Wednesday 1 February 2017

Reflections on the 2017 Family Language Challenge

After participating in the 2017 Family Language Challenge set by Bilingual Avenue I thought I´d finally get round to posting my reflections and observations about it! I really enjoyed taking part in the challenge as it helped me think about my vision and ideas as to where we are heading and what my objectives(or our obejectives as a family!) are in our bilingual journey.I have to say I don´t really think about it and plan how to achieve our goals....in fact I don´t even really set goals for our language learning but rather let things run their natural course.

A Facebook group was set up for those participating in the challenge and it was good to come into contact with other like-minded parents of bilingual and multilingual children and find out their goals and aspirations for their bilingual/multilingual children, which also helped bounce ideas off of one another. There were many language combinations but particularly those of Spanish & English- there were even two from Madrid!! 

We were sent a task every day to complete for the five day challenge....the hardest part for me was trying to keep up with the tasks and even now I still have to complete Day 5´s task(yes, I´m a bit of a slacker!!)Day 1´s task was involved in envisioning our goals for our children by a certain age, Day 2 was a look back on the previous year´s achievements and failures, Day 3 was looking ahead to the future and how we are going to achieve our goals,Day 4 was contemplating how to create exposure and need to the languages and Day 5 is putting the plan into action. After each task you could share your visions or goals on the Facebook group if you wanted to. The challenge also included a Bilingual Planner so you can plan and write down your observations....there are also questions and pointers to help you try and achieve your goals month by month.I still need to fill out January´s and start on February´s! All in all, a very useful and helpful guide that I´m sure is going to help us on our bilingual journey.

No comments:

Post a Comment