7 Steps to Raising a Bilingual Child
Parenting Books
7 Steps to Raising a Bilingual Child
By Naomi Steiner
The easiest time to learn a second language is as a child. During childhood, the brain is more receptive to language learning than at any other time in life.
Helping your child acquire an additional language is one of the best gifts you can give her. Raising bilingual children is not always easy. I have been trying to do this for years with little success. After I gave birth to my third child I decided to find a more successful method that would help me get my kids to cooperate and successfully raise bilingual children.
This book will help you create a strategy (a “bilingual action plan”) that will work for your family. This includes determining who will speak the additional language, maximizing exposure to that language, utilizing community resources and formal education. It is noted that plans and goals often need to be adjusted over time since every child and family situation is different.
The author, Naomi Steiner, provides tables and worksheets to help you create your bilingual action plan.
In addition to the strategies and the bilingual action plan the author provides a resource list as an added bonus. It points parents towards helpful tools that can be used, such as foreign language newspaper websites, educational activity websites, and other suggestions for opportunities to add extra language exposure for your child.
There is a chapter devoted to reading and writing with suggestions for each age range.
Naomi Steiner addresses and dispels the 7 most common myths about bilingualism and lists potential problems and suggestions on ways to overcome them. Some of the problems that parents encounter are concerns that they are not speaking the second language well enough, children who refuse to speak the second language, parents who don’t feel comfortable speaking a second language in public, developmental difficulties children might face, etc.
7 Steps to Raising a Bilingual Child by Naomi Steiner will help you develop a unique bilingual action plan that will work for your family.