We’d love to tell you we have all the answers, but motherhood has humbled us, and now we realize we don’t.

That’s why we’ve teamed up with a group of bona fide experts in the topic of bilingualism to answer your questions once a week.

Every Wednesday is ASK AN EXPERT day.

Our panel includes celebrated authors, professors, child psychologists, bilingual speech therapists and bilingual education advocates. Please take a minute to meet them by reading a little bit about them here, as well as checking out the answers they’ve already shared with all of SpanglishBaby readers. To send us a question now, scroll down to the bottom of this page.

Barbara Zurer Pearson, Ph. D. – A bilingualism expert with over twenty years of research experience in the fields of bilingualism, linguistics, and communication disorders, Pearson is the author of the informative and extremely useful book Raising a Bilingual Child. She is currently a Research Associate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her pioneering work on bilingual learning by infants and children and on language assessment has been published in scholarly journals and in the book Language and Literacy in Bilingual Children. You can see her answers by going here.

Beth Butler.-Bilingual educator of young children and strives to create better communication within our increasingly diverse society. She is the founder of the internationally acclaimed Boca Beth language learning series which has garnered various parenting awards.  Ms. Butler lived in Chile and Mexico where she learned Spanish as her second language and has been bilingual and biliterate for more than 30 years. She has spent over 25 years in the field of preschool and elementary education writing and recording four bilingual music CDs in Spanish and English, as well as producing three bilingual educational movies for children.  Read Beth Butler´s answers here.

Ellen Stubbe Kester, Ph.D, CCS-LLP – A bilingual (English/Spanish) speech language professional who earned her Ph.D. in Communication Sciences and Disorders from The University of Texas at Austin. She has provided bilingual Spanish/English speech-language services in schools, hospitals, and early intervention settings. Her research focus is on the acquisition of semantic language skills in bilingual children, with emphasis on assessment practices for the bilingual population. She is the President of Bilinguistics, which is “dedicated to enhancing speech and language services for Spanish-English bilingual children, enabling those children to achieve their highest communicative and academic potential.” You can read her answers here.

Liza Sánchez – A bilingual education specialist who received her MA in Education at UC Berkeley and has spent many years teaching in both public and independent schools. She is the founder and Board Chair of Escuela Bilingüe Internacional (EBI) in Oakland, California. EBI is the first independent school in California to offer a Spanish-English dual language program, extending from pre-K through 8th grade. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area and is fluent in Spanish and English, speaks conversational German and can understand quite a bit of French, Portuguese and Italian. You can read her answers here.

Lori Langer de Ramirez.- -Bilingual educator who began her career as a teacher of Spanish, French and ESL. She holds a Master’s Degree in Applied Linguistics and a Doctorate in Curriculum and Teaching from Teachers College, Columbia University. She is currently the Chairperson of the ESL and World Language Department for Herricks Public Schools, New York. Lori is the author of Take Action: Lesson Plans for the Multicultural Classroom and Voices of Diversity: Stories, Activities and Resources for the Multicultural Classroom, as well as several Spanish-language books and texts.  Her interactive website (miscositas.com) offers teachers over 40 virtual picture books and other curricular materials for teaching Chinese, English, French, Indonesian, Italian, Spanish and Thai.  Her areas of research and curriculum development are multicultural and diversity education, folktales in the language classroom and technology in language teaching. You can read her answers here.

Melanie McGrath.-- is a coordinator of Dual Immersion and transitional bilingual education programs in Southern California. She provides professional development training and assistance to parents, bilingual teachers and administrators in the areas of biliteracy development, bilingual program design and English language development. Melanie can also be found blogging on Multilingual Mania. Click here to read her answers.

Naomi Steiner, M.D.– is a developmental-behavioral pediatrician and clinical researcher at the Floating Hospital for Children at Tufts where she is also an assistant professor in pediatrics. She is interested in how children develop awareness to cope with their emotions, behavior and learning. Dr. Steiner has a longstanding interest in bilingualism and multiculturalism, which is a topic that she enjoys teaching and discussing. After more than a decade of working closely with families around these issues she has written a book, with Susan Hayes, called 7 Steps to Raising a Bilingual Child. She is multilingual and is raising multilingual children.  You can read her answers here.

Simona Montanari, Ph.D.- – Assistant Professor of Child and Family Studies at California State University in Los Angeles. She is the department’s expert in early multilingual development and has a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Southern California. Simona is Italian and she’s also a mommy to trilingual daughters aged 3 and 4 1/2. In addition, she conducts workshop titled: “How to Raise a Bilingual Child” in the LA area. You can read her answers here.

Every week, we’ll choose a question for one of our Experts to answer in a practical manner for you to implement in your day-to-day life raising a bilingual child.

No question is too big or too simple. If you have a doubt, most likely it’s shared by all.

Click here to read the questions answered by the experts so far.

Please leave your question below.

¡Gracias!

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