1) Bilingual: Life and Reality by François Grosjean — Professor Grosjean is no stranger to bilingualism. Not only is he one (English/French), but he has basically dedicated his career to this topic and his expertise includes code-switching and borrowing – two of my favorite areas when it comes to bilingualism. He’s written other books too, such as Life with Two Languages and Studying Bilinguals. I’ve only read this last one and I devoured it as soon as I got my hands on itRead More ...
Little Pim, the cute panda who teaches foreign languages, is one of our favorite characters for Spanish-language education. We have reviewed several Little Pim resources in the past, including the Word Bag app. This PBS Kids iPad app, Little Pim Spanish, follows with the award-winning quality of other PBS Kids products. It is a simple, effective way for preschoolers to learn new vocabulary – 60 words and phrases, in fact. Aimed at English-dominant children who are learning Spanish, Little PimRead More ...
With the rise of dual language education in the U.S., have bilingual children become a commodity? In other words, are children who walk into the dual language classroom already speaking two languages possessing a highly valued commodity: bilingualism? The question, though, still remains, whose bilingualism is valued? Is it the “middle class” students bilingualism or is it those students who come from “lower class” homes? To distinguish between “middle” and “lower” I’d like to clarify how I am referring toRead More ...
One of the the things that can put parents who are raising bilingual children off the most – aside from their kid not responding back in the target language – is when they start mixing languages. Our first thought is that our child is falling “behind” in terms of language acquisition, but nothing can be further from the truth. My girl is almost five years old now and is very aware that she’s about to start a new stage inRead More ...
Editor’s note: During the next few weeks, we’re going to be doing things a bit differently here as Ana and I concentrate in meeting the deadline for the forthcoming SpanglishBaby book. We hope you bear with us. Because we’ve been around for almost three years (wow! when did that happen?), this week we’ll be sharing some classic posts from when it all got started. This post was originally published on February 3, 2009. In most parts of the world, beingRead More ...
Recently, I realized that we haven’t updated our list of recommended reference books for parents raising bilingual children in more than two years. Unlike other parenting topics, books on bilingualism do not abound. So, whenever a book in this subject comes out, we try to get our hands on it both for our own research and to share it with all of you. Last time we wrote about this subject matter, I gave you a list of 10 books IRead More ...
Last week, I found myself passionately reading sonnets by Pablo Neruda to my 2-year-old. Yes, I know that sounds obnoxious, but the book is all pink, and she pulled it off the shelf…then I found the poem in it we read at our wedding…then I told her how romantic it was that Neruda wrote a hundred love sonnets for his wife…And somewhere between eyerolls, my husband suggested I should write love sonnets for the girls. Now, that sounds easier thanRead More ...
Ana
Roxana
We are two Latina moms – best friends since college – who are extremely passionate about ensuring our children not only speak both our languages, English and Español, but that they also grow up proud of both their cultures, Latino and American. Over three years ago we realized there's was a lack of information available for parents raising bilingual + bicultural children, so using our background in media, we launched SpanglishBaby.
