Hola! This is Carrie from the USA
Dec 16, 2017 4:29:51 GMT 9
Post by Carrie on Dec 16, 2017 4:29:51 GMT 9
Hi Everyone!
My name is Carrie and I’m very excited to be a part of this group!
I’ve been on this raising bilingual kids journey for seven years now, but just recently I’ve felt the need for more support since we seem to be at a language acquisition crossroad in many ways.
I have four children (ages 7, 5, 2 and infant). We live in the US, so our ML is English, and our ml is Spanish. I am a non-native speaker, having studied Spanish since high school. All of my children are at a native level for their age (or close to it) in both languages. However, I feel the pendulum swinging towards the ML, and with three children defaulting in that direction, I’m looking for ways to swing it back before it is too far gone and never returns.
This is a summary of the current challenges of my situation:
I am a non-native speaker. I speak at a pretty high level, but the older my kids get the harder it is for me to keep up. My oldest is now reading chapter books, and often if she doesn’t understand a word, I don’t know it either. It’s also very hard for me to maintain spontaneous conversation with the older kids in ml, because I’m lacking the vocabulary or verb structure, etc. (For example, in the car the two year old wants to talk about the puppy dog we are driving by. No problem. The five year old wants to know how come it’s darker earlier in the winter time. This is tough to explain even in the ML!)
My husband is a native speaker of the ml, however he’s lived here so long that his default is the ML. He is very supportive of raising the kids bilingually, and very happy that they are bilingual, but his opinion is that they are doing great so far (which is true), so what we are doing must be enough. Because of this, he only speaks to them about 10% of the time in ml. He is an amazing husband/dad, and doing a great job with the kids in all areas, just not as concerned about this area.
I am homeschooling. This means that I actually spend a large part of my day teaching in the ML. It also means I am responsible to provide ML resources (books, maps, etc). I do include a lot of ml in their schoolwork, but I also have to teach reading/writing in ML, as well as I teach most of the core subjects (math, science, etc) in ML.
Thanks for listening to all of this! Looking forward to sharing more of this journey together.
Carrie
My name is Carrie and I’m very excited to be a part of this group!
I’ve been on this raising bilingual kids journey for seven years now, but just recently I’ve felt the need for more support since we seem to be at a language acquisition crossroad in many ways.
I have four children (ages 7, 5, 2 and infant). We live in the US, so our ML is English, and our ml is Spanish. I am a non-native speaker, having studied Spanish since high school. All of my children are at a native level for their age (or close to it) in both languages. However, I feel the pendulum swinging towards the ML, and with three children defaulting in that direction, I’m looking for ways to swing it back before it is too far gone and never returns.
This is a summary of the current challenges of my situation:
I am a non-native speaker. I speak at a pretty high level, but the older my kids get the harder it is for me to keep up. My oldest is now reading chapter books, and often if she doesn’t understand a word, I don’t know it either. It’s also very hard for me to maintain spontaneous conversation with the older kids in ml, because I’m lacking the vocabulary or verb structure, etc. (For example, in the car the two year old wants to talk about the puppy dog we are driving by. No problem. The five year old wants to know how come it’s darker earlier in the winter time. This is tough to explain even in the ML!)
My husband is a native speaker of the ml, however he’s lived here so long that his default is the ML. He is very supportive of raising the kids bilingually, and very happy that they are bilingual, but his opinion is that they are doing great so far (which is true), so what we are doing must be enough. Because of this, he only speaks to them about 10% of the time in ml. He is an amazing husband/dad, and doing a great job with the kids in all areas, just not as concerned about this area.
I am homeschooling. This means that I actually spend a large part of my day teaching in the ML. It also means I am responsible to provide ML resources (books, maps, etc). I do include a lot of ml in their schoolwork, but I also have to teach reading/writing in ML, as well as I teach most of the core subjects (math, science, etc) in ML.
Thanks for listening to all of this! Looking forward to sharing more of this journey together.
Carrie
and though I still used ml2 on a regular basis before my first daughter's birth, I can feel I have lost the ml2 capacities I had back then. So bathing myself back in my ml has helped me revive my dormant ml2 language skills. It has also helped me regain confidence in this language, especially since as a non-native mum I get very criticised by monolingual people who can't even judge for themselves my language skills.
