Kletsheads [English edition]

Transcript In this final - and therefore extra-long - episode, three parents who have previously been guests on the podcast talk about how their family's bilingual journey has progressed since then. I look back over the past four years, reflect on the future and, to conclude, we hear a poem written about and dedicated to bilingual children, and inspired by the podcast. Our first guest is Liz. I first spoke to her in the first season of Kletsheads (in episode 4, about language mixing). Liz is originally from Limburg in the Netherlands but has lived in Canada for 10 years. Together with her Egyptian husband, she has a 4-year-old son, Otis. Next, we hear from Marjolein. Marjolein grew up monolingually in the Netherlands, studied English and then became an English teacher. When she became a mother in 2018, she decided to also speak English to her infant son Owen. She now has a second son, James. Marjolein was first featured in this episode 2 of the first season on how much input does a child need to hear to become bilingual. Finally, I speak to Christi. Christi was first on the podcast back in 2020 (in the same episode as Liz) as our Kletshead of the week. She spoke about her own upbringing as a trilingual child in Vienna, and about the choices she faced now that she had become her mother herself. In this episode she tells us how speaking German can sometimes be a challenge (especially when 'life' gets in the way) and how her eldest daughter has picked up Spanish from her mum. If you want to know how these three parents and their bilingual families are doing now, listen to the podcast! To conclude this episode and thus the entire podcast series, we hear a poem, Three words for squirrel. This poem was written and is performed by spoken word poet, Wieke Vink. You might recognise Wieke from the first episode of this final season, when she interviewed our Kletshead of the week. If you listen carefully to the poem, you will hear many references to conversations, topics and words that have passed by in the past four in the podcast. Three words for squirrel This poem is for the little onesWhose mother tongueIs more than one With words in different flavoursOn the tip of your tongueOr flowing out of your fingertips This is for the childrenFor whom the crossroads of thoughts in your headCould be spread outInto at least two different languages With womb-held babiesBathing in soundFollowing the rhythmic patternsThat are with them – all around EmergingOut into the worldA holder of knowledge Growing up You already knowHow to be gentle with yourself and with othersHow to wobble on the table of conventions How to take it slowWhen a word doesn't immediately come to mind When in search for the right ‘mmm'The nuance that you might knowFrom the flow of past conversations Not yet fully interpretatedBut held onto brightlyIn the library of your mind Your shelves full of boxesWith vocab and grammarTu sais que somewhereBetween the Malayalam, French and Finnishthere will be a great find This is for youAs you've feltHow language is part of connectionFor all our neurodiverse minds Language as a connectorFor all things funny and wise, silly and kind Dear multilingual child You might not be able to speak it allYou might not be able to read it allYet you are able to hold it all In a map of the worldThat's unique to youAnd the communities that you belong to Your cultures sometimes resonatingIn the tones of your skinThe rhythms of your sentencesThe sounds of your name You know, language is part of identityYet our schools may beSo monolingual or full of variety With the need for heritage language educationAnd intercultural communicationWithin and across our different nations With all these languages holding the world in their embraceAnd a dialect in every corner And when seasons seem out of orderYou are asked to braze both our physical and our cultural landscapes As three seasons of a podcast droppedFrom the northern hemisphereCoveri...

Transcript Learning to read does not come easily to all children. Some children experience serious problems with reading and spelling. They have difficulty recognising and learning letters, they mix up sounds or letters, or read very slowly. With proper help, this often passes, but in some children these issues remain. Persistent problems with reading and spelling are sometimes due to dyslexia. What exactly is dyslexia? If a bilingual child has dyslexia, will they succeed in learning to read in both languages? Does dyslexia work the same in all languages, e.g. also in languages with different scripts? What can you do as a parent, teacher or speech language therapist to support bilingual children with dyslexia? Researcher Ioulia Kovelman explains that being dyslexic means that you have long-term problems with reading. More often than not, these become clear when - after several years of schooling - children have persistent difficulties in connecting sounds and letters or sounds and characters but even before children start to read, there may be some signs that children will develop dyslexia, for example if they struggle to recognise which words rhyme with each other. We also learned that dyslexia works similarly across languages and so if your bilingual child has dyslexia in one language, they will have it in another. The tests used to diagnose dyslexia may however differ depending on whether sounds are matched to letters, as an in alphabetic languages such as English or Arabic, or to characters as in Chinese. One thing that Ioulia made very clear is that being bilingual does not make dyslexia any worse. In Let's Klets, we spoke to Miriam de Oliveira from the International School Breda in the Netherlands. She told us about the Language Friendly School network. If you understand Dutch, you can hear me talk to the co-founder of this network, Ellen-Rose Kambel, in this episode of the (Dutch edition of the) podcast (Season 2, Episode 6). Ioulia Kovelman is Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan in the US. She a neuroscientist studying the bilingual brain and how children learn to speak and to read in more than one language. You can read more about her research at the Language & Literacy Lab here.

Transcript Many bilingual children around the world attend heritage language education. Sometimes called complementary or supplementary schools, heritage language programs or mother tongue education, these schools offer children and young people a safe space where they can develop and maintain their HL and cultural identity. Classes take place at the weekend or after children are done for the day with their mainstream schooling, and in many cases include not only language but also a cultural and sometimes a religious component.   In this episode we hear more about the research on heritage language education. Do certain types of complementary schools work better than others? What effect does attending these schools have on children's language development and their cultural identity? What other benefits are there, and are there benefits for parents as well as children?   Researcher Layal Husein tells us how complementary schools have indeed been found to support bilingual children's heritage language development, especially when it comes to literacy. They also serve as safe spaces for children to explore their cultural heritage and identity. Complementary schools can also serve as community hubs for parents, and for newcomers, help them navigate their new surroundings.   In this episode we heard excerpts from two previous episodes of Kletsheads: this interview with Gisi Cannizzarro (starts at 22m17), director of the Heritage Language Education Network, and this interview with Thorwen, who attended complementary school in Dutch whilst living in Hong Kong as a child.   Another useful resource for anyone interested in this topic is the National Resource Centre for Supplementary Education in the UK. You can read more about mother tongue education being a human right here.   Dr. Layal Husein is a researcher the University of East London, UK. She recently completed her PhD on the effects of complementary schools bilingual children's language and identity. You can read more about this work here (if you have access - unfortunately, like many academic articles, this paper is behind a paywall). Layal grew up bilingually, learning Arabic from her Bahraini father and English from her mother and at school.   Our Kletshead of the week is the Sybil Vachaudez. She grew up in Denmark and Portugal, learning (and then forgetting) Danish alongside Portuguese, French and English. Curious about the Portuguese music you heard during our conversation? That was Portugal's 2022 entry for the Eurovision Song Contest, Saudade, Saudade by Maro.   In this episode, I also share our final Quick and Easy, a concrete tip you can put into practice straightaway to make the most out of the bilingualism in your family, class or practice: create a reading problem that your child will want to solve. Listen to the podcast to find out more!

Transcript According to WHO, 1 in 100 children have autism. Whilst exact numbers can vary depending on who's reporting them, where in the world you live, and how autism is defined, this developmental disability is certainly not uncommon. In fact, in many places, the number of people living with autism is increasing. Autism is a spectrum which means that it's different for everybody. It affects how people relate to others, how they make sense of the world around them, and how they communicate. And it's likely these problems with communication that raise questions about bilingualism in autistic children. Should you raise an autistic child with more than one language? Can autistic children who don't speak very much or at all become bilingual? What effect does being autistic have on a child's language development and is this any different for bilingual children? Researcher Philippe Prévost tells us about this emerging field of research. He tells us that whilst there's a lot that we still don't know about autistic children growing up bilingually, there's no reason to believe that autistic children cannot be raised with more than one language.   Philippe Prévost is Professor of Linguistics at University of Tours in France, and one of the few researchers working on the topic of bilingualism and autism. His research focuses on how different groups of bilingual children learn how to put sentences together, including children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and / or Developmental Language Disorder. To find out more about Developmental Language Disorder, listen to the previous episode of Kletsheads on 'How do you know if a bilingual child has a language delay?'.   To find out more about bilingualism and autism, including hearing an autistic bilingual adult's lived experience, listen to this episode of the podcast Much Language, Such Talk.   Our Kletshead of the week is the 30-year-old Gema Garcia from New York. Gema grew up in an Ecuadorian family learning Spanish and English, and she tells us how she uses both languages professionally as an aspiring translator. During our conversation, Gema talked about an essay she wrote, first in Spanish and then translated into English, about her coming out experience. Curious to take a look? You can access the essay here (p. 82 in Spanish and p. 86 in English). Find Gema on insta @fernanda.ecu.   This episode's Quick & Easy is to have that conversation you've been meaning to have with your partner, parents or friends, colleague or child and to talk to them about that one topic that's been bothering you for ages and make sure you can move forward together.

