Identity. It’s a word you often hear when talking about children growing up in a bilingual family, but what does identity really mean? To what extent can you have multiple identities, belonging to different cultures or ethnic backgrounds? What are the consequences for children if they identify more in one way than the other? What role do parents, friends, school and wider society have in play? In this episode, we’re answering these questions with Virginia Lam, researcher at Univeristy of Roehampton in London, herself a bilingual speaker of English and Mandaring and mother of two bilingual chil ..read more

Why do some bilingual children end up becoming more bilingual than others? That’s the question we’re answering in this episode of Kletsheads, the first in our third season of the English-language ediition. Most children become more proficient in one of their languages compared with the other(s). This is often the language spoken at school or the wider community. Some children actively use both languages, but many do not. And in much the same way as we see for learning to walk, or the age at which you lose your first tooth, we also see that some children are quicker to pick up their two languag ..read more

Kletsheads is back! Season 3 is on its way. We’ll have a new episode for you on the 15th of every month from now through November, eight episodes in total. In this short trailer, I’ll tell you more about what we’re going to be talking about. This season of Kletsheads was made possible thanks to funding from HaBilNet. The Harmonious Bilingualism Network HaBilNet aims to support and stimulate scientific research into harmonious bilingualism and to make sure the results of that research reach the general public. If you want to know more about this organisation, check out their website ..read more

What do bilingual children think about being bilingual? Children – from 8 to 38 years old – talk about the fun and not so fun sides of being bilingual, their favourite words, the language they use with their pets, and what language they will speak when they become parents themselves. In the first two seasons of Kletsheads, I talked to children about what it is like to grow up with two or more languages, our Kletshead of the Week. In this special episode, I bring you the best of, a compilation of my favourite bits from ‘Kletshead of the Week’. Want to listen to the whole conversation with one o ..read more

Transcript It’s over two years since the Covid-19 pandemic broke out and families across the globe were forced  into lockdown, with schools and childcare centres closed and many parents having to juggle working from home with caring for younger children and homeschooling older ones. Whilst this was a shared experience across many communities in many (if not most) countries around the world, individual families found themselves in many different circumstances, some more bearable than others.  In the second season of Kletsheads, we spoke about the impact of the pandemic of mu ..read more

Bilingual children sometimes say things that their monolingual peers would never say. This is the same for adults, too. They don’t always know certain words in each of their two (or more) languages. And in the many cases when bilingual children do know the word in question, they can’t always think of it straightaway. Again, this also holds for adults. I speak from experience as someone who sometimes has to use google translate from Dutch to English to remember what a word is in my native language. As a parent, teacher or speech language therapist, you may wonder whether all of this is normal ..read more

Most bilingual children mix their two languages. Perhaps not all the time and not in all contexts, but as many parents will know, bilingual children regularly start a sentence in one language and finish it in another, or they insert a word from one language whilst speaking the other. Such behaviour is perfectly normal. You might say it’s part and parcel of being bilingual. Yet why children mix and why some do it more than others remains poorly understood. Given that language mixing is often one of the biggest concerns raised by parents raising their children bilingually, it’s surprising how li ..read more

Every three years, teenagers around the world are tested on their abilities in maths, science and reading, as part of PISA, the Programme for International Student Assessment. Basically, it’s a way of comparing how well countries are doing when it comes to educating their children.  Because of Covid-19, the latest PISA data we have are from 2018 and what these data show is that in many countries, there are huge differences between children in how well they score, differences that are related to, for example, their parents’ level of education (often referred to as socio-economic statu ..read more

When you’re raising a bilingual child and you’re the the only source of one of your child’s two or more languages, it can be a good idea to try and find other people or places for your child to hear and use that language. One way you can do this is to use multimedia resources such as tv and films, apps, audiobooks and music. In Hot off the Press, we talk about a recent piece of research from Singapore that investigates whether using multimedia resources really does support bilingual children’s language development. This is the study in question: Sun H and Yin B (2020) Multimedia Input and Bili ..read more

Learning to read is an important step in your child’s development. When children start to learn to read depends on the country they live in. In some parts of the world, like the UK, children are taught to read pretty much as soon as they enter school, whereas in other countries, like here in NL, children spend a year or two first learning to recognise letters before they’re actually sat down and taught how to read and write. Learning to read comes more easily to some children than others. And as a parent, it’s important to help your child by reading to them, helping them sound out words, and o ..read more