Back in 2007 I wrote the following:
My intentions in creating a blog stems from my interest in pursuing a doctoral degree in the next few years! This blog shall serve as a vehicle that will allow my thoughts about bilingual/bicultural education to flourish and develop to what eventually will be my dissertation! I hope that I can create honest & intellectual conversations with fellow bloggers who might have an interest in what I am posting.
Now that it is 2016:
I have graduated with a Ph.D. and accepted a visiting assistant professor position in education. I intend on continuing to write about MY interpretations of a bilingual life. Specifically, how language intersects with class and race in places like Central Texas where Mexico is a three hour drive away. I am exploring other venues to share about bilingualism which includes local and national media, podcasts, guest posts, and consulting opportunities. If you are interested, please feel free to contact me at suzanne@mateus.com.
Hi Suzanne,
I am a sophomore majoring in Teaching Chinese as A Foreign Language in Mainland China. I happened to find your blog when I was collecting resources for my term paper writing. Your article about ‘surface culture’is truly enligntenning! Thanks.:)
Tracy
Love your blog. I too value multilingualism and fight to maintain it in my children’s lives. It is truly the only 21st century skill that matters. As I tell my students, all knowledge does not arrive in English.
hi Suzanne,
i am so so excited to have found your blog– thanks to Spanglish baby. I too am raising (attempting to?) a trilingual (Spanish, French, English) baby! the number one most pressing concern of mine when i was pregnant wasn’t “am i going to breastfeed?” it was “my baby has to learn, and be fluent in Spanish!– how can i do that if i think, dream, and speak mostly English all day long?”
i am thinking of starting a blog to share my passion for the importance of children learning Spanish but also to share tips and stories about this important journey… am still pondering the idea… maybe reading your blog will inspire me to get on it!
im happy to say, My son is now almost 14 months and I’m proud to say his first word was AGUA =)
Hi Diana,
Thanks for your comment and interest in my blog! I totally understand planning on teaching your baby another language while pregnant. I have been thinking about this for years before having a baby. It was a sealed deal for me too.
It can be so hard to only speak Spanish…not in the sense that I forget words or have to look some up, but because in the other aspects of my life I am functioning in English. I have noticed, or maybe its just me, that the older Sabrina gets the weirder it seems for other people that WE are communicating in Spanish.
We should keep in touch!
Hi Suzzane,
I am so glad I have found your blog. I have a little girl (1 month 3 weeks). I speak Spanish and my husband speaks Swedish. However, my husband and I speak English. In addition, we live in Sweden.
By now, I speak with my little girl spanish. My husband tries to speak with her in Swedish. My husband thinks that I should continue to speak Spanish but he says that he should switch to English because she will learn Swedish anyway. Any advice?
Thats a tough one, Claudia. If you know that you will be in Sweden for quite a while then yea I would switch to English, unless your children will go to an English school.
We dont speak English to Sabrina, because like your husband, we know she will learn it. Now if we were to move to a Spanish speaking country and knew that we would only be there a short while, and by short I mean even 2-3 years, I would still use Spanish at home because I want her to keep speaking Spanish once we were to move back to the US.
Suerte—Suzanne