Lana Privitera is the proud Mom of a fun-loving, bilingual "chatterboy" that likes to spice his speeches in English with long-winded Spanish words. Her goal for 2008 is to pack also some French and Italian in his very expandable 3.5 year old brain. Lana still qualifies as a SAHM but uses her "spare" time working as a watercolor artist and Spanish/art teacher
I’ve heard some bilingual parents saying that using bilingual materials such as CDs
and DVD in dual language setting is “Bad”, that the kids “tune out” the target
language and listen only to the “Majority language”.
In my opinion, that’s not true to all kids and circumstances. If you use materials in
the Target Language only, some kids can deduce the meaning of words by context
alone, yes, but many others cannot manage that and so they need some additional
support. I’m talking about children that are exposed to a new language after they
can somewhat understand and/or communicate in the “Mother” language, of course.
If they have no clue of what a song or dialogue is about, these kids might get
frustrated and lose interest in the target language completely.
My son, who is almost 4 years old and has been exposed to Spanish for 2 years, is
now asking every day for the meaning of some words that pop in our conversations
or the TV, words that I’d assumed he knew the meaning of! There are many words
in every language that cannot be figured out just by the context and need an
explanation or translation.
My brightest student is 11 years old She’s very smart and can guess word meanings
by context and root similarity, but what sparked her interest in learning Spanish
was a bilingual CD full of cute songs and so I’ve been encouraging her Mom to buy a
few more bilingual materials.
Whatever technique works to get your kid speaking the target language…. is the
right one!
If you think that materials in bilingual format can be of interest to your child, the
following are a good start: