Colombian Culture, Colombia Adoption and Raising Colombian Kids

While I am working with a Speech Therapist and a member of a University's ESL Faculty to put together more suggestions that can help with the teaching of ESL to your newly adopted child, I wanted to make 1 suggestion now that can help you as you read aloud to your child. Here is the technique: (TO MY EUROPEAN READERS: I found research that shows Dutch speaking children have similar issues to those learning ESL. We might assume, therefore, that children learning other languages -- particualrly those very different from Spanish -- Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, Finnish, Danish, German, etc. would suffer from similar language proficiency problems. So, you can try using this technique as well). Step #1: Read the title and look at the pictures. Label pictures that your child cannot name. The talk about or predict what the story is about. Step #2: Read 1 page or 1 paragraph, then stop and ask a question about the content. Once child answers, model the correct answer in a short ...

If you have a child adopted at 5, 6, or older, it is clear that they will need English as a Second Language classes at school, and most districts will help you. But what about the adopted toddler or preschooler? Most people -- and teachers -- assume that the child will adequately learn English by the time the child goes to school simply because they only hear English spoken in the home. Ah, but is that true?!?! I became aware that my own son (now 4 1/2) may be having difficulty with English acquisition when I started teaching him to read. He was/is doing great sounding out words. We started with the words that end in AT -- CAT, RAT, BAT, etc. He would look at the picture of a RAT, sound out R-A-T and then say MOUSE. I would correct him and say RAT. Then, finally one day he said, "Mommy, what is a rat?" OOPS! In addition to simple vocabulary issues, there are other issues that he has with language, so I reached back to my Master's degree in TESOL and started researching ab...