What is bilingual or multilingual family coaching?
Family coaching for bilingual and multilingual families is designed to support parents, grandparents, and other family members in navigating challenges and opportunities of raising children in multiple languages. I provide both expert-based and dialogical coaching.
1) In Expert-Based Coaching, I provide evidence-based advice on various topics on multilingual language acquisition. This helps families to have more information about recent research findings of language development and how they can best support their child's linguistic growth.
2) Coach-Based Approach, I work with families to explore their specific goals, current circumstances, and options for fostering a harmonious bilingual family life. Through open dialogue, we identify strategies that align with each family’s unique dynamics and values.
By integrating both expert guidance and coaching techniques in the same session, I help families achieve a balanced and effective approach to raising children in a multilingual environment. Recent scientific evidence shows that parental coaching improves infant language development (Huber et al., Developmental Science, 2023). When parents were provided with parent-coaching intervention, vocabulary growth increased, and the intervention group scored higher on measures of speech length and grammatical complexity.
Several factors play a crucial role in fostering harmonious bilingual development and supporting the social-emotional well-being of bilingual children. These include parental attitudes and beliefs about language learning, the child’s opportunities to use both languages, engagement in home literacy activities, the ways parents use language and interact with their children, and the transmission of cultural values from parents.
References and further reading:
Huber, E., Ferjan Ramírez, N., Corrigan, N. M., & Kuhl, P. K. (2023). Parent coaching from 6 to 18 months improves child language outcomes through 30 months of age. Developmental Science, e13391.
Sun, H. (2023). Harmonious bilingual experience and child wellbeing: a conceptual framework. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1282863.