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
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
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
March 25, 2020
by Mary Pat
Comments Off on How To Teach Your Child A Word in Any Language
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
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
December 16, 2019
by Mary Pat
Comments Off on How to do Dialogic Reading with your child in any language
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