May 6, 2020
by Mary Pat
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So in your family you need two languages; one is a home language and one is the community language. You speak your home language (German) with your child and your partner speaks English with them- the community language. You and … Continue reading
April 16, 2020
by Mary Pat
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#1 multilingual children have two separate language systems from early on and they don’t get confused. Yes the languages influence each other but that’s not a sign of confusion. In fact, it’s a sign of separateness. You can only mix … Continue reading
March 25, 2020
by Mary Pat
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So we know that vocabulary is very important for learning to read and especially for understanding what you read. Children learn a lot of words! Some estimates say that school-aged children learn around 3000 new words a year while children … Continue reading
January 16, 2020
by Mary Pat
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How long should it take for your child to learn English once they start school? If you and your partner speak home languages and your child begins to learn English when they go to school, you might be worried … Continue reading
December 16, 2019
by Mary Pat
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In my last post, you found out about dialogic book reading and how to use books as props for conversations with your multilingual child in whatever language you need. (You can read about the 11 Principles of Dialogic Reading here. There … Continue reading
November 22, 2019
by Mary Pat
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You can Another proven way to support your child’s language development (whether they have a language problem or not) is dialogic book reading. I’m going to cover how to do it in two blog posts as it’s too much to … Continue reading
October 23, 2019
by Mary Pat
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You speak two languages at home. One of them is a home language like Polish which both you and your partner speak. The other one is a community language like English. You feel most comfortable speaking with your children in … Continue reading
September 30, 2019
by Mary Pat
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If your child has a language impairment or at risk of developing one you might well be wondering how speech and language therapy is going two work out. Especially if the SLT doesn’t speak your language. This is the first … Continue reading
September 5, 2019
by Mary Pat
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The truth is- it’s complicated! But there are some things we can say for definite and I’ve put those in bold. Vocabulary means the words your child knows and uses; kind of like their mental dictionary. The size of multilingual … Continue reading
August 29, 2019
by Mary Pat
2 Comments
A few years ago, I did an interesting course with the wonderful developmental psychologist Gordon Neufeld. (You can check him out here. ) I learned a lot about attachment. And the importance of frustration for our children’s emotional development and well-being. The general idea is … Continue reading