Raising bilingual children

[mumtothemountain]

We're a British family currently living in a Spanish speaking country with a 3 year old and 3 month old. I'm a native English speaker and my husband is a native Spanish speaker, though does speak very good English.

Our 3 year old has just started nursery which is 100% Spanish speaking, and where we live there are as far as we know no other English speakers.

Our 3 year old was fluent in English before we moved here 8 months ago but now it seems her English is getting worse as she becomes more confident in Spanish.

I try to read her stories in English, correct her mistakes and use as wide a vocabulary as possible but realise I need help!

I'd love to hear from anyone with experience of raising bilingual children. We really want both children to grow up fluent in both languages if possible.

Are there any good materials available apart from general British children's DVDs (Postman Pat, Bob the Builder etc)?

Do you and your husband speak English or Spanish at home?

If you could both speak English then that would help.

Other than that you could try to seek out other English speaking families to meet up with and only speak English when you are with them.

Is your child at nursery all day?

It may seem like your child's English is slipping away but so long as you keep on speaking it to her and read as much as possible to her then it'll be ok in the long run.

There are many methods. One of them is for each parent to use one language, so you speak english and your dp spanish. We havn't done this. We speak the foreign language at home and with friends from our community and we speak english when we are around other people (we are in uk). Dcs go to 2 schools.

Radio helps a lot and cds with stories/music.

Not sure you'll get the best answers here, though the ones you've had so far have been great.... you need to head to the bilingual families board! try here

I´d try not to worry too much, she´s probably just putting so much effort into learning spanish that the english has taken a back seat for a while but there´s no reason to worry it is permanent. do you speak english at home? Ds (just 3) has been in a bilingual environment since birth and his english came on faster at first but now he seems to be progressing pretty equally in both. though its a bit hard to judge as I am not fluent in his second language. At any rate I would say his general language is a wee bit behind his monolingual friends but understandable, they´re taking a lot in! They´re a bit young to do any formal language activities imo in our house we just try to have all tv in english, english songs, his books are about 90% english and of course I witter away to him in english all the time.

I can understand your concern but I´d just keep up the english input at home and once she has a better handle on spanish I´m sure she´ll have more brain power left over for english again

Look up www.letterland.com it is a fabulous series of educational material for reading & writing. My son adores the characters and they offer an English as a second language series too which may be really useful for you.

Thanks fijibird... will give tha a try.