Multilingualism: Getting started (Part 2)

Hola, Ahlan, Hello!!!

Welcome back to my family's journey to multilingualism! If you've read my first blog, you'll remember, we are not yet a multilingual family. We are just getting started on our journey, so today I am going to share with you our, or rather, my plan for introducing and facilitating a second and third language to our children... ALL AT ONCE!

If you'll remember, my husband is a native Egyptian speaker, so it is super important to us to pass this language onto ur kids so they can better communicate with him and their family in Egypt and so they can better understand their entire culture and heritage. We are also going to be teaching the children Spanish, because it was the first foreign language I ever learned, and it helped develop my passion for other languages. Spanish is my second best language and where we live, in the U.S., resources for learning Spanish are far more accessible than those for any other foreign languages.

So, here are the things we will be doing to facilitate multilingualism in our family, in no particular order:

* One of the most important steps, which we have really been delving into this week is to get my husband to speak to the children as much as possible (only) in Arabic!

* Refresh and continue learning Arabic and Spanish myself. I have dusted off some of the books I bought to learn Arabic shortly after I met my my husband, after 8 or 9 years they are finally starting to see some use! I am also using www.livemocha.com (great resource for anyone considering learning or brushing up on a foreign language.... and it's practically free!)

* Whatever phrases I do know in Arabic, I will use those with the boys to communicate as opposed to English and incorporate new phrases as I learn them opposed to English as that is already the community language.

* Designate the boys' room to Spanish speaking ONLY!

* Media/T.V. exposure: I have been streaming Egyptian Arabic cartoons and Arabic lessons to my T.V. through youtube for the past week, as well as a tiny bit of Spanish. English language media has been sparse. I also ordered two movies: "The Incredibles" and "Monsters Inc." in Egyptian Arabic from www.a1arabicdvd.com 2 weeks ago, they have not arrived yet though. :-( I did order a dvd from them several years ago and I believe it took 3 weeks to arrive, so hopefully those movies will be here soon!

*I have also been streaming Egyptian music and will be ordering a CD with Egyptian nursery rhymes/children's songs as soon as I can find a good one!

* Books: I have purchased a first words book for my boys in Arabic and been going over the vocab. I also bought them 3 new Spanish book for the "Spanish room," 2 of which I found at the salvation army for 20 cents a piece!!! I may read both an Arabic and Spanish book at bedtime as well. I will be ordering a few more books in both languages in the within the next few weeks.

*Incorporating languages into play: From here on out we will play Hide and seek using only Arabic, and have a puppet for each language who will only respond to his designated language in that language. I already found our Egyptian puppet for 33 cents at the salvation army!!!

*Lastly, but certainly not least: Language lessons. This past Saturday Cruz, Coen and I had a free hour and a half Spanish immersion trial class at a local immersion school: Bright Loritos! It was awesome, Coen and I went to a mommy and me class and Cruz went by himself, we all really enjoyed it! The school actually offers full-time immersion in Mandarin Chinese and Spanish and 1-2 weekly lessons in French and Arabic, but we chose to try Spanish over Arabic because the Arabic would be standard fus-ha as opposed to the Egyptian dialect, which is quite different. We cannot afford the lessons at this time, even though I think the prices are pretty reasonable, we are working on getting out of debt; but that's another story. We will probably look into lessons at Bright Loritos again next year. For now we are still going to try to go to our Coptic Egyptian church, to which we, unfortunately, rarely go and try to find someone (this Saturday) who will come over 2-3 hours a week and speak and play with the boys in Arabic only!

I am so excited to incorporate all these things into our lives and see how we, especially my boys, progress in to the world of multilingualism, they are both learning so much already!!!