119: Overcoming challenges when raising bilingual children with Lorraine Ladish

05/03/16 • 37 min

On this episode of Bilingual Avenue, I chat with Lorraine Ladish about the challenges of raising bilingual children. She shares her particular struggles while also providing great advice and perspective on overcoming common challenges when raising bilingual children.

Previous Episode

118: Q&A - What is the best language policy?

On this episode, a father wonders what language policy would work best for his family. Should they consider the Minority Language at Home strategy to increase the exposure? Or should they give the One Person, One Language strategy a shot?

I share my thoughts on what is more important quantity or quality of exposure!

Next Episode

120: Q&A - Where can I find resources in the target language?

On this episode of Bilingual Avenue, I share seven tips for finding resources in the target language.

Question:

Hi there I'm a Venezuelan mother of a three years old boy. I have spoken Spanish to my son from birth, I communicate in English with my husband, and my husband speaks Croatian to my son (he has no problem with the Spanish as he speaks Italian too and understand most of the Spanish words )

My son speaks Spanish and speaks-understand a bit of English and some Croatian!

We actually live in Australia and it is very hard to find materials in Spanish. I would love to know where I can find resources in Spanish and how to keep my son motivated ! My son started preschool three weeks ago and sometimes he asks me questions in English, I always reply in Spanish.

Answer:

Thank you Maria for submitting your question!

This is such a common struggle that multilingual families have. We are working hard to add more exposure to our children and so it often feels like we never ever have enough resources.

You also have the added struggle that depending on your location in the world, you may have an easier time finding resources in one language versus the other.

To help out Maria and those of you following along at home who may be on the same boat, I am going to run through a few resources that you can use to help you add a few more items to your toolkit

The first resource is Eulingual.

We had the creator of Eulingual on the podcast, Joanne Wall. She joined us back on episode 67. She told us all about how Eulingual is her labor of love where she has over 3,000 links for language learning in twenty different languages including: Afrikaans, Arabic, Chinese – Mandarin, Czech, Danish, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swahili and at the time she was also adding Romanian to the list!

This is a great collection of resources. You can go on there and dig around for hours and I know you will walk away with some wonderful resources that you can add to your toolkit.

2. The second resource is called Lingowl resources.

She created this website specifically to help parents looking for language resources to help their children. It now offers dictionaries, flash cards, games, bilingual books, etc in a variety of languages including Spanish. Chinese, English, French, German, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian and several other languages.

I just love this resource because it was specifically inspired to help other parents so I know you’ll find some great resources to help you.

3. The third resource is Audio Books.

If you are a regular podcast listener, you know I love audio books. Even though I talk about them being a good resource I am not sure that I have shared some of my favorite benefits about audio books with you so I wanted to go ahead and list a few and then share with you where you can get your hands on some.

Children can understand language above their reading level when they listen to a story.
Audio books allow you to bring literacy skills into the more mundane parts of your kid’s routine like car rides.
Poetry can be brought to life for children because a narrator can convey timing, tone and rhythm.
Audio books are great at helping children develop listening skills and quiet concentration.
Children can be exposed to other speakers of your target language while developing fluency!

As you can see, audio books are pretty great. My favorite go to resource for audio books is Audible which is under the Amazon umbrella. If you head over to BilingualAvenueBooks.com you can get your first audio book free when you sign up for a 30 day membership.

This way you can see if this is something that your children find interesting although I can already assure you that they will enjoy it.

BilingualAvenueBooks.com is an affiliate link so if you choose to sign up for the Audible membership through that link I will get a small commission but it is at no cost to you.

4. The fourth resource is a multilingual alphabet.

Since you are in Australia, I just have to share one of my favorite resources for multilingual families which was developed in Australia and that is The Little Linguist Alphabet from LoveYourLingo.com! It’s a multilingual alphabet which has 26 objects that all start with the same letter in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Germa...