011: Maria Babin | One Parent Speaks Two Languages to Her Children in a Unique And Very Effective Way

Bilingual Kids Rock Podcast: Raising Multilingual Children, Multicultural Living, Growing Up With Multiple Languages.

In this episode of Bilingual Kids Rock Podcast, we talk with Maria Babin. She is the founder of Trilingual Mama. She has four trilingual kids with her French husband and they are residing in France. She graduated from Brigham Young University in Provo Utah, in 2000 with a Bachelor’s degree in French. Maria completed an undergraduate coursework early childhood language acquisition and graduated coursework in French literature.

We talk about passive bilingual learning, how her parents raised her as a bilingual and her love for the culture of France that lead to her living there. She also shared her family language portrait, the system that she uses to teach her kids how to speak Spanish, English and French.

In this episode, here’s what we’ll cover:

00:35 Introduction to Maria Babin – founder of Trilingual Mama.

2:45 How Maria turned active bilingual from passive bilingual

4:45 Maria on being passive bilingual and why is it important

5:20 Serving a mission for her Mormon church – learning Spanish again

8:13 How her parents raised her as a bilingual

10:30 Discussing her love for France – the attraction to the French culture and language

13:58 How she came to Paris and met her French husband

17:53 They have two weeks of English and then two weeks of French.

23:59 Research and early learning language acquisition

26:30 One parent, one language system

27:47 Language confusion vs. inter-language transfer

29:24 How different kids learn differently

33:10 Choosing to speak different languages

36:44 What does she sacrifice to be able to travel to the heritage country

44:52 Having international pen pals and creating a pen pal kit

49:39 Advice on bilingualism for parents

Items mentioned in this Episode:

Encouraging multilingual children to write in their minority language(s)

Creating a pen pal kit

Raising multilingual children using an adaptation of one parent, one language system

Nurturing language and culture when raising a multilingual family