November 3, 2023
by Mary Pat
Comments Off on 5 Ways To Support Multilingual Children To Develop The School Language
Langaloo and colleagues in Holland looked at 31 studies of teacher-child interaction with multilingual children and how they compare with teacher-child interactions with monolingual children. Essentially, they conclude that where children have low skill levels in the school language, teachers … Continue reading
November 3, 2023
by Mary Pat
Comments Off on How to support multilingual children in day care
In day-care settings, De Houwer and Pascal (2021) recommend that educators actively value all of the home languages. This doesn’t mean you have to know all of the languages or teach these languages in the day care setting. It does … Continue reading
November 3, 2023
by Mary Pat
Comments Off on 4 Ways to More Culturally Sensitive Early Childhood Education
You know that expression : if you can’t see it, you can’t be it? I think it’s worth thinking about that in relation to our speech and language therapy clinics and in education settings too. I’ve been reading some studies looking … Continue reading
November 10, 2022
by Mary Pat
Comments Off on 5 Ways To Support Home Languages in Early Childhood Interactions
Welcome to the second post in the series about how early childhood educators can support multilingual children’s language development, especially the home languages. Remember how Zheng and colleagues in Australia looked at the research to find what works? Last time, … Continue reading
November 1, 2022
by Mary Pat
Comments Off on 9 Ways To Use Translanguaging In Preschool
Here is the first of 7 posts about research-backed ideas for supporting multilingual children’s home languages. The community language isn’t in danger. But once multilingual children start pre-school, their precious home languages are in danger of backsliding, plateauing, stagnating, or incomplete acquisition. We’ve got … Continue reading
April 30, 2022
by Mary Pat
Comments Off on What’s the story with stuttering & bilingual children?
Key words about the research on this topic? Ambiguous, conflicting, sparse! I’ve read two systematic reviews that aimed to pull together several studies on the topic & I picked key points from both to keep things simple. First up is … Continue reading
April 21, 2021
by Mary Pat
Comments Off on Learning to Read and Write in Two Or More Languages
This is a massive topic! There’s so much debate about methods and strategies and timing for learning to read and write. I’m not going to try and cover everything in this post or we’d be here forever! I’m just going … Continue reading
March 18, 2021
by Mary Pat
Comments Off on Does the speech & language therapist need to speak all of your languages?
So your multilingual child is going to see a speech and language therapist (SLT) and you’re wondering if the SLT needs to be multilingual too. The short answer here is no. What the SLT needs to be is culturally competent. … Continue reading
September 28, 2020
by Mary Pat
Comments Off on Language Development in Multilingual Twins
My last post which you can read here is all about language development in monolingual twins. There isn’t a lot of recent research on that topic and there’s even less out there when it comes to multilingual twins. I kept … Continue reading
May 6, 2020
by Mary Pat
Comments Off on How To Encourage Your Child To Use Your Home Language
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