November 3, 2023
by Mary Pat
Comments Off on 5 Ways To Support Multilingual Children To Develop The School Language

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
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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

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

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
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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?

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
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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?

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
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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

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