Raising Multilinguals

This past Monday, Caroline Delhommeau and Karli Walsh presented a workshop for parents on Raising Multilingual children. There were rich discussions centered around the importance of maintaining a home language/mother tongue and the challenges that come with finding the time to do this successfully.

Below are two videos which can be viewed to gain a better perspective on the importance of maintaining the mother tongue. We know that children with a strong home language, develop their second and third languages with more ease. They have “hooks” on which to connect their new learning. In multilingual homes, the native speaker of each language is the language model for the children in that language. For example, in a home where one parent is a native English speaker and one is a native French speaker, the English speaking parent should always try to speak English to the children and the French speaking parent should always speak French. This will enable rich linguistic input from each of the native speakers. At times, children may appear more confident or competent in one language than another. This is a completely natural and developmental aspect of language learning. Give your child/children time to process both languages, continue being their language model in your native language and praise them consistently for their efforts to communicate in both languages.

Myths About Bilingual Children

Raising Bilingual Kids: Make it part of your daily life

We will be providing a follow-up workshop on March 12, 2018 if you are interested in learning more or would like to continue our previous discussion.

By Karli Walsh – Early Intervention Teacher