Hi, I'm Dr. Mary Barbera, Autism Mom and Board Certified Behavior Analyst.
Many of you have seen my videos of Chino who I worked with around 2010 I believe when he
was just 20 or 21 months old.
He made amazing progress and he is now in early elementary school with little support
and he is fully conversational, in fact he is bilingual, Spanish and English as this
is what his family speaks.
So when I started with Chino when he was just 20 months old the family had an older child
who was just a year or two older than Chino.
And they had planned to raise their family in a bilingual home.
And so they were asking me what we should do about this bilingual desire and Chino really
only had popped out a few words and very few skills to speak of.
I didn't have a lot of experience back then with how to teach bilingual families and how
to select one or more languages but I was pretty sure that we should stick with English
because all of his early intervention providers were speaking English, they were coming into
the home.
The other important part is that when Chino went to preschool and to school he would be
speaking English at school.
And so I was pretty sure that we should stick with English, at least in the beginning.
And we should pair the words in English and if they wanted to speak in Spanish to their
older daughter, you know, in full sentences, he wasn't really going to pick any of that
up anyway.
So that we were speaking to Chino in very one word, two word utterances.
So instead of saying "Chino let's go up the stairs and brush your teeth and get ready
for bed."
in English or Spanish we would be saying "Up, up, up, up" as we were climbing the stairs.
And these are the techniques that really brought Chino's language up.
Since starting my online courses in 2015 which has already served people from 45 different
countries, both professionals and parents, there are a lot more families asking questions
about bilingual, how to teach bilingual kids, especially early one.
So I know that in general research supports that kids can learn two or more languages
very early on but when you have a child with severe language delays and disabilities and
autism, it is different in my experience.
My experience is that we need to pick one language and that language in my opinion should
be the language where they're going to be taught in school because that is the language
that they're going to have the most exposure to and the therapists will, you'll be able
to find therapists in that language a little bit easier as well.
For higher language kids, I know we have one member who started with my procedures very
early on when I first wrote my book, she's in Switzerland and there are three languages
that her family and community speak.
She was on a call a few years ago with me and Dr. Mark Sundberg and she was asking questions
about three languages and that her son who was fully conversational and pretty indistinguishable
from his peers was better at one the languages and the other two languages were a little,
he was a little less competent.
I suggested that she'd do three different VB map assessments for the three different
languages.
And then should be able to see which areas within each language needed to be caught up.
So this has worked well for families and I do believe that obviously more research is
needed but in the meantime I think from my practice with hundreds of children over the
past two decades that I would stick with one language and then as the child develops language
you can teach him the second or third language hopefully.
And if they become fully conversational like Chino, they'll become bilingual at the same
time or near the same time and I think that will happen more naturally than trying to
teach two languages early on.
Hope you found this interesting, leave me a comment on marybarbera.com and I'll see
you next week!