Bilingualism

You remember the lists of word translations you had to memorize for each unit in your school’s second language class. Chat means cat. Chien means dog. Souris means mouse… Lists so long they would lull you to sleep.A lot of second language teaching is about…

Some languages may sound quite similar to an adult. A native speaker of Italian for example may be able to make out some words in Spanish. Other languages may sound very different to an adult. A native Italian speaker may be completely lost as to…

Languages can be learned at any age: from a nanny, on an exchange in undergrad, after a work promotion to an international office, in a seniors activity class. Caregivers and educators can feel pressure to introduce a second language from a very young age. We…

Some kids may hear Japanese at home and English at school. Other kids may hear one of their caregiver’s speak Spanish and the other French. Bilingual children grow up learning two languages, but how much they hear or speak each language can vary greatly. Typically,…

At first glance, codeswitching can appear to be a difficult way to learn languages. Instead of learning each language neatly, in isolation, children have to make sense of two languages intertwined. This may be just an impression however. Codeswitching can help a child strengthen skills…

Caregivers who speak two (or more) languages may use a mix of languages in some conversations. Switching between languages is, pretty straightforwardly, called ‘Codeswitching’. Codeswitching can be used between sentences, where one sentence is in one language, and the next in another language. For example,…

There are many ways to foster bilingualism. There is not one best strategy! To choose the strategy that works best for you and your child, follow the three pillars of harmonious bilingualism. Harmonious bilingualism is based on the importance of well-being for bilingual language acquisition.…

Bilinguals all speak two languages, but how they learned those two languages can vary a lot! The first example of a bilingual child that may come to mind is when one caregiver speaks one language and the other another language. This is called the one-parent-one-language…

One impression that often surfaces in educational settings, like preschool or elementary school, is that multilingual children can seem to have smaller vocabularies than their monolingual peers. However, this is mainly because language abilities are evaluated in just one language. For monolingual children, one language…