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8 reasons why you don’t have to be a native speaker to teach your child a language

Posted in Non native-speaker by Bilingual For Fun
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More and more parents are teaching their children a second language they themselves don’t speak as native speakers. Even more parents would like to do but don’t dare. The assumption that only native speakers can teach their children a second language is deep rooted but not supported by any evidence, on the contrary, it is [...]

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Posted on October 29, 2009
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Second Blogging Carnival on Bilingualism

Posted in Bilingualism by Bilingual For Fun
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The second Blogging Carnival on Bilingualism went live today, hosted at Blogging on Bilingualism. I think this is a great resource for all bilingual parents, as Blogging on Bilingualism beautifully pointed out “the commonality of the bilingual journey ties us together”.
Enjoy the Carnival! And if you are a blogger join us, you can submit your [...]

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Posted on September 30, 2009
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Bilingualism Makes Children Smarter

Posted in Research by Bilingual For Fun
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Another interesting article on Bilingualism: Bilingualism Makes Children Smarter.
The article reports the results of a research conducted in Belgium by Prof. Van de Craen. Funny enough last week I attended a very interesting conference on bilingualism (more on this later, a lot more actually, hopefully not a lot later) and there I attended  a speech [...]

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Posted on September 29, 2009
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How to praise to boost motivation

Posted in Bilingualism by Bilingual For Fun
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Children will speak a language, any language, only if they have a reason to, in other words if they are motivated, and one of the trickiest parts of raising a bilingual child is to understand what motivation is and how to trigger it. Praise and reward certainly stand out among the tools most used to [...]

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Posted on September 23, 2009
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Pro and Contra of Praise

Posted in Bilingualism by Bilingual For Fun
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Let’s keep talking about praise, to understand if and how it actually motivates children to speak the second language. We all use praise, hands up if you don’t get overexcited every time the little one says a new word in the second language, or a sentence, or even (can’t believe that!) a whole reasoning! But do we know what [...]

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Posted on September 20, 2009
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Is praise always a good thing?

Posted in Bilingualism by Bilingual For Fun
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Your 3 year old says a whole new sentence in …. (fill in with your minority language), what do you do? Jump with joy? Open a bottle of champagne? Head for the toy shop to buy him a reward gift?
I bet most parents, like me, would at least be very happy and proud and praise [...]

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Posted on September 17, 2009
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Tv, children and language, part 2

Posted in Bilingualism, Research by Bilingual For Fun
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We mentioned earlier that there are two fundamentals questions that need to be answered with regards to TV and bilingualism

How bad is TV for children?
Do TV and DVD support language learning?

Here we’ll look at second question and see what experts think about it.

Very young children learn from interactions, i.e. from playing [...]

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Posted on September 3, 2009
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TV, children and language, part 1

Posted in Bilingualism, Research by Bilingual For Fun
Tags , ,

TV and DVD are often part of children’s lives, and more and more are used to “teach” children a language. Is this right or wrong? Is TV a language learning tool or a brain killing device? I have done some research on the subject and I want to share the results with you. With regards [...]

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Posted on September 1, 2009
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First Blogging Carnival on Bilingualism now Live

Posted in Resources by Bilingual For Fun
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A fellow mom, and blogger, and bilingual parent had a great idea, starting a Blogging Carnival on Bilingualism.
If you don’t know what a blogging carnival is you have two ways to learn about it:

Go read it, here at Mummydothat! This is the recommended option, you’ll find some really useful posts about bilingualism!
Read the theory about [...]

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Posted on August 31, 2009
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Bilingualism at 23 months, IV

Posted in Real Life by Bilingual For Fun
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Something special happened today, and I want to share it. I think that for the first time I saw A. switching language, in a way that was both conscius and contextual.
Fact: we were reading a book, The Snail and the Whale.  In the drawings figured also a boat, A. pointed to it and said Baca [...]

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Posted on August 27, 2009