Xiao-lei Wang - Trilingual Learners

Xiao-lei Wang is Professor and Acting Dean of the School of Education at Pace University, USA. She is the author of Growing up with Three Languages: Birth to Eleven (Multilingual Matters, 2008) and Learning to Read and Write in the Multilingual Family (Multilingual Matters, 2011). She is a regular speaker on child development and parenting at local, national and international parents' associations and academic conferences.

[@UtesInternationalLounge]

Thank you for this video and insight. I'm helping multilingual families maintain their home languages while living abroad and the "suggestions" you mention from teachers or speech therapists are very common. As many (all?) parents of multilingual children, I not only read to our children not only in our home languages, but also in their other languages - English (school), Dutch (local language), German (home language), Italian (home language) and French (add language at school) & Spanish. In our family, reading and watching videos, films in all the languages we speak is our "international zone". With all the research about the translanguaging policies and the introduction of it in schools (not only international schools but also local, monolingual schools!), the bridging between home and school language has finally got the attention it needs! I personally think that we parents of multilingual children have to think out of the box when it comes to the bi-/multiliterate upbringing of our children and be more inclusive.