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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
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
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
“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
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
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
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
The life of a Third Culture Kid (TCK) can be fraught with the challenges of speaking one or more (often, minority) languages and straddling two or more cultures. When a family with a TCK finds itself moving across countries frequently, this adds more complexity to the family dynamic in terms of language and communication. Like many families out there, our family has had to respond to these complexities each time we have moved. And we have moved countries three times
Though my husband and I are Polish, and we live in Poland—a largely monolingual country—the language that we use with our two children is English. Because we believe strongly that bilingualism is so beneficial, we think it’s worth pursuing even if your knowledge of the target language isn’t “inborn” but acquired. In other words… Non-native speakers can bring up bilingual kids, too! And I’m happy to say that we’re experiencing success at our bilingual aim. The other night I was
Konnichiwa! (That’s hello in Japanese!) If you had met me four years ago, I could only have greeted you in English and (maybe) Spanish…from the few Spanish words I learned from sleeping through my Spanish class in high school. I wasn’t interested in learning another language and never realized the opportunities and depth that can come with it. Moving to Japan I am—well, was—a monolingual mom from a completely monolingual family. We’re a military family and, to our dismay—at least
I have always liked the scene in the Disney movie “Big Hero 6” where, in a moment when the younger brother was feeling hopeless and out of ideas for a big project, the older brother carried him on his shoulders and turned him upside down to shake him and move him around their bedroom, encouraging him to look at things from another angle. Every now and then I feel like I need that kind of shaking up to reset and
