10 Stages of Bilingual Language Development

“Becoming bilingual, whether from birth of soon after, or subsequently in early childhood prior to schooling, entails a complex interaction between what children bring to the learning task, that is, among others, speech segmentation skills, speed of processing, and the linguistic and cultural environments in which they grow up” (Ludovica Serratrice, Becoming Bilingual in Early […]

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Language acquisition versus language learning

  What is the difference between language acquisition and language learning.   Some people use the term of language acquisition for all the phases that lead to language fluency, including learning to read and write. Others use the term of language learning even for babies and very young, pre-school children. – But there is a […]

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Code-switching, what to do, when should I worry?

This is one of the questions I get asked frequently: When should I worry when my children do code-switching? First of all, the term code-switching is widely used as an umbrella term for using different languages in the same sentence, alternating them to some extent. It is not to be confused with borrowing, where a […]

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Myths about Bilingualism/Multilingualism

This is a short (!) overview of some common myths about bilingualism/multilingualism – I will be updating this list in May/June 2024, so, if you came across any myths you want me to include, please let me know in the comments. They are all assumptions based on old theories about bilingualism and bilinguals (and multilingualism), […]

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