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
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
April 16, 2020
by Mary Pat
Comments Off on 8 Things To Remember If Your Multilingual Child Needs Speech & Language Therapy
#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
January 16, 2020
by Mary Pat
215 Comments
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
November 22, 2019
by Mary Pat
Comments Off on How To Read Together To Build Your Child’s Language Effectively
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
September 5, 2019
by Mary Pat
180 Comments
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
July 4, 2019
by Mary Pat
143 Comments
Dr Kathyrn Kohnert, a speech & language therapist and researcher in the US wrote a very interesting article in 2010 for speech & language therapists. Her aim was to explore how to best provide speech & language therapy for bilingual … Continue reading
February 6, 2019
by Mary Pat
Comments Off on Can your child who has Down syndrome learn two or more languages?
If you’re a parent of a child with Down syndrome and you’re raising your child using two languages or more, it’s possible that somewhere along the way, you’ve been told to drop one of language. After all, children with Down syndrome … Continue reading
December 14, 2018
by Mary Pat
Comments Off on 6 Ways To Raise Multilingual Children
So in your family, you speak two languages or more and you want the same for your children. What’s the best way to do it though? The truth is though that there isn’t one single best way. There isn’t one … Continue reading
October 25, 2018
by Mary Pat
590 Comments
So my last post was all about screen time. How much is enough? How much is too much? You can read that post here. Realistically, screens are here to stay so let’s look at ways that you can use them … Continue reading