Transcript In this episode we review two books about bilingual parenting: Bilingual success stories around the world by Adam Beck and Bilingual families. A practical language planning guide by Eowyn Crisfield. We get the parental perspective from Maria Papantoniou, a Greek-speaking mother raising her child bilingually in the UK together with her Greek-speaking husband, and Sam Timmermans, a Dutch-speaking father who until recently lived in the UK with his wife and two children. Language scientist Ludovica Serratrice joins me to evaluate the books from a research perspective. Ludovica is Professor of Bi-Multilingualism at the University of Reading in the UK, where she is also Director of the Centre for Literacy and Multilingualism and where she teaches on the BSc in Speech and Language Therapy. Read more about her research on the language development and processing of bilingual children and adults here. In Let's Klets we speak to Daphne Vlachojannis, mother to three multilingual children, currently living in Greece. She tells us how she went about writing (and re-writing) her family language plan as her family expanded and moved countries. You can read more about Daphne and the work she is doing as a consultant at Raising Bilingual Children here. During this episode I referred to an earlier episode of the podcast with Eowyn. That was our very first episode How to plan for a bilingual child. I also mentioned the Planting Languages project. Their website shares materials in several languages which can be used by parents and professionals to think about which resources are available, the family goals, and many other factors which come into play when writing a family language plan.

Transcript If we are lucky, we will all grow old. And if we are even luckier, we will stay healthy for as long as possible. But even if we stay healthy, it is inevitable that we slow down -- both physically and mentally. We often don't function as well as we used to, we become forgetful, and we may also develop problems like dementia. Research shows that being bilingual might help when it comes to slowing down these kinds of problems. Why is this the case ? And does this apply to all bilinguals? Researcher Merel Keijzer explains how being bilingual can potentially help when it comes to slowing down these kinds of problems. But not always. So when does it help and when doesn't it? We learn that it's especially important to continue using both languages throughout your life and to use the two languages in different contexts, i.e. one language at home and the other at school or work. We also talk about language loss. Quite a few children who grow up with two or more languages often prefer to use the language they use at school or the most widely spoken language in their community. In many cases, they no longer actively use their other language (the heritage language). What happens when these children get older? Do they lose this language altogether? And what happens to bilingual parents as they grow older? Can you also lose your first language (or parts of it at least) if you live in a different country than the one you grew up in, using another language day in and day out? In this episode, we learn that this is unlikely but that it is normal if sometimes you can't find the right word. However, such problems are less likely to occur when it comes to grammar. And except where there is also trauma, children will also not lose a language they have learnt from an early age so easily. This episode's Quick & Easy : stop, think and evaluate! It's a good idea to every now and then reflect on how your child's bilingualism is coming along. Questions you can ask are: is everyone happy, are things going well, are we achieving our goals by doing it this way? It's important not to be afraid to change things, to choose a different route if needs be. And if things are going well, take a moment to think about why this is, and how you can make sure that this success will continue in the future. The two books we'll be reviewing in the next episode (Bilingual families - A family language language planning guide by Eowyn Crisfield and Bilingual success stories around the world by Adam Beck) are useful sources of inspiration fo this. As a teacher, you can also do the same. Ask yourself - with or without colleagues - how the bilignual children at your school are getting on. Are there things that could be improved or changed? To help you do this, use the materials developed by the Language-Friendly School and the PEACH project's guide for educators. Our Kletshead of the week is the 9-year-old Youjin. He's growing up in the UK with Korean and French as his two heritage languages. Merel Keijzer is professor of English linguistics and English as a second language at the University of Groningen. She's also a member of the KNAW Jonge Akademie. Merel's research focuses on language loss and the effects ageing can have on language use and vice versa, using insights from neuroscience, applied linguistics, cognitive psychologi and medical sciences. Read more about Merel and her research group at the Bilingualism & Ageing Lab here.

Transcript Identity. It's a word you often hear when talking about children growing up in a bilingual family, but what does identity really mean? To what extent can you have multiple identities, belonging to different cultures or ethnic backgrounds? What are the consequences for children if they identify more in one way than the other? What role do parents, friends, school and wider society have in play? In this episode, we're answering these questions with Virginia Lam, researcher at Univeristy of Roehampton in London, herself a bilingual speaker of English and Mandarin and mother of two bilingual children. We learn that there's an important difference between 'identifying as'  and 'identifying with' something or someone. For example, children might consider themselves 'half Chinese, half English' because they have a Chinese and an English parent, but this doesn't necessarily mean that they will feel like they are Chinese. We also heard that children start to develop their identity from very early on and that identity continues to develop throughout childhood and the teenage years into adulthood. Research shows that children who identify with both their HL culture and the mainstream culture will grow up into healthier and happier individuals and that family life will benefit from these positive identities, too. Towards the end of our conversation, Virigina mentioned a resource called the Library 4 multilinguals developed by Yoshito Darmon-Shimamori. I also mentioned another episode of Kletsheads about well-being in bilingual families. In this episode I also shared another Kletsheads Quick and Easy, a concrete tip you put into practice straightaway to make the most of the bilingualism in your family, class or clinic: Find something from your own culture to share or do! Dr. Virginia Lam is senior lecturer at the University of Roehampton, London. She's a psychologist and her research focuses on identity, bilingual development, and complementary language schooling. In Let's Klets I spoke to Denise Amankwah. Denise is as a speech and language advisor (not therapist!) on a project called the London EAL project at Speech and Language UK, working with children learning English as an additional language and their families.  She has a Masters in Education, specialising in Language and Literac,y and also has an undergraduate degree in Linguistics, as well as years of experience as an Early Years Practitioner. As you'll hear in our conversation, Denise is passionate about supporting parents and teachers to encourage children to see bilingualism as a gift, and she's particularly interested in sharing the positive messages surrounding bilingualism to Black African families from ex-colonies where a European language tends to be the most superior. She grew up bilingually in the UK in a Ghanian family speaking Twi, a language which she understands completely but no longer speaks actively, making her what we call a "receptive bilingual".

Transcript Why do some bilingual children end up becoming more bilingual than others? That's the question we're answering in this episode of Kletsheads, the first in our third season of the English-language ediition. Most children become more proficient in one of their languages compared with the other(s). This is often the language spoken at school or the wider community. Some children actively use both languages, but many do not. And in much the same way as we see for learning to walk, or the age at which you lose your first tooth, we also see that some children are quicker to pick up their two languages than others. Sometimes there are seemingly obvious explanations for all this variation between children, but not always. Sometimes children growing up in apparently very similar circumstances have very different outcomes when it comes to how well or how much their use their two or more languages.  What exactly causes these differences? Why do some bilingual children end up being more bilingual than others? And as a parent or professional, is there anything we can do to maximise a child's chances of becoming as bilingual as possible? To answer these questions, I'm joined by Johanne Paradis, professor at the University of Alberta, Canada. We heard that there are a whole host of reasons why some bilingual children end up being more bilingual than others. Younger is not always better and that it's better in the early years to concentrate on the heritage language. Amount and type of input children hear at home is important, and - crucially - research suggests that this especially the case for the heritage language. Extra-curricular activities and friendships involving the heritage language are just two ways in which you can create richer input and increase your child's chances of becoming and remaining an active bilingual. These are some of the factors that you have (some) control over as a parent, or at least they are things you can change, but there are also factors that impact on children's bilingual outcomes that you can't change. Language aptitude is one example of this. In many instances, if not all, there's no one-size-fits-all, no one factor that wins out above all others - as Johanne said, it's often a trade-off. The choices parents make are personal and will depend on individual circumstances, individual children and even the languages in question. What's crucial, though, is that you're aware of the potential consequences of the choices you make as a parent or the advice you give as a teacher or parent. I hope this episode will help you make those choices. In this episode I also shared another Kletsheads Quick and Easy, a concrete tip you put into practice straightaway to make the most of the bilingualism in your family, class or clinic: Find someone to talk to about bilingualism in your family, classroom or practice. If you already know someone, send them a message or email now, or give them a call, and otherwise start thinking today about who you might be able to approach. Our Kletshead of the week was Rehan and he was interviewed by Wieke Vink.  Johanne Paradis is Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Adjunct Professor in Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of Alberta. Her research focuses on bilingualism in children with typical development and in children with developmental disorders, in particular children learning English-as-a-second language from immigrant and refugee families. She is co-author of Dual Language Development & Disorders: A Handbook on Bilingualism and Second Language Learning and she recently wrote an amazing review paper on much of the research she discussed in the podcast. The article is entitled 'Sources of individual differences in the dual language development of heritage bilinguals' and is published in the Journal of Child Language. It's open access, which means that you don't need to pay to read it. Note, however,

Kletsheads is back! Season 3 is on its way. We'll have a new episode for you on the 15th of every month from now through November, eight episodes in total. In this short trailer, I'll tell you more about what we're going to be talking about. This season of Kletsheads was made possible thanks to funding from HaBilNet. The Harmonious Bilingualism Network HaBilNet aims to support and stimulate scientific research into harmonious bilingualism and to make sure the results of that research reach the general public. If you want to know more about this organisation, check out their website (habilnet.org) and follow them on Facebook and Twitter. Many thanks to Habilnet for making this season possible!

