August carnival

Lots of great posts to read this month in the carnival. Head over to Best4future to read what is on offer. It is free and it is a lovely community.

July blogging carnival

The July blogging carnival on bilingualism is here. Check it out at Non-native bilingualism hosted by Tamara. If you would like to host one, here is the page to visit.

Happy reading!

May 2012 blogging carnival on bilingualism

The May carnival is here. Check out this month's great contributions here.
My own is posted below.

April's bilingual blogging carnival

Welcome to this month's blogging carnival on bilingualism.

I have had a terrible week after my fairly new computer broke down (and might have to end up in the bin). I lost a lot of valuable bits and pieces (thankfully we were making regular back-ups). So i am writing this on an old laptop hoping everything turns out ok and I haven't missed out on anything or anybody important.

I am fairly new to this blogging (carnival) but every month I love reading the carnival, discovering new blogs and reading what other parents fear, battle with or enjoy about their children's multilingualism. Before motherhood took me in a new direction, I used to be a researcher in linguistics. I devoted 4 years of my life studying bilingual children and how they acquire words. But I had no idea about all of these amazing resources. Maybe there were not that many back then (oh I sound old now!). But I still think a lot of researchers and academics generally underestimate the power and knowledge of parents. 

Words, words, words.... 4years, I heard you say, about words! 

How important are words? How are they written? How do our children learn them? How can we encourage our children to learn more of them? What do our bilingual children make of them?

I tried to make this my little theme for this carnival. Every post is represented by a word on this map. But I have also included a small description about each of our wonderful posts so you can make your choice where to go.

Bye-bye, au revoir and adeus or why my child is NOT lagging behind monolinguals

Quite recently, I saw a few headlines (here and here for example) in the news about what basic words a two-year-old should know. That immediately grabbed my attention for several reasons: my daughter has just turned two; and words are my thing (as you may know by now).
This research is nothing new in the world of academia. These lists have existed for quite some time. The study in question reported here is under criticism (see second example's comments). But I am not going to go into that. It is not relevant to what I want to say. The fact is that there are words that are acquired first. These tend to always be the same. And this is what is relevant here.
To summarise the articles, two-year-olds should know and produce (spontaneously say) about 25 words minimum:
Mummy, daddy, milk, juice, hi, hello, ball, no, dog, cat, nose, eye, show, banana, car, hot, thank you, shoe.  (Note that if you compare the two articles' lists they are not quite the same!!!)

Blogging carnival

I will be hosting the bilingualism blogging carnival this month. Please submit a post by April 23rd if you would like to be included at annabhu at gmail dot com.

More details here.