My son doesn’t seem to be grasping the whole word concept very well. There are a few words that he recognizes but it took considerable effort to get him there. At this rate I figure I am going to have to teach him phonics anyway and I think he is getting old enough (20 months) to start. So I have decided to shift our focus.
We are bilingual English/Spanish and I was curious if there was anyone else out there with experience teaching phonics in two languages. I am concerned it would be very confusing to try both languages at the same time. My thought was once he is a proficient reader in one language the second should come fairly easily. Does anyone know if this is true?
I had previously taught him the letter sounds in English. I wouldn’t say he had the down pat and I often avoided the vowels which is the major difference between the two languages because I didn’t know which sound to tell him! Recently, I started teaching him the letter sounds in Spanish. I basically based this decision on the fact that I felt frustrated with our path so far and thought Spanish would be easier since it is phonetically very straight forward. Some disadvantages to teaching Spanish are that I won’t have a program to follow and will have to make up most of the material (we live in the US). I am also concerned that once he knows the phonetic rules of Spanish it will be difficult for him to learn English which is much more difficult. Ideally I wish I could teach both at the same time, but I don’t want to frustrate him or myself as it seems like it would be a major challenge.
I am just feeling a little lost. :wacko: Anyone’s experience would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!
Thanks TeachingMyToddlers for the video. I will use it with my son. That’s sort of what I am doing to teach him Spanish - combining the consonants with the vowels to make syllables. I guess teaching syllables is a common way of teaching reading in Spanish whereas in English we sound out each letter. I asked my MIL how they taught my husband and BIL to read and that’s how they did it.
I find it interesting that my husband doesn’t remember learning how to read. I remember it very well. It used to tick me off that the sounds of the letters often didn’t match what I had been taught. lol That is why I wanted to teach Spanish first. We’ll see how it goes. I think we will focus more on Spanish but won’t leave English out entirely.
For anyone with the same question as me I found a page on the internet that said teaching reading in two languages simultaneously was advantageous for grammar and language development in both languages but that decoding could be more difficult (or that is how I interpreted it). That is sort of what I thought would be true. Seems like if at all possible there are more advantages to teaching them at the same time. As far as how to do it…we’ll see. http://petitto.gallaudet.edu/~petitto/archive/EuroSLA2007.pdf:
CONCLUSIONS
Both Simultaneous and Sequential reading instruction impact
reading acquisition and reading success, but in different
ways: Simultaneous schooling is most advantageous for
mastering language and reading skills in both languages,
and further facilitates analysis of underlying grammatical
class/structure
Sequential schooling facilitates analysis of surface
phonological regularity
Mybabymyan
We face the same issue with french and english. My daughter now knows how to combine consonants and vowels [m] and [i] sounds [mi] in French.
I’m reading first readers to her in English now and there are issues with words spelled the same.
So I always remind her when we start that this is in English and that words will sound differently even if they are written the same. There are some confusions but I keep going.
Our little boys must be around the same age - mine is 19.5mths! We are Sp/ Eng as well & I am concentrating on English at the moment. I read to him in Spanish but don’t actively “teach” it as I do English. So I’m sorry, I can’t really help or offer any advice. Do you think the “slowness” of progress is simply because he is bilingual & there are so many other neurological processes going on? How verbal is he? I’m saying slow progress but he sounds way more advanced than my little guy, he hasn’t indicated that he recognises a single word yet :biggrin: but he is waaay too cute, lol My current plan is that once he is comfortable to some degree with English phonics then I will teach him Spanish. If he has one language & you can see/ hear that he knows it, then I doubt it would take very long to pick up the other?? The study seems to be that they were verbally bilingual at home but were officially taught to read in kindergarten, we are still in new territory here teaching reading in 2 langauges from babyhood.
We live in a Spanish speaking country & have no Eng speaking friends close by so I figure his Eng is more likely to suffer in the long run. I only started to speak Sp about 4.5 yrs ago, but I don’t actually remember learning to read either since the phonics are so simple once you have the alphabet. I do on the other hand remember learning to read English:-)
I think Hypatia is right though, I try to tell him which language we are in. He’ll say something e.g. “book” when we are at the shops - so I’ll say “no, aqui hablamos Español, es un libro. libro” Just so he perhaps understands that they are 2 separate languages. Whether or not that’s important I’m not sure…
Sorry I’ve been no help, but I know how you feel. Some of the pronounciation on the LR downloadable files were better than others.Let me know how you get on!
Lois
Thanks for your replies. They are helpful. I started as hypatia suggested by pointing out when there are words that are spelled the same in the two languages like “bus”. I try to just say quickly “…and in English you say bus.” Too much talking and I loose him.
Lois1, that’s neat that our son’s are the same age and similarly learning Spanish and English. Ian is starting to be pretty verbal. He repeats everything (a million times if he likes it) and starting to make simple sentences. To my surprise he seems to understand the difference between English and Spanish. He used to mix the languages a lot. Now he usually answers in the right language although not always. I never really told him that this is Spanish and this is English as I was always just so happy to hear him say anything. lol
I don’t think being bilingual would slow him down in learning whole words. But, learning to read phonetically I would think would be harder in two languages. I know some kids can intuit phonics but I think those are the kids who pick up whole words very quickly and therefor have a lot of sight words to begin to recognize the pattern. With two languages the pattern would be less recognizable and since my son doesn’t seem to pick up the words very quickly I figured he will need to be taught phonics. But, I think as you do; the second language should be fairly easy once they have the first.
My son never indicated that he recognized any of the words from LR either and I am pretty sure it is because he really doesn’t recognize them. He doesn’t like testing but will volunteer that he knows something if he does. The only words he has recognized are words that we have played games with. I am constantly making toys and books for him out of flash cards as I think he learns better from the interaction and he doesn’t like actual flash cards. To be fair it is harder to know what he knows from LR as he has less opportunities to volunteer what he knows.
We are making progress. He now knows all the vowels in Spanish and I don’t know how many letters. He knows some syllable combinations: ba, be, bi, bo, bu and sa, se, si, so, su. I have them taped on our two bathroom mirrors and every time we go in the bathroom we drive cars and things over the syllables. Now I am going to try to teach him words like beso, bus, base (as in primera base). I really don’t know what I am doing but it seems logical. lol If I understood my MIL right that is how they teach reading in Spanish.