What do bilingual children think about being bilingual? Children - from 8 to 38 years old - talk about the fun and not so fun sides of being bilingual, their favourite words, the language they use with their pets, and what language they will speak when they become parents themselves. In the first two seasons of Kletsheads, I talked to children about what it is like to grow up with two or more languages, our Kletshead of the Week. In this special episode, I bring you the best of, a compilation of my favourite bits from 'Kletshead of the Week'. Want to listen to the whole conversation with one of our Kletsheads? You can. You can find the link to the relevant episodes below: You'll find brothers Aiden and Quinn in the very first episode of Kletsheads on How to plan for a bilingual child. Christie, who spoke about the different personalities associated with her languages is in Episode 4, Season 1 (Should you worry about language mixing?). French-English bilinguals Loïc and Ella are in Episode 2, Season 1 (How much language does a child need to hear to become bilingual?) and Episode 6, Season 1 (Bilingual siblings), respectively. Katriina tells us about her struggles with Finnish in Episode 9, Season 1 (How to make the use of bilingual children's home languages in the classroom: Translanguaging), and South African Rehoboth talks about swearing in Episode 4, Season 2 (Trilingual with Xitsonga and Hot off the press). You can find Japanese-English bilingual Naia in Episode 3, Season 1 (How do you know if a bilingual child has a language delay?), and Italian-English-Arabic trilingual Sara in Episode 8, Season 2 (Language mixing and bilingual secrets). Thorwen talks about how his parents persuaded him to attend heritage language school in Episode 7, Season 1 (Does it matter if a bilingual child only actively uses one language?).

Transcript It's over two years since the Covid-19 pandemic broke out and families across the globe were forced  into lockdown, with schools and childcare centres closed and many parents having to juggle working from home with caring for younger children and homeschooling older ones. Whilst this was a shared experience across many communities in many (if not most) countries around the world, individual families found themselves in many different circumstances, some more bearable than others.  In the second season of Kletsheads, we spoke about the impact of the pandemic of multilingual families in a special episode dedicated to the topic in early 2021. In that episode, I also told you about a research project which I was carrying out together with students following the MA in Linguistics programme at Radboud University, The Netherlands. Many listeners (and many others) took part in this project and in Hot off the Press (starts at 01:12), I tell you about our main findings. You can read all about them in the full report and infographic on the project's webpage, available in English and in Dutch. A publication in an academic journal will follow soon.  In Let's Klets (starts at 09:57), I talk to Dr. Francesca la Morgia is Founder and Director of the Mother Tongues, a social enterprise working to promote multilingualism and intercultural dialogue in Ireland. Co-incidentally, she also contributed to the earlier Kletsheads episode on bilingual families in lockdown. Francesca is a linguist, researcher and social entrepreneur based in Dublin. As she mentioned in our conversation, Francesca is also the creator of the Language Explorers Activitiy Book, which can be used by teachers and parents to help children explore their own bilingualism as well as bringing them into contact with 30 different languages in a fun and interactive way. Another great resource! Find out about all of Mother Tongues' various activities - including the Mother Tongues festival - on their website. This is the final episode of the season. Stay in touch via social media and thanks for listening! 

Bilingual children sometimes say things that their monolingual peers would never say. This is the same for adults, too. They don't always know certain words in each of their two (or more) languages. And in the many cases when bilingual children do know the word in question, they can't always think of it straightaway. Again, this also holds for adults. I speak from experience as someone who sometimes has to use google translate from Dutch to English to remember what a word is in my native language. As a parent, teacher or speech language therapist, you may wonder whether all of this is normal. The answer is "yes". Being creative with words, not always finding the right one, and sometimes saying things in ways monolinguals would never do is quite normal. In this episode research Elly Koutamanis explains why this is the case, how we know this exactly, and what this tells us about how the bilingual mind deals with words from two languages. We talked about two different kinds words: cognates and false friends. Cognates are words which look or sound similar and mean the same thing. For example, cat in English looks and sounds like kat in Dutch, and they both refer to the same four-legged furry creature that miaouws. False friends also look and sound similar but they mean something different. For example, the German word schlimm 'bad' sounds and looks like the Dutch word slim, which means something quite different: 'clever'. Research shows that the bilinguals respond differently to these two kinds of words, both compared with each other and compared with words that are completely unrelated across languages. Listen to the podcast to find out how exactly! What this research shows is that bilignuals are unable to switch off their languages and this means that how they use or understand one language is often influenced by the other. It also shows that a bilingual's two languages live together in the same 'bin' rather than in two separate 'bins', one for each language.  How words from two different languages are connected to the same concept (the triangle idea Elly spoke about in the episode) In this episode, I also share the last Kletsheads Quick and Easy for this season, a concrete tip you can put into practice straightaway to make the most out of the bilingualism in your family, class or clinic. This episode's tip was to play a game with your child in the heritage language. You can find many ideas for games on the PEACH project webiste. The website is currently available in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish and Romanian but the idea is (if possible) to translate the materials into all 24 languages of the EU. We spoke about the PEACH project in an earlier episode of the podcast when I spoke to Ute Limacher-Riebold.   Elly Koutamanis is a PhD student at the Centre for Language Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Her research is on exactly the same topic as this episode: how does the bilingual child's mind handle words from two languages. She's a member of the 2in1 project, which investigates how bilingual children's languages influence each other more generally. We heard from another project member, Chantal van Dijk, in an earlier episode on this topic last season. You can read more in this piece by Elly, Chantal and colleagues on the MPI TalkLing blog. 

Transcript Most bilingual children mix their two languages. Perhaps not all the time and not in all contexts, but as many parents will know, bilingual children regularly start a sentence in one language and finish it in another, or they insert a word from one language whilst speaking the other. Such behaviour is perfectly normal. You might say it's part and parcel of being bilingual. Yet why children mix and why some do it more than others remains poorly understood. Given that language mixing is often one of the biggest concerns raised by parents raising their children bilingually, it's surprising how little research there is on the topic. In Hot off the Press I tell you about one of the few pieces of research on language mixing in bilingual children where researchers in the US asked what makes children mix - not being proficient enough in their two languages or not being able to control which one they're speaking? It turns out that it's a bit of both. Listen to the podcast to find out more or take a look at the research paper yourself. Here are the details: Gross, M.C. & Kaushanskaya, M. (2020). Cognitive and linguistic predictors of language control in bilingual children. Frontiers in Psychology. 11:968. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00968 Megan Gross is a researcher at the University of Massachussetts at Amherst in the US, and you read about her work on her Bilingual Language Development Lab's website. Rita Kaushanskaya is a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, also in the US. Read about her work on her Language Acquisition and Bilingualism Lab's website. In this episode I also talk to another Kletshead of the week. This episode we're off to Ireland where I talk to 12-year-old Sara who's growing up with English, Arabic and Italian. She tells me about learning to read in Arabic and how one of the benefits of being bilingual is being able to use your 'other' language as a secret language when you don't want everyone to know what you're saying. This is in fact one of the most popular answers we've had to that question on the podcast!

