Motivate My Child to Write in Our Home Language?

October 15, 2022

As a secondary school language teacher, I see every day how much of an impact motivation has on my students’ learning. If they are interested, find an activity fun and/or useful, they will want to complete the activity in the best way possible. Writing is probably the skill that children find

Guest Post: My PhD Thesis on the Language Strategies of Bilingual Families

May 2, 2022

As I watch my British-Spanish daughters, now 14 and 12, chat away in English with their British relatives while on holiday in England, I look back at our bilingual journey and feel incredibly proud of what we have achieved. Born and raised in Madrid, Spain, our daughters were initially expected—by us and everyone around us—to become bilingual just by having a British father and a Spanish mother, with no extra effort on the side. However, as we know, “magic bilingualism” does not exist

Guest Post: Our Successful Playgroup for Minority Language Families

February 26, 2022

I’ve always believed that language has a very important social component and I wanted my children to feel that Spanish was a language that allowed them to communicate not only with their mother and their family in Spain, but also with other children and families around them here in Germany. So, in the summer of 2010, when my eldest was about a year and a half

Guest Post: What Does It Take to Raise a Multi-literate Child?

May 26, 2021

“AAAAAH ha ha ha ha!!” I was woken up by my sons laughing while reading Super Chien (the French version of Dog Man by Dav Pilkey). Most nights, I’m the one reading a bedtime story to my sons…and I also tend to fall asleep while doing so! But now, my eldest reads French (our minority language, along with Korean) quite fluently

Guest Post: 5 Things I Wish I Had Known About Raising Bilingual Children 10 Years Ago

April 30, 2021

Families are raising bilingual children all over the world. So, when you are expecting a baby and you or your partner speak more than one language, it can seem like a relatively simple project. Let’s raise this baby bilingually! First and foremost, you are about to embark on a beautiful journey which will at times be ‘laugh-out-loud’ funny

Guest Post: My Son Is a Language Superhero, Even If He Doesn’t Know It Yet

October 7, 2020

My son is trilingual: he speaks English, Arabic, and Urdu. That’s a pretty cool super power. Passing it on hasn’t always been easy, especially living in the United States where we don’t need to speak other languages. This article lays out some tricks and challenges I’ve faced teaching Arabic (not to leave out my wife, but I don’t want to be putting words in her mouth). But I’ll start with a key idea: our son speaks these languages because he

Guest Post: Alice in a Bilingual Wonderland – How to Nurture the Minority Language with Creativity and Mindset

August 14, 2020

Prologue Alice looked like my dad. She was seven seconds old and lay on my wife Bénédicte’s stomach, staring at me through cloudy eyes. That was a relief; not the cloudy eyes, the looking like my Dad. Definitely a Fielding, unquestionably half-English. Béné leaned over and kissed Alice’s mushy head and whispered, “Bonjour ma Belle,” into her left ear. I leaned over, my life having changed forever, and said, “Hello Alice, welcome to the world,” into her right ear. And

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