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The contrived tree rends a healthy workload.

Masters Work

Whew, sorry it has been such a long time. I had hoped to post more frequently so I am setting up a reminder for myself. I have been caught up in the general spin of life over the past two weeks, getting ready for Easter, making meals playing and leanring with Ari and my Masters level classes. I am pursuing my Masters in Education and focusing on the English Language Learner, which means that right now my main class is educational research, and I have chosen a research topic, Acquiring languages. I suppose I should have chosen such an in depth topic for my Thesis rather than a regular class but maybe this small amount of research will prove to be a great base layer upon which I can build an excellent thesis. I have been reading scholarly information left and right and trying to create this wonderfully informational research paper about how we as humans acquire not only our first language, but also a second or third, etc., with comparisons between language learning in the home and language learning in the classroom setting, whether as an ELL student or a native speaker trying to learn a second language in the U.S. While this topic is extremely interesting to me, I did not consider the huge amount of time that would be required to finish this in a mere six weeks as well as the tangents of information I would be chasing down. Now that you know about the general nature of my topic, I was hoping to get some feed back from those of you who are bilingual or more, and/or are teaching your children a second or third or multiple languages in the home. I have several questions that I will post below and I would appreciate any and all response, either in the comment section or feel free to email me at CarrMZC@gmail.com.
*What method(s) did you use in teaching your child another language?
*How fluent would you consider your child to be in the non-dominant language?
*At what age was your child able to converse easily in the non-dominant language, and at what age did you start teaching him/her?
*Did you encounter any setbacks while teaching the non dominant language?
*Have you tried language learning methods other than the one you settled on?
*What ah ha! moments do you especially enjoy?
*How did you learn the non-dominant language? Were you a bilingual child or did you learn in a school setting?
*Is there anything you think I forgot that you want to add?

Thanks to everyone who leaves a comment or email =)

Hello Everyone!

So this is my very first quest into the blogging adventure. After reading so many wonderful blogs from other parent's raising a child/children bilingually or multilingually, I have been inspired to write about my own experiences with my 18 month old daughter Arianna. I am also pursuing my Master's degree in education with a focus on the English Language Learner, and I am really interested in the language learning process. I have also recently discovered Biolinguistics, which is absolutely amazing to me. I have always had a great interest in languages and tried to teach myself some Spanish when I was in middle school since my district did not offer languages until high school. Not to mention that when I got to high school, my electives were already chosen, Band and Choir (I am still a music lover). When my mother moved our family to southern California, I got the chance to study Spanish in a real classroom and found that I excelled, and easily picked up more and more of the language. Unfortunately, my mother decided to move us back to Pennsylvania, and I was again unable to take the class, so without the practice, I lost some of my ability and comfort. Later in college I would meet a man who was my boyfriend for a while, and he was a bilingual brat as I liked to call him. His parents were American and German and he grew up speaking both languages. His stories of being bilingual from birth and picking up other languages so easily, like when he translated for his mother when he attended a French preschool in Belgium, and when his father remarried and moved to Korea, where my boyfriend attended high school, I was jealous that I had not had the ability to have multiple languages since birth. I decided at that point that when I had children I would try my best to give them another language besides English with which to communicate. While the romance did not last, my passion for the German language did, and once again I started teaching myself from books and eventually taking college level courses, in which I excelled again. Now that I am married to the man of my dreams, who unfortunately only has a rudimentary knowledge of one other language than his native English, we have had our first child and I have attempted to communicate with her mainly in German when it's just the two of us. I have been struggling with myself recently to find a way to incorporate another language, Spanish, so that I will not confuse her. I am also excited to start in on acquiring other languages for myself over time, specifically, French, Italian, Mandarin Chinese, etc. As you can see I absolutely love languages, and maybe I am a little bit crazy. I can't wait to get acquainted with everyone and to share my successes and downfalls of trying to raise my daughter in a second language of which I am a non-native speaker. Please leave me a comment or an email so I can talk with you about your experiences and languages and cultures!