Transcript Every three years, teenagers around the world are tested on their abilities in maths, science and reading, as part of PISA, the Programme for International Student Assessment. Basically, it's a way of comparing how well countries are doing when it comes to educating their children.  Because of Covid-19, the latest PISA data we have are from 2018 and what these data show is that in many countries, there are huge differences between children in how well they score, differences that are related to, for example, their parents' level of education (often referred to as socio-economic status), where their parents come from (whether they have an immigrant background), and also the language spoken at home. What causes these differences and when do they emerge? Do we see the same differences for all bilingual children? In this episode of Kletsheads, we're talking about the relationship between bilingualism and academic achievement. To what extent does speaking another language at home affect how well a child does at school? In conversation with researcher Orhan Agirdag, we discover that the performance gap between bilingual students and their monolingual classmates is *not* due to their bilingualism. It is precisely the children who use their home language more that do better at PISA. So what is the reason? According to Orhan, this achievement gap is caused by the way bilingual children are treated in education. We talk about the role of teachers' expectations, a country's educational system, and about using the multicultural capital of bilingual children in school.  Orhan Agirdag is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Psychological and Pedagogical Sciences of KU Leuven and at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences of the University of Amsterdam.  He has more than 100 publications to his name on all kinds of subjects concerning bilingualism and education. If you want to know more about his research and about the topics he discussed in the podcast, and you read Dutch, then read his book, Onderwijs in een gekleurde samenleving.  In this episode I also share another Kletsheads Quick and Easy with you, a concrete tip that you can put to use straightaway to make a success of the bilingualism in your family, class or clinic. This episode's tip is to play a game with your child. It's a tip taken from the resources provided by the PEACH project.  The PEACH project is a European project supporting families raising bilingual and multilingual children by creating a handbook for parents and educators as well as informative videos and a whole host of free resources for you to use (be sure to scroll to the bottom of the page!). As I mentioned in the podcast, there are even pictures you can download to turn into jigsaw puzzles to play with your child whilst speaking your hertiage language. It's well worth a look!

When you're raising a bilingual child and you're the the only source of one of your child's two or more languages, it can be a good idea to try and find other people or places for your child to hear and use that language. One way you can do this is to use multimedia resources such as tv and films, apps, audiobooks and music. In Hot off the Press, we talk about a recent piece of research from Singapore that investigates whether using multimedia resources really does support bilingual children's language development. This is the study in question: Sun H and Yin B (2020) Multimedia Input and Bilingual Children's Language Learning. Front. Psychol. 11:2023. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.02023     The researchers asked what matters most: how much time children spend engaging with this resources or how many different kinds of multimedia resources they use? It turns out that for the dominant language in the children's wider environment, English, multimedia resources didn't have much of an impact at all. For their children's heritage language, Mandarin Chinese, the diversity of resources was positively related to their scores on a range of language tests, but how much time they spent engaging with such resources was not.  Our discussion of multimedia resources continues in Let's Klets when I speak to Ute Limacher-Riebold from the PEACH project. The PEACH project is a European project supporting families raising bilingual and multilingual chidlren by creating a handbook for parents and educators as well as informative videos and a whole host of free resources for you to use (be sure to scroll to the bottom of the page!). As Ute mentioned in our conversation, there's also an ever-increasing set of Spotify playlists with all kinds of audio resources in a range of different languages (go to Spotify and search for PEACH project) and there are PEACH ambassadors around the world. Ute also mentioned a number of other resources she's been involved in creating, including the Activities for Multilingual Families YouTube channel. Ute Limacher-Riebold is a language consultant with expertise in intercultural communication and multilingualism. She is based in the Netherlands but has lived in various countries around the world, although never in her parents' country of origin, Germany. Find out more about Ute and her work at Ute's International Lounge. 

Learning to read is an important step in your child's development. When children start to learn to read depends on the country they live in. In some parts of the world, like the UK, children are taught to read pretty much as soon as they enter school, whereas in other countries, like here in NL, children spend a year or two first learning to recognise letters before they're actually sat down and taught how to read and write. Learning to read comes more easily to some children than others. And as a parent, it's important to help your child by reading to them, helping them sound out words, and of course encouraging them to read themselves. In this episode we discuss what you can do as a parent to help your bilingual child learn to read in both languages together with Elise de Bree. We start by discussing the process of learning to read, the steps involved and where children might experience difficulties. We learn that bilingual children learn to read in exactly the same way as monolingual children and all parents can support their children's reading development by helping them practice, having them sound out words and reading to them yourself. This will help children to learn new words, a crucial part of learning to read, because even if you can figure out what each letter on the page sounds like, if you don't then recognise the word you're reading, you won't be any the wiser.  We also discuss the question of how to approach reading in the home or heritage language (or languages). How do you make sure that your child can read in their heritage language as well as their school language? Is it always better to start with the school langauge and then move on to the other language? Or is it ok to do it the other way round ? Or even at the same time? What happens when the two languages use different scripts? Listen to the podcast to find out the answers to all of these questions.  In this episode I also share my third Kletsheads Quick and Easy with you, a concrete tip that you can put to use straightaway to make a success of the bilingualism in your family, class or clinic. This episode's tip is to map your child's input. The book I mentioned in the episode, where this tip comes from, is Eowyn Crisfield's recent book, Bilingual Families: A Practical Language Planning Guide. There you'll find more about the idea of mapping your child's language input. For a similar (and simpler) approach, take a look at the materials developed by the Planting Languages project and in particular at page 13 (step 5) in their booklet for parents (here in English but also available in Polish, French, Dutch and Greek). As I said in the podcast, I also tried to map my daughter's input. Here's the result: In the podcast I mention a tool that we've designed as part of the Q-BEx project. Essentially, this is a questionnaire which parents complete online (or together with a teacher or speech language therapist) and which outputs various measures of language exposure, language use and language richness, in both of the child's languages. In other words, it's a way of mapping a bilingual child's input! If you want to find out more, take a look at the project's website where there's information for teachers, parents and clinicians. We'd love it if you gave it a try! Elise De Bree is professor of Developmental Language Disorders in Inclusive Education at the Faculty of Social Sciences aan de Utrecht University, the Netherlands. This is endowed professorship from the  Koninklijke Auris. Her research focuses on reading and spelling, including dyslexia, and the language development of children with development language disorder (DLD). Find out more about Elise's research here. She contributes to several national organisations (Stichting Dyslexie Nederland and Nederlands Kwaliteitsinstituut Dyslexie) which provide research-based information and advice to parents, teachers and clinicians. 

In Hot off the Press, I tell you about a recently published study from Canada. This research deals with two important factors in bilingual language development, namely how early you start (age) and how much contact you have with a language (amount of language input). It's often thought that age is more important than language input, but this research shows that this is not the case. The study focused on the language development of bilingual children in Montreal who were growing up with French and English and/or another language. The children were 6 and 8 years old and had started learning French at different ages (before 3 years or after 3 years). The results show that -- once how much contact the children had with French was taken into account -- the early and late bilingual children hardly differed (or did not differ) from each other, nor from monolingual French-speaking children. It was true, however, that there was lots of variation between bilingual children in their scores on the language tests used, and these were related to differences in the amount of input in French that children had had up to that point. This research was led by Elin Thordardottir, professor in the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders atMcGill University. Here are details: Elin, Thordardottir (2019). Amount trumps timing in bilingual vocabulary acquisition: Effects of input in simultaneous and sequential bilingual school-age bilinguals. International Journal of Bilingualism, 23, 236-255. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367006917722418 It's open access, which means that you don't have to pay to be able to read it.  Would you like to know more about the Q-BEx project (Q-BEx stands for 'quantifying bilingual experience')? You can find an infographic about what the questionnaire involves here and summaries of our research so far - all written in accessible language - here.  Our Kletshead of the week is 13-year-old Rehoboth. He lives in South Africa and is growing up trilingual with English, Afrikaans and Xitsonga as his three languages. He tells me which language he dreams in, and why he thinks it's unfair if your school books aren't available in your heritage language.

Children who grow up hearing two or more languages do not always end up actively using all their languages as they get older. In such cases, it's typically the heritage or minority language which suffers at the expense of the school language. As we heard in the last episode of Kletsheads when I spoke to my neighbour Kate, children may be perfectly capable of speaking the heritage language but prefer to use the language or languages spoken at school. in some cases, however, they might not be able to speak the heritage language well enough in order to express themselves properly. This is often a great source of frustration for parents, who may feel disappointed and in some cases rejected by their child's inability or unwillingness to use their native language. It can also make communication quite difficult and parents may sometimes switch to speaking the school language in order to be able to communicate with their child, even though in some cases they themselves might not be very proficient in that language. All of this can a negative impact on the relationship between parent and child, and on children's well-being. This is the topic we're talking about in this episode of Kletsheads, together with researchers Elspeth Wilson and Napoleon Katsos. What is the impact of children's use and knowledge of the heritage language on family well-being? We talk about the role of language use and language proficiency (it's quite hard to disentangle the two), about the importance of promoting the heritage language culture, and we share tips for parents and teachers about what you can do to make sure that the bilingual children in your environment are happy, engaged and generally feel positive about life! We also hear our second Kletsheads Quick & Easy, a concrete tip that you can put to use straightaway to make a success of the bilingualism in your family, class or clinic. This episode's tip: find one new source of language input for your child's heritage language.  Dr. Elspeth Wilson is a post-doctoral researcher in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge. Her research mostly focuses on how children learn to understand what other people mean when they're talking, especially when what they literally say is often not what they mean (this area of linguistics is known as pragmatics).  Professor Napoleon Katsos is professor of Experimental Pragmatics in the section Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. One of his many research interests is language learning in monolingual and bilingual children and on the relation between bilingualism and autism. Together with colleagues, Elspeth and Napoleon published what's called a scoping review on the relationship between bilingualism and well-being. A scoping review is bascially a way of bringing together all the research that's been done on a topic and summarising it for others. As we heard in the episode, there's not actually that much research on this topic but what there is, you can find in this paper. Here are the full details:  Müller, L-M., Howard, K., Wilson, E., Gibson, J., & Katsos, N. (2020). Bilingualism in the family and child well-being: A scoping review. International Journal of Bilingualism, 24(5-6), 1049-1070. doi:10.1177/1367006920920939   It's open access, which means that you can go to the website and read it there or download it for free. (Should that not work for you, send Kletsheads a message and we'll email it you!). Elspeth and Napoleon are also part of the Cambridge Bilingualism Network, and as Napoleon mentioned on the podcast, they helped develop a set of materials for bilingual parents-to-be and antenatal practioners who work with them. You can find these on the We Speak Multi website.  Another great resource when it comes to well-being in bilingual families is the Harmonious Bilingualism Network directed by Professor Annick De Houwer. Her work was also mentioned in the podcast and you can find out more...

