Multilingual Mamas

In the season 1 finale episode, Sara and Lauren reflect back on one year of Multilingual Mamas, including their favorite moments, what they’ve learned, and how it has changed their multilingual parenting. This episode also includes an update on their children’s language development and a preview of what’s to come in season 2.

In this episode, we interview Jason Lee, whose parents, both native Korean speakers, raised him bilingual in Korean and English in the United States. Both he and his wife are second-generation speakers of Korean raising their three-year-old son to be bilingual. Research often finds that third-generation speakers of minority languages in the US tend to be English-dominant or even lose the minority language completely, but Lee is committed to keeping Korean alive for his son. He discusses how the experience has strengthened his language skills in Korean and how his own bilingual upbringing served as a model for him to pass on the gift of (at least) two languages to his child.

In this episode, we interview Principal Robert Ash of Speas Global Elementary School, a public IB and Spanish-Language Dual Language Immersion School in Winston-Salem, NC. He shares with us research and personal experiences showing the numerous linguistic, academic, economic, and cultural benefits of his program for his students in addition to his thoughts on why similar programs aren't more common in the United States. We wrap up by discussing the unique challenges COVID and remote instruction have posed for a normally very structured immersion program. If you are interested in sending your child to a similar school, this episode is a must-listen!

In this episode we interview Holly Hinshelwood, an English-Spanish bilingual speech language pathologist. She discusses some of the common misconceptions about bilingual speech development that we see among parents and sometimes uninformed health care providers. Furthermore, Holly explains how the field of speech language pathology is rapidly evolving by offering testing in the patient's dominant language, which is often not the majority language. The episode closes with Holly's advice for parents on how to best advocate for a proper diagnoses for their bilingual children.

In this episode Dr. Daniel J. Olson tells us about how he and his wife, non-native Spanish speakers, decided to raise their daughters bilingual English-Spanish. Dan is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Purdue University and he shares with us his expertise with codeswitching and how normal this linguistic practice is among bilingual individuals, especially young children. He also discusses the importance of speaker networks for language maintenance and touches on important issues such as language discrimination, and how your race/ethnicity plays a role into it.

In this episode we interview Dr. Zsuzsanna Fagyal, a Hungarian mom who decided to raise her children trilingual with her French spouse while living in the US. Zsuzsanna tells us about how she and her spouse decided on a family language policy to optimize trilingual language acquisition for her children, who are now adults. She argues that is is important to be flexible with your children's language use choices, but that it is necessary to remind them that if they do not use them they will loose them. If you are raising your kids trilingual this episode is a must!

In this episode we interviewed Charles Uselman, a French-English bilingual child, (now adult), who tell us about his experience growing up with two languages in San Francisco, California. He discusses his personal experience attending a French school (L'Alliance) in the US and opens up about some of the difficulties he experienced transitioning into the US college system.

In this episode we interview Hannah Inzko and Tamara McLaughin, two monolingual-raised mothers who decided to send their kids to bilingual (Spanish-English) schools. They tell us about their experiences pre- and post-pandemic, and discuss the motivation and reasons that led them to make this decision.

In this episode we discuss the pros and cons of this book. Overall, this book is a good read. Andreas Braun and Tony Cline do a good job at explaining and summarizing the limited research conducted with trilingual/multilingual families and their linguistic practices. We were drawn to this book because it portrays parents and sometimes children's testimonials on their linguistic practices and attitudes towards trilingualism. A note to the listener: this book is contextualized in Europe, the authors only interviewed families living in Germany and the UK, but these families spoke a wide variety of languages (Polish, Rumanian, Vietnamese, etc).

In this episode we interview Silvia Tiboni-Craft, a native of Urbino (Italy), who has lived in the US for more than 10 years. She is raising her twin daughters Vittoria and Julia bilingual in Italian and English. She is in the process of starting to teach her daughters who to read in Italian and tell us all about her approach with "La scuola della mamma".