Kletsheads [English edition]

Transcript In this final – and therefore extra-long – episode, three parents who have previously been guests on the podcast talk about how their family’s bilingual journey has progressed since then. I look back over the past four years, reflect on the future and, to conclude, we hear a poem written about and dedicated to bilingual children, and inspired by the podcast. Our first...

Transcript Learning to read does not come easily to all children. Some children experience serious problems with reading and spelling. They have difficulty recognising and learning letters, they mix up sounds or letters, or read very slowly. With proper help, this often passes, but in some children these issues remain. Persistent problems with reading and spelling are sometimes due to dyslexia. Wh...

Transcript Many bilingual children around the world attend heritage language education. Sometimes called complementary or supplementary schools, heritage language programs or mother tongue education, these schools offer children and young people a safe space where they can develop and maintain their HL and cultural identity. Classes take place at the weekend or after children are done for the day...

Transcript According to WHO, 1 in 100 children have autism. Whilst exact numbers can vary depending on who’s reporting them, where in the world you live, and how autism is defined, this developmental disability is certainly not uncommon. In fact, in many places, the number of people living with autism is increasing. Autism is a spectrum which means that it’s different for everybody. It...

Transcript In this episode we review two books about bilingual parenting: Bilingual success stories around the world by Adam Beck and Bilingual families. A practical language planning guide by Eowyn Crisfield. We get the parental perspective from Maria Papantoniou, a Greek-speaking mother raising her child bilingually in the UK together with her Greek-speaking husband, and Sam Timmermans, a Dutch-...

Transcript If we are lucky, we will all grow old. And if we are even luckier, we will stay healthy for as long as possible. But even if we stay healthy, it is inevitable that we slow down — both physically and mentally. We often don’t function as well as we used to, we become forgetful, and we may also develop problems like dementia. Research shows that being bilingual might help when...

Transcript Identity. It’s a word you often hear when talking about children growing up in a bilingual family, but what does identity really mean? To what extent can you have multiple identities, belonging to different cultures or ethnic backgrounds? What are the consequences for children if they identify more in one way than the other? What role do parents, friends, school and wider society...

Transcript Why do some bilingual children end up becoming more bilingual than others? That’s the question we’re answering in this episode of Kletsheads, the first in our third season of the English-language ediition. Most children become more proficient in one of their languages compared with the other(s). This is often the language spoken at school or the wider community. Some childre...

Kletsheads is back! Season 3 is on its way. We’ll have a new episode for you on the 15th of every month from now through November, eight episodes in total. In this short trailer, I’ll tell you more about what we’re going to be talking about. This season of Kletsheads was made possible thanks to funding from HaBilNet . The Harmonious Bilingualism Network HaBilNet aims to support a...

What do bilingual children think about being bilingual? Children – from 8 to 38 years old – talk about the fun and not so fun sides of being bilingual, their favourite words, the language they use with their pets, and what language they will speak when they become parents themselves. In the first two seasons of Kletsheads, I talked to children about what it is like to grow up with two...

Transcript It’s over two years since the Covid-19 pandemic broke out and families across the globe were forced  into lockdown, with schools and childcare centres closed and many parents having to juggle working from home with caring for younger children and homeschooling older ones. Whilst this was a shared experience across many communities in many (if not most) countries around the world,...

Transcript Bilingual children sometimes say things that their monolingual peers would never say. This is the same for adults, too. They don’t always know certain words in each of their two (or more) languages. And in the many cases when bilingual children do know the word in question, they can’t always think of it straightaway. Again, this also holds for adults. I speak from experience...

Transcript Most bilingual children mix their two languages. Perhaps not all the time and not in all contexts, but as many parents will know, bilingual children regularly start a sentence in one language and finish it in another, or they insert a word from one language whilst speaking the other. Such behaviour is perfectly normal. You might say it’s part and parcel of being bilingual. Yet why...

Transcript Every three years, teenagers around the world are tested on their abilities in maths, science and reading, as part of PISA, the Programme for International Student Assessment. Basically, it’s a way of comparing how well countries are doing when it comes to educating their children.  Because of Covid-19, the latest PISA data we have are from 2018 and what these data show...

Transcript When you’re raising a bilingual child and you’re the the only source of one of your child’s two or more languages, it can be a good idea to try and find other people or places for your child to hear and use that language. One way you can do this is to use multimedia resources such as tv and films, apps, audiobooks and music. In Hot off the Press (starts at 01:12), we t...

Transcript Learning to read is an important step in your child’s development. When children start to learn to read depends on the country they live in. In some parts of the world, like the UK, children are taught to read pretty much as soon as they enter school, whereas in other countries, like here in NL, children spend a year or two first learning to recognise letters before they’re...

Transcript In  Hot off the Press (starts at 01:12), I tell you about a recently published study from Canada. This research deals with two important factors in bilingual language development, namely how early you start (age) and how much contact you have with a language (amount of language input). It’s often thought that age is more important than language input, but this research shows that...

Transcript Children who grow up hearing two or more languages do not always end up actively using all their languages as they get older. In such cases, it’s typically the heritage or minority language which suffers at the expense of the school language. As we heard in  the last episode of Kletsheads  when I spoke to my neighbour Kate, children may be perfectly capable of speaking t...

Transcript In this episode of Kletsheads we talk about one of the greatest frustrations faced by parents raising their children bilingually: you speak consistently to them in the heritage or home language and they consistently respond in the school language. Of course this only happens when you’re proficient in that language, too, and for many parents this is indeed the case. In Let’s...

Transcript Children start talking when they are around one year old. However, we know from research that they are already working on language before that. In this episode, we learn what exactly babies know about language. And we hear about the ingenious ways scientists have developed to figure this out. For example, they measure how fast babies suck on a fake teat, or measure the activity in their...

The second season of Kletsheads is almost about to start! The first episode will drop on Feb 18th. You can expect the same mix of science, experiences, and practical tips, but not quite the same as the last season. The episodes will be a bit shorter (between 30 and 45 minutes, instead of an hour) and they’ll be released every two weeks (instead of once a month). And we have two new features...

Transcript In this special bonus episode of  Kletsheads  we have a podcast crossover. We are delighted to share an episode of the  Much Language Such Talk  podcast , an English language podcast that answers questions about language, learning, and culture. The podcast was created by three researchers at the  University of Edinburgh , Brittany Blankship, Eva-Maria Schnelten and Carine Abraham, who a...

Transcript “You’re wobbling the whole time the table! This is what my bilingual son said to his sister when they were playing a board game sat together at a small table and big sister was apparently also playing with the table leg. His message was clear. Big sister stopped and the game continued. What struck me most about this conversation was the way in which my son had chosen to phra...

Transcript One language at school and another language at home. This is the reality for most bilingual children here in the Netherlands and in many countries around the world. Bilingual children often use the school language when they’re at home, sometimes because this is the language spoken to them by one of their parents, but speaking the other language at school? That rarely happens. Some...

Transcript Many children in the world grow up with three languages. For example, because their parents both speak a different language and they learn a third language at school. Or because they speak one language at home and go to a bilingual school where they learn two new languages. There are also many countries in the world where almost everyone is trilingual. Think, for instance, of countries...