In this episode of Kletsheads we talk about one of the greatest frustrations faced by parents raising their children bilingually: you speak consistently to them in the heritage or home language and they consistently respond in the school language. Of course this only happens when you're proficient in that language, too, and for many parents this is indeed the case. In Let's Klets, we speak to Kate, English-speaking mum to two daughters, aged 5 and 8. Until recently, they both almost always spoke to her in their other language, Dutch, the language of the community they grow up in, the language they use at school, the language they use with their father, and a language which Kate herself speaks very well. It will be a familiar situation to many, no doubt. Kate tells us how a summer holiday in the US last year changed all this and how she discovered just how much English her children actually knew. It's a story of hope which I'm sure will inspire many parents to stick at speaking their heritage language even when it might seem like they're fighting a losing battle.  In one of our new features for this season,  Hot off the Press,  I tell you about a recent piece of research on bilingual children. In this first edition, we hear about a study looking at bilingual children who speak Russian as their heritage language and who were growing up in five different countries (Norway, UK, Germany, Latvia and Israel). The study examines their acquisition of grammatical gender. Grammatical gender in Russian can be tricky, because it's not always clear which gender (masculine, feminine, neuter) a noun has. Some genders are harder to learn than others and in this study, we learn that those which have less 'transparent' cues need more input, that instruction in the heritage language can help in this regard, and that for this particular aspect of Russian, any influence from the children's other language was minimal. The study in question is free to access:  Rodina Y., Kupisch T., Meir N., Mitrofanova N., Urek O. & Westergaard M. (2020) Internal and External Factors in Heritage Language Acquisition: Evidence From Heritage Russian in Israel, Germany, Norway, Latvia and the United Kingdom. Frontiers in Education https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2020.00020

Children start talking when they are around one year old. However, we know from research that they are already working on language before that. In this episode, we learn what exactly babies know about language. And we hear about the ingenious ways scientists have developed to figure this out. For example, they measure how fast babies suck on a fake teat, or measure the activity in their brains.  Bilingual babies by definition hear more than one language while in their cradle. How do they keep their two languages apart? How do they know which combination of sounds belong together and in which language? How do they learn their first words? These are all questions we discuss in this episode of Kletsheads. We do this together with Krista Byers-Heinlein from Concordia University in Canada. We learn that bilingual babies can hear differences between all kinds of languages, and just like monolingual babies, they start to zoom in on the sounds of the languages they hear around them in the first 12 months. Babies use the rhythm of language to distinguish different languages. In the podcast you will hear three languages, German, Spanish and Japanese. All three have a different rhythm. The pieces in the podcast were all from adults reading children's books.  Spanish: Pollito Tito - Chicken Little in Spanish with English subtitles Japanese: Learn Japanese with Children's Books - 12 Minutes of Japanese Kids Books With Hiroko German: Noaanou's Kinderkram -  Vorlesegeschichten: Pixi Buch "Conni bekommt eine Katze" Importantly, keeping the two languages separate by having each parent only speak one language only does not appear to be necessary for babies to keep their languages apart. As Krista put it, mixing your languages won't mix up your babies.  We also hear about bilingual babies learning languages which are similar to each other, and about differences between bilingual and monolingual babies when it comes to their flexibility in learning new rules that don't have anything to do with language: bilingual babies adapt to the environment they're growing up in and this can have consequences for how they learn such rules.  In the first edition of our new feature, Kletsheads Quick and Easy, I encourage you to give your bilingual child a compliment about their bilingualism. Compliments make a child feel valued, it boosts their self-esteem, and gives them self-confidence. It is also a way of recognising that speaking two or more languages is not always easy, and that it can sometimes take extra effort.  Krista Byers-Heinlein is Research Chair in Bilingualism and Open Science in the Department of Psychology at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. In her lab, she researches studies how bilingualism in the infant and preschool years affects children's language, social, and cognitive development. She has published widely on these topics and regularly communicates her findings to a broader audience in talks and appearances on podcasts such as this one. You can read about her research here.

The second season of Kletsheads is almost about to start! The first episode will drop on Feb 18th. You can expect the same mix of science, experiences, and practical tips, but not quite the same as the last season. The episodes will be a bit shorter (between 30 and 45 minutes, instead of an hour) and they'll be released every two weeks (instead of once a month). And we have two new features for you: Hot off the Press and Kletsheads Quick and Easy. Listen to this teaser episode to find out more!

Transcript In this special bonus episode of Kletsheads we have a podcast crossover. We are delighted to share an episode of the Much Language Such Talk podcast, an English language podcast that answers questions about language, learning, and culture. The podcast was created by three researchers at the University of Edinburgh, Brittany Blankship, Eva-Maria Schnelten and Carine Abraham, who are also volunteers at Bilingualism Matters, a research and information centre on multilingualism at the University of Edinburgh. There are episodes on a variety of topics related to multilingualism, from language, race and ethnicity, to language and cognition, and specific languages such as Basque. This episode is about multilingual children. Carine is the host and I am the guest. We talk about the role of language input (listen to this episode of Kletsheads if you want to hear more about this), bilingual siblings (here's an episode about that), how the languages of bilingual children can influence each other (we also have an episode of Kletsheads about this), and of course about podcasting and why I started the Kletsheads podcast.  During the conversation with Carine and Maria I talked about the Kletskoppen child language festival. This is a science festival about language for children. The next edition will take place on March 6th, 2022 in Nijmegen.

Transcript "You're wobbling the whole time the table! This is what my bilingual son said to his sister when they were playing a board game sat together at a small table and big sister was apparently also playing with the table leg. His message was clear. Big sister stopped and the game continued. What struck me most about this conversation was the way in which my son had chosen to phrase his message: his sentence was perfectly ok English, and his sister clearly understoond him, but I am certain that his English-speaking cousins in England would have said it differently. They would have switched the words around and said "You're wobbling the table the whole time" instead. This is a wonderful example of what we call cross-linguistic influence. The way in which my son put together his sentence was clearly influenced by the fact that he speaks Dutch as well as English, because in Dutch, "de hele tijd" (the Dutch for "the whole time") comes before "de tafel" (the Dutch for "the table") and not after it.  Bilingual children sometimes sound different to children who only speak one language. They sometimes say things in a slightly different way, and this is often related to how their other language works. Why do bilingual children do this? What does this tell us about their language development? Why do some bilingual children do it more often than others? Is cross-linguistic influence something to worry about or is it part and parcel of being bilingual? These are all questions that we answer in this episode of Kletsheads, the last episode of season 1, together with fellow researcher Chantal van Dijk.  We learn that cross-linguistic influence is part and parcel of being bilingual. This is because the two languages of a multilingual are connected to each other. Some researchers even claim that certain grammatical rules are shared between languages, for example if they are the same in the two languages. We also hear that language dominance can have an effect on when one language influences the other: if bilingual children are much stronger in one of their languages, their stronger language usually influences the weaker language, although cross-linguistic influence in the other direction - that is, from the weaker language to the stronger language - is still possible.  In Let's Klets we talk to Martha, a mum here in the Netherlands who grew up herself as a bilingual child. She talks about deciding which of her two languages (English and Dutch) she should speak to her son, and about the challenges her family faced during the lockdown and once her son went back to school. And we hear from trilingual 12-year-old Nicole. She's growing with with Dutch, English and Italian. She tells us about why she thinks it's important for her to speak Italian (to speak to her grandparents) and how some words can be a bit confusing because they sound the same but mean something different.  Chantal van Dijk is a postdoctoral researcher at the Radboud University in Nijmegen where she is conducting research within the 2in1 project on the language development of bilingual children and in particular cross-linguistic influence. In September 2021 she will defend her thesis with four different studies on this topic. In the podcast, she talked about a large study that we carried out together, a "meta-analysis" where we pooled together data from over 700 bilingual children, 700 monolingual children, and 17 unique language combinations, to find out which factors predict whenand how much cross-linguistic influence takes place. The article is published in the Journal of Child Language and you can access it here. As I said in the podcast, it's written for an academic audience so it does contain quite a lot of jargon. 

