While I was waiting in the doctor’s office yesterday, I finished reading The Bilingual Edge: Why, When, and How to Teach Your Child a Second Language.

There was at least one thing we were certain about before we decided to have a child: that he or she would be raised speaking English and German, regardless of where we live. In fact, if we could take on teaching her more we might…but I’d want to learn too (especially Italian and Spanish) 🙂 Since we’ve never done anything like teaching a child a foreign language, we figured it would be wise to get a book and see if it could give us a bit of help on how to approach things.

The Bilingual Edge is written not only for those who already know they will be teaching their kids more than one language…but also for those who are just considering it and wonder how complicated it would be. They have sections on finding language specific playgroups, schools, day cares and so on if you want your child to learn an additional language that you don’t actually speak yourself. They also address at what ages children become receptive to learning languages via TV and DVD (past toddler ages) versus just learning from hearing it being used by real people..and different tools you can use to teach various types of learner. Plus there are examples of other families who have started at birth, preschool age and older to help you figure out how you can best help your child learn another language, regardless of when you’re starting.

There’s a lot of focus on nay-sayers in the book and combatting arguments from people who think you shouldn’t be teaching your kids more than one language because it will confuse them or cause them to start talking later than other kids simply because they have so much jumbled in their heads. Studies don’t prove that at all and children who learn multiple languages at young ages actually have a much easier time picking up additional languages later on in life…which will certainly be beneficial for them later in life.

The important thing is that you give your kids as much exposure to the multiple languages as possible and try to balance it out so they are not being overexposed to a language which would result in them using it more often. For example, while living here in Germany, we’ll want to make sure that we teach Mackenzie an equal amount of English and German so she won’t be at a disadvantage when she starts school or wants to play with kids down the block (although she will eventually be in a multi-language school anyway). But if she starts getting more exposure to German, I have to make sure to increase the English exposure at home to maintain balance.

Since I’ll be signing with her as well, I hope to use spoken words in both German and English (which will also help my German somewhere along the way) so that the relationship of the name of something in German and English is easier. By the way, if you teach your kids signing, it’s only considered an additional language if you teach them full ASL where they learn to construct actual sentences, not just a word here and there to get their point across as most people do for baby signing.

While I can’t say with certainty if we’ll just have one of us speaking English to her and the other German…or some combination of us speaking both to her, the important thing seems to be that we just talk and interact with her as much as possible in both languages so she can soak them up. Reading stories, creating conversations, learning songs and using props are all things we can do to help us start teaching her from infancy, so we’ll just have to make sure we stock up on lots of books and check out the resources at the back of The Bilingual Edge so we have as much stuff as possible to help us stay motivated.

Buy The Bilingual Edge: Why, When, and How to Teach Your Child a Second Language at Amazon.com or Amazon.de