Bilingual Bubbas

Although I live in a fairly small city (I´d call it a town really!!!)with very few foreigners due to the increased interest in learning English, a lot more language academies have sprung up and also because of the university, it´s becoming easier to come across other native English speakers and other foreigners!!

I´m quite lucky as a lot of my native friends have also had babies at a similar time to me so we have a little bilingual posse, 3 of which are all girls(including Chloe) with another girl on the way to join them! Hopefully, this will encourage them to speak their minority language when they are older,especially in the street as they will realise they aren´t "different" from other people. I´m hoping they´ll play together and speak English together and learn from each other and the other Mummy´s or Daddy´s. It´s also great as our children will be able to hear different English accents and get used to them instead of hearing just our accent. For example,I´m from North England but have a fairly neutral accent, one of my friends is from Belfast and two of my friends are from the South so Chloe will hopefully get accustomed to all these different accents. Maybe we´ll even start up our own bilingual playgroup!



Another great thing about Chloe having a little bilingual posse is that we could swap English children´s books with one another, as it is quite difficult to buy English books where we live (you can buy them but there isn´t much choice and they are more expensive)and the library also doesn´t have much variety.

As a parent wanting to bring her child up as bilingual as possible and also as an English teacher, I´m trying to find out as much as I can about bilingualism and educating a child bilingually,and one website mentioned in my Growing Up With Two Languages book was The Bilingual Families Webpage. This website is run by Cindy Kandolf and has allsorts of useful information, including Myths about Bilingualism,Frequently Used Terms and Resources, which lists books and newsletters which bilingual parents may be interested in reading,websites, sources for books in different languages including Spanish,Portuguese, German,Arabic and Chinese etc.It´s definitely a very helpful and useful site to find out more info.You can also read about Cindy´s story and visit her home page or join the mailing list.I haven´t done this yet but if any of you do or have, I´d like to know your opinion about whether it´s worth joining or not! I´m going to check out some of the books,articles and websites reccommended (eventually!) or when I can get my hands on them & more importantly when I have time!!