Transcript One language at school and another language at home. This is the reality for most bilingual children here in the Netherlands and in many countries around the world. Bilingual children often use the school language when they're at home, sometimes because this is the language spoken to them by one of their parents, but speaking the other language at school? That rarely happens. Sometimes it's not even allowed. According to many researchers -- and more and more teachers -- this is a missed opportunity. Because using the home languages of bilingual children at school can have all kinds of advantages. It makes them feel better, they often perform better academically (also in the school language), and it promotes inclusivity. One way of giving the home languages of bilingual children a place at school is called translanguaging. In this episode, I talk to Joana Duarte, a polyglot herself, about this strategy and what research-based evidence there is to show that it works. In short, it does work but only under the right circumstances. Joana tells us what those circumstances are. We also discuss potential concerns teachers may have, such as what to do when you don't speak or understand the children's home language yourself, and we hear what teachers who have worked with Joana and her team have learned from using this approach. In Let's Klets, I talk to Victoria Farrell and Marie Newton, both speech and language therapists working in the UK, and both members of the Bilingualism London Clinical Excellence Network, a group of speech and language therapists specialised in working with children and families from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. They provide support, help and encouragement to all members and promote the exchange of information and ideas and resources. Check out their website for more details!  Our Kletshead of the week is Katriina from Canada. She was raised trilingually, with Finnish from mum, English from dad and her wider environment, and French at school. Now an adult herself, she reflects on her own multilingualism, as well as that of her future children.  Joana Duarte is Professor in Multilingualism and Literacy at NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences in Leeuwarden, and Special Professor of World Citizenship and Bilingual Education at the University of Amsterdam. She conducts research on diversity and equity, the language acquisition of multilingual students, language attitudes of teachers and families, multilingual didactics and teacher professionalisation in the context of multilingualism in education. One of the projects Joana mentioned during our conversation is the 3M project (More Opportunities With Multilingualism). There are many resources there but most are in Dutch.  An extensive list of the research of Joana and her colleagues can be found on this website. One of the researchers most associated with translanguaging is Ofélia García. List to her in this lecture where she explains what translanguaging entails. This explainer video by Eowyn Crisfield (our guest on the very first episode of Kletsheads): https://youtu.be/iNOtmn2UTzI When talking about how schools can find out more about bilingual children's home language environments, I mentioned the Q-BEx project. Q-BEx stands for Quantifying Bilingual Experience and in this project we are developing a user-friendly, online questionnaire which teachers, clinicans and researchers can use bto gain more insight into children's language experience, now and in the past. This project is led by Cécile De Cat at Leeds University, and involves researchers from the UK (Drasko Kascelan - Leeds, Ludovica Serratrice - Reading), France (Philippe Prévost & Laurie Tuller -- Tours) and me (Sharon Unsworth - Nijmegen). 

Transcript Many children in the world grow up with three languages. For example, because their parents both speak a different language and they learn a third language at school. Or because they speak one language at home and go to a bilingual school where they learn two new languages. There are also many countries in the world where almost everyone is trilingual. Think, for instance, of countries in Central and West Africa, countries like India, Luxembourg and Switzerland. There are actually far more trilingual children than you might first think, also in countries like the Netherlands.  In this episode, we focus mainly on trilingual families.  For example, where one parent speaks Russian, the other German, and at school a third language is learnt. Our guest is Simona Montanari, researcher and mother of two trilingual (Spanish, Italian, English) teenagers. Together with Simona, we answer the following questions: What can you realistically expect from a child who grows up with three languages, and how can you best support his or her multilingual development? Are children able to keep their languages apart? Do they take longer to develop their language than children who grow up with only one or two languages? How many languages can a child learn at once? We discover that there are many similarities between trilingualism and bilingualism. This means that the factors that play a role in bilingualism, such as how much language a child is exposed to, also play a role in trilingualism. We also talk about (possible) differences between bilingualism and trilingualism. We discuss trilingual language development in the early years as well as what happens when children grow up and how you can ensure that your child continues to master and use all three languages.  And there's a bit of an Italian flavour to this episode, because in Let's Klets I talk to another native speaker of Italian, Sara. She lives in London, and together with her American husband is raising her child bilingually. She tells us how her daughter was a completely passive bilingual, understanding everthing her mum said to her in Italian but only answering in English. Until the lockdown. Because after spending hours and hours re-enacting Elsa's coronation day with her mum (from the popular film Frozen), and a visit from nonna (her Italian grandma), everything changed! To the delight of both her parents, she now regularly uses Italian and has even said that she wants to start learning Spanish.  In this episode we have not one, but two Kletsheads of the week, Gabriel and Elliot. They live in France, but also speak English and Czech.  Simona Montanari is a researcher at California State University, Los Angeles, USA. She is one of the few people who have done research on trilingual children. During the podcast, she also talks about her own children. If you want to 'meet' the two girls, check out her YouTube channel where there are several videos showing examples of their three languages. Simona also does research on bilingual education. You can find more on her website. 

Transcript "Help! My child doesn't speak my language back to me!" This is one of the most frequently heard concerns from parents raising their children bilingually. You really try your best, consistently speaking your language to your child, and yet she or he mostly speaks to you in the majority language, usually the language spoken at school (so Dutch here in the Netherlands, English in Ireland, German in Germany, and so on). Some parents don't really mind when their children do this, but for others it can be a source of great frustration. In this episode of Kletsheads we ask whether it matters if a bilingual child only actively uses one of the two languages she or he hears? It turns out that is does. At least if you want your child to be able to actively use both languages in the long run. Our guest is researcher Erika Hoff (who also appeared in Episode 2, where we answered the question How much language does a child need to hear to become bilingual?). In this episode, we learn that speaking a language is different from just listening to one. And we also provide lots of tips for parents on how to encourage a bilingual child to continue using their minority or heritage language. These are not only useful for parents themselves, but also for speech language  therapists and teachers who want to provide advice to bilingual parents.   Sharon and Thorwen chatting online In Let's Klets we speak to Ellen-Rose Kambel about Language Friendly Schools, an initiative designed to encourage schools around the world to welcome and value all the languages spoken by their students and their parents. And our Kletshead of the week is the 19-year-old Thorwen, originally from the Netherlands but who spent most of his childhood in Hong Kong. He tells us about his positive experiences of going to a local (rather than international) school and about attending Dutch language education. To find out more about this, take a look at the Stichting NOB website. Erika Hoff is Professor of Developmental Psychology at Florida Atlantic University in the USA. She is world-renowned for her research into the language development of bilingual and monolingual children and currently leads a research project following a large group of Spanish-English bilingual children from 2½ years of age up to and including their tenth birthday. In her research, she focuses on the factors in the young child's environment which predict later language development. Our conversation took place in June 2019 when Erika was a guest researcher at Radboud University. Ellen-Rose Kambel is Director of the Rutu Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to mother-tongue education. With a PhD in social sciences, she has written several books and articles on education and multilingualism. Together with Emmanuelle Le Pichon-Vorstman (University of Toronto), she founded The Language Friendly School. Go to their website to find a roadmap indicating what a school should and should not do in order to become language-friendly.  Ellen-Rose Kambel is Director of the Rutu Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to mother-tongue education. With a PhD in social sciences, she has written several books and articles on education and multilingualism. Together with Emmanuelle Le Pichon-Vorstman (University of Toronto), she founded The Language Friendly School. Go to their website to find a roadmap indicating what a school should and should not do in order to become language-friendly. 

