Hello from Iraq!
Aug 14, 2017 17:15:44 GMT 9
Post by Megan C. on Aug 14, 2017 17:15:44 GMT 9
Hello! My name is Megan and I'm excited to have found this forum as I begin a multilingual journey with my two month old son. I am originally from Chicago, but I have lived in Iraq for six years teaching English. I have a BA in linguistics and am completing a masters in education with a focus on literacy and multilingual kids. I enjoy my work with my students, but I'm really excited to start nurturing my own multilingual family.
I was raised monolingual in English, but I learned Arabic as an adult and now speak Iraqi Arabic fluently. My husband is Iraqi and his mother tongue is Assyrian (the language of the indigenous Christian community here). Our shared language is Arabic; I understand a fair amount of Assyrian but don't speak it, and his English is very rudimentary. We are following a one-parent one-language strategy with our son (English for me, Assyrian for my husband), and we expect that he will also pick up Arabic from our interactions and because it's the majority language. Just to mix things up even more, Assyrian is basically not a written language, so literacy activities like reading aloud are strictly in English for now (we'll introduce Arabic later when he enters school, if we're still here).
These first two months have been delightful and I have gotten used to speaking English to Francis (it took a few weeks as I had been speaking only Arabic at home!). We sing a lot, look at books, read poetry and make up some of our own. However, I have to go back to work in a month.
We're not sure yet what childcare will look like but it will be either an Arabic or Assyrian environment, so he won't get all that much English input. I'm not too worried as it's likely that we'll move to the US in the next couple of years, so I would be happy for him to get a strong foundation in Assyrian while we're still immersed in it.
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I was raised monolingual in English, but I learned Arabic as an adult and now speak Iraqi Arabic fluently. My husband is Iraqi and his mother tongue is Assyrian (the language of the indigenous Christian community here). Our shared language is Arabic; I understand a fair amount of Assyrian but don't speak it, and his English is very rudimentary. We are following a one-parent one-language strategy with our son (English for me, Assyrian for my husband), and we expect that he will also pick up Arabic from our interactions and because it's the majority language. Just to mix things up even more, Assyrian is basically not a written language, so literacy activities like reading aloud are strictly in English for now (we'll introduce Arabic later when he enters school, if we're still here).
These first two months have been delightful and I have gotten used to speaking English to Francis (it took a few weeks as I had been speaking only Arabic at home!). We sing a lot, look at books, read poetry and make up some of our own. However, I have to go back to work in a month.
We're not sure yet what childcare will look like but it will be either an Arabic or Assyrian environment, so he won't get all that much English input. I'm not too worried as it's likely that we'll move to the US in the next couple of years, so I would be happy for him to get a strong foundation in Assyrian while we're still immersed in it.