Transcript Children growing up in the same bilingual family can differ in how well they speak their two (or more) languages. Sometimes siblings in bilingual families differ in how much they use their two (or more) languages. Parents often remark that their eldest child is more bilingual than their youngest. Or that their youngest develops more quickly in the school language and often ends up preferring this language over the heritage language (or languages). A crucial moment in a bilngual family's life is when the eldest child goes to school. Then, suddenly, the school language starts being used (more) at home and language dynamics may change in the family. This is what parents often report, but to what extent is this backed up by research? What can the available research tell us about the language development of siblings in bilingual families? Do older children really have such a big influence on the bilingual language development of their younger siblings? And if so, is this the same for both the school language and the heritage language? The language development of siblings in bilingual families is a topic that we've done some research on recently. You'll hear a bit more about this during the episode and you can read the study I talk about here (open access). I also talk to Canadian researcher Tamara Sorenson Duncan about her research on the topic.   We also discuss the language use between siblings in bilingual families. Children often have a preference for the school language when they talk to each other, much to the frustration of at least one of their parents. There's not much research on this topic but I will give you a number of practical tips for how, as a parent, you can ensure that your children continue to use their heritage language in the home. In Let's Klets, I talk to Gisi Cannizzaro, enthusiastic promoter of heritage language schools here in the Netherlands. Our Kletshead of the week is the 11-year-old Ella from Montréal. She comes from an English-speaking household and attends French-language school. We talk about the language of dreams and about the word for "squirrel" in different languages! Dr. Tamara Sorenson Duncan is an assistant professor at Carleton University in Ottowa, Canada. Her research focuses on the bilingual language development of children who immigrated or fled to Canada with their parents, children with language development disorders, and children with autism. The research she discusses in this episode was carried out as part of her doctoral research at the University of Alberta, under the supervision of Prof. Johanne Paradis.  Dr. Gisi Cannizzaro lives in Eindhoven with her Italian husband and two trilingual sons (English, Italian, and Dutch). Originally from New Orleans, in the U.S., she speaks English as her mother tongue. After completing a PhD in child language acquisition at Groningen University in the Netherlands, she worked for six years as an educational consultant helping multilingual, internationally mobile families with children. In 2018 she initiated two volunteer projects in Eindhoven: one to organize Italian language lessons for Italian-speaking children (Eindhoven Italian School "La Lampadina") and one to organize a network of mother tongue ("heritage language") programs, Heritage Language Schools Eindhoven.  The Heritage Language Schools Eindhoven website contains information about heritage language education in the Eindhoven region, lists the available programs, and announces news and updates from these programs. The site also has information that is of interest for people living outside of Eindhoven: it lists events about multilingualism in the Netherlands and abroad (if online), features interviews with experts in the field of heritage language education, and contains useful resources for parents and Dutch school teachers. There is a special resource page devoted to information about professional development for heritage language program ma...

Transcript Many bilingual families across the world find themselves in lockdown. And as a result, schools are closed and children are having to be taught online and/or by their parents. What would have been unheard of a year ago has now - unfortunately - become normal. But normal, of course, does not mean easy. Many families are struggling with homeschooling, from practical issues like whether there is enough space and equipment available to issues relating to actual content of the lessons.  Bilingual families may also face additional challenges. If you don't speak the school language at home, how do you make sure your child has enough contact with that language - Dutch in the case of the Netherlands, where Kletsheads is based. What language should you use as a parent while homeschooling? Is it better to switch to the school language or can you continue to use your mother tongue?  These are all questions we answer in this special episode of Kletsheads about the impact of the lockdown on bilingual families. We're joined by Tessa Mearns, researcher at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and Francesca la Morgia from the organisation, Mother Tongues. Tessa and Francesca are both mothers of bilingual children, too, so they also tell us about their families' experiences during this period. And it's not all doom and gloom! We'll also talk about some of the upsides bilingual families have reported to the lockdown: more time at home means more contact with the home language (the non-Dutch language, in our case) and this has meant children are improving, using that language more, and sometimes developing new skills such as reading. At the time this podcast "drops", as it's called in podcast world, the primary schools in the Netherlands have just re-opened, but secondary schools are still teaching online only and children with family members who are shielding or who are shielding themselves of course have to stay at home. In many other places around the world, all schools remain closed and in many countries, this also holds for preschool childcare centres, too. Whether you're still in the thick of it or you want some tips on how to approach homeschooling if you're faced with it again (let's hope not), there are plenty of practical suggestions and tips for both parents and teachers. Because this is a special episode, there's no Kletshead of the Week or Let's Klets this time. Dr. Tessa Mearns is a Lecturer Researcher at ICLON (Leiden University Graduate School of Teaching) where she also coordinates the World Teachers Programme. Tessa is from Great Britain and, together with her English-speaking husband, is raising her two children bilingually. For this episode, she collected the experiences and tips of other bilingual families in her local are.  Dr. Francesca la Morgia is Director of the Mother Tongues, a not for profit organization aimed at promoting multilingualism in Ireland. She is a linguist, researcher and social entrepreneur based in Dublin. In the podcast, Francesca mentioned several resources which she and her colleagues have developed for parents and teachers. You can find these here. Francesca is also the creator of the Language Explorers Activitiy Book, which can be used by teachers and parents to help children explore their own bilingualism as well as bringing them into contact with 30 different languages in a fun and interactive way. Another great resource!  At the end of the podcast, I mention a study from the UK about the impact of the lockdown on multilingual families. You can read more about it in this New York Times article, or in this blog by the lead researcher, Prof. Ludovica Serratrice of the University of Reading. We want to conduct a similar study at Radboud University and will share more information about this around mid-March via social media. If you would like to apply now, please contact us via this website or send a message to kletsheads@ru.nl. 

Transcript For many bilingual families, mixing languages is quite normal. Children may start a sentence in one language and end it with the other. They sometimes throw in words from the other language in what is otherwise a monolingual conversation.  For many parents, this is often cause for concern. It might be a sign that their child can't speak either language well, or that they're confused. In this episode of Kletsheads, we find out whether these concerns are justified. Children aren't the only ones mix. Parents who speak more than one language do this, too. And this is also something which parents often worry about. Will it have a negative effect on your child's language development? Can you better avoid mixing altogether? Together with Professor Elma Blom of Utrecht University (The Netherlands), we discuss the reasons why children mix their two languages, and what we know about the impact of parental mixing on children's development in their two (or more) languages. We learn that language mixing is completely normal, and based on the available research, there's no real reason to worry about it, either when your child does it or you do it yourself as a parent.  Sharon and Liz recording Let's klets And there's a bit of a Canadian theme in this episode! Our Kletshead of the week is thirty-something Christi from Ontario, Canada. She grew up bilingually with German and Spanish, but now considers English her dominant language. And in Let's Klets, we stay in Canada to speak to Dutch-speaking mum, Liz, (pictured above) about her hopes and concerns about the future of her bilingual toddler.   Elma Blom is professor of Language Development and Multilingualism in Family and Education at Utrecht University. Her research focuses on the language development of bilingual children, children with language impairment, and bilingual children with language impairment. Find out more about Elma and her research interests on her website. 

Transcript Potty-training, teething, learning to ride a bike: some children are quick to reach each of these milestones, whereas others are much slower. The differences between children can be huge, and such differences also exist when it comes language development. But how do you know when your child's progress in learning a language really is too slow? What should you do as a parent or teacher of a bilingual child, if you're worried about his or her language development in one of their two languages, or perhaps even in both? At what point is it wise to contact a professional such as a speech language therapist? And if you are such a professional, what is the best way of approaching assessment in bilingual children?  You often hear that bilingual children are slower to learn their two languages than monolingual children. People refer to this as a language delay. Language delay is used in different ways by different people and so it's not always clear what this term means. Often times, language delay is used to refer to a child who is lagging behind in his or her language development in the language used at school (so Dutch in the Netherlands, English in the UK, etc.). For bilingual children, this may be due to the fact that - because they're learning two languages at the same time - they have less contact with the school language than their monolingual peers. At the same time, having a language delay can also mean that something else is going on, namely that the child has what's called a developmental language disorder, often abbreviated to DLD. DLD is a condition which affects one in fifteen children and is just as common in monolingual children as it is in bilinguals.  In this episode of Kletsheads we talk to Sean Pert, speech language therapist and researcher, about language delay and DLD. We learn that if a bilingual child has DLD, this will be visible in both their languages. This means that DLD is not simply the same as being unable to speak the school language well. We learn what the characteristics of DLD are, what to do as a parent if you think your child might have DLD, and what to pay attention to when diagnosing DLD in bilingual children. Our Kletshead of the week is the brillliant Naia and in Let's Klets we talk to an educational consultant about five simple steps in include multilingualism in the classroom. Dr. Sean Pert is Senior Lecturer and Consultant Speech and Language Therapist at the University of Manchester in the UK. He has over 25 years of clinical experience and has worked on home language interventions for bilingual children in the UK speaking Pakistani heritage (Mirpuri, Punjabi and Urdu), Bangladeshi heritage (Sylheti) and Polish languages. As discussed in the podcast, Sean was involved in writing the the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists' Clinical Guidelines on Bilingualism.  Mari Varsányi was born in Budapest, Hungary and now lives in Amsterdam, Netherlands. She works as an educational consultant and trainer at human-ed (www.human-ed.org), working in the field of intercultural and inclusive education. Mari's five steps to making space for multilingualism are discussed in detail (along with photos) in this blog post and you can download the activities from step 3 (as part of a whole portfolio) on her webiste. Mari is also the mother of a trilingual (Hungarian-Hebrew-Dutch) 3-year-old, and she appeared in an earlier episode of Kletsheads, where she helped us review books about raising bilingual children.  If you're in the Netherlands, you might also be interested in the Dutch bilingual speech and language therapy association, where you can find a map showing where to find speech language therapists who areable to assess children in languages other than Dutch. If you understand Dutch, hop over to the Dutch edition of the podcast, where we also have an episode on taalachterstandand bilingualism. 

Transcript Are you looking for a book about bilingual children to give to someone in the holidays? Or perhaps you just fancy a new book to read for yourself. Then this special episode of Kletsheads is definitely one for you! Because together with a panel of experts, we are reviewing three recently published books on raising bilingual (and trilingual) children.  These are the books: And here our the members of our (all-women!) panel: Cécile De Cat is originally from Belgium and has lived in the UK for over 20 years. She is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Leeds. In her research, she asks what makes individual bilingual children differ from each other in how they learn and use their two languages. Via Language@Leeds and the Centre for Applied Education Research she also works with teachers to enhance research-informed approaches to education. Cécile is also raising her son bilingually (French and English).  Christine Taylor is originally from the US and now lives in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, where she is raising her two children bilingually (English and Dutch). She is a professional storyteller, helping others to tell their own personal or professional stories. Find out more at her website storycraft.nl Mari Varsányi was born in Budapest, Hungary and now lives in Amsterdam, Netherlands. She is the mother of a trilingual (Hungarian-Hebrew-Dutch) 3-year-old. She works as an educational consultant and trainer at human-ed (www.human-ed.org), working in the field of intercultural and inclusive education.  For each book, we talk about stengths and weaknesses, whether the authors achieved what they set out to, whether the book is suitable for its intended audience, and we'll each give the book a final rating from one to five stars - just like on Amazon, but then more fun! Of course, as reviewers, we each come to these books from our own personal and professional experiences, and these may be different from yours. Have a listen and hopefully, whatever your background, there'll still be enough in this episode to give you a good idea about which books might be a suitable choice for you, or for someone you know.  Because I really wanted to do justice to each of the books discussed in the episode and give both the perspective of a parent and a scientist, we could only fit in three books in total (and even then, it's still quite a long episode!). There are many more books available on this topic. Here are a couple of tips for other books which you might be interested in: A Parents' and Teachers' Guide to Bilingualism offers a wealth of practical advice to parents and teachers of bilingual and multilingual children. Written in a reader-friendly question and answer format, author Colin Baker, (former) Professor of Education at Bangor University and father of three bilingual children, provides up-to-date, factual information on issues relating to the family, language development, reading and writing and education. It's easy to dip into and covers almost every aspect of raising bilingual children you can think of. This is the book I always recommend when talking to parents. The only issue is that it was last revised in 2014 and so it's starting to get a bit old. I don't know that this will change much of the advice given but there are no doubt some insights from the latest scientific research which will be missing. Nevertheless, still worth a look! Read more here. Dual Language Development & Disorders is aimed at language professionals, such as teachers and speech language therapists, who regularly come into contact with bilingual children. Now in its second edition, this book provides a clear and accessible overview of the latest research in bilingual first language acquisition and child second language acquisition. The first chapter introduces profiles of various children which are used to guide the reader through the relevant issues, including diagnosing disorders.

Transcript Bilingual children grow up in many different circumstances. In some families each parent speaks his or her own native language with their child.  So, for example, Mum speaks Italian and Dad English. This is what's generally known as the "one parent, one language" strategy. In other families, both parents speak the same language, for example Arabic, and the child only comes into contact with the language of the wider community at a childcare centre, in the playgroup or at school. Some children hear their two languages from native speakers, whereas others also get language input from people who are less fluent in the language in question.  In some families there are other family members in the neighborhood who speak the home (heritage or minority) language to the child, while in other families this language is only spoken by one parent and no one else. All in all, this means that there can be big differences between children in how much language they hear and what kind of language they hear, and this holds for both their languages. In this second episode of the English edition of  Kletsheads, together with Professor Erika Hoff, we explore the extent to which these differences affect the language development of bilingual children. Our Kletshead of the week is French-English bilingual boy, Loïc, and in Let's Klets we speak to secondary school teacher, Marjolein Koster-Leppink, who tells us why she decided to speak her second language to her child.  Erika Hoff is Professor of Developmental Psychology at Florida Atlantic University in the USA. She is world-renowned for her research into the language development of bilingual and monolingual children and currently leads a research project following a large group of Spanish-English bilingual children from 2½ years of age up to and including their tenth birthday. In her research, she focuses on the factors in the young child's environment which predict later language development. Our conversation took place in June 2019 when Erika was a guest researcher at Radboud University. Marjolein is trained as an English teacher and since 2016 has worked as a teacher trainer at Windesheim University of Applied Sciences . She is a native speaker of Dutch and studied English at Utrecht University. As you'll hear, her English is amazing, and she tells us how she already decided to speak English with her future children back in her student days. She now has a son, Owen, who is almost 2 years old, and in addition to her native Dutch, she regularly uses English with him whenever she can. 

Transcript Are you or your partner pregnant, and do you speak a different language from each other? Then chances are there's not just a baby on the way, but a bilingual baby! At least that's what a lot of parents hope when they find themselves raising a child together with someone who has a different mother tongue. It's not always clear though what exactly the best approach is in such a situation. Should you both continue to speak your own language, or are there other choices you could make that might lead to better outcomes? What do you do if you don't understand each other's languages and speak a third language amongst yourselves? What will your conversations with your future offspring look like? And if you do speak the same language as each other but this is a different language from the one spoken in the community around you -- Dutch in the case of families here in the Netherlands --  you may wonder how your child will learn that language properly. In short, then, how do you plan for a bilingual child? Don't worry if you've have already started your parenting journey and are already raising bilingual children, there's plenty for you in this episode, too.  In this first episode of Kletsheads we talk to Eowyn Crisfield about how you and your partner can make a plan for the languages in your family, something that's often referred to as family language planning. We hear that it's wise to think about this early on, that it's necessary to involve all the important people in your child's life, and that this plan may change over time. Eowyn gives us her six building blocks for success so that you can be sure that there is a bright bilingual future ahead for your child. This episode is mostly intended for parents, but if you're a speech language therapist, teacher, or other professional working with young families, there's plenty of useful information in here for you, too. Every episode we speak to a bilingual child about what it's like to grow up with more than one language, in our feature Kletshead of the week. This episode we have two Kletsheads of the week, two brothers from Utrecht, the Netherlands, Quinn and Aiden. As part of our feature Let's klets, we speak to a parent or professional about their experiences with bilingual children. In this episode we speak to Dessu from Ethiopia about his very multilingual family. Our conversation took place at the Kletskoppen child language festival held in Nijmegen on 29th February, 2020. Sharon interviewing Dessu at Kletskoppen child language festival Eowyn Crisfield is an expert in multilingual education and parenting. She comes from Canada, where she earned her Bachelor in Teaching English as a second language and her Master of Applied Linguistics. She has over 20 years of experience in teaching, teacher training, and research in this field. She has a very accessible blog www.onraisingbilingualchildren.com where she writes about her professional and personal experiences with biilingualism. Here you can also read more about her services, including a webinar on bilingual education. Eowyn is the mother of three trilingual children (English, French & Dutch) and works as a lecturer at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. During my conversation with Eowyn several topics came up that we discussed in the first season of the Dutch-language edition of Kletsheads, such as the mixing of two tasks (Aflevering 1: Is het praten van twee talen door elkaar reden tot zorg?), language problems (Aflevering 4: Hoe weet je of een meertalig kind een taalachterstand heeft?), and whether bilingualism brings many cognitive benefits (Aflevering 5: Zijn meertalige kinderen slimmer dan eentalige kinderen?). Eowyn also gave Colin Baker's book A Parent's and Teacher's Guide to Bilingualism van Colin Baker as a reading tip. This is also one of my favorites!  Keen to hear more from Eowyn and her approach to family language planning? She has her own book coming out in January 2021.

Find out more about the new English-language edition of Kletsheads, the podcast about bilingual children for parents, teachers and speech language therapists.