Multilingualism Seminar

I went to a multilingualism seminar on Sunday 12 August at the University of Melbourne. The Research Unit for Multilingualism and Cross-Cultural Communication hosted the event. There were 5, one-hour lectures to choose from. I attended "Issues in Raising Children Bilingually", "Practical Suggestions for Helping Your Child Learn Your Language" and "Family Movies, Blogging, and New Communication Media in Raising Children Bilingually". All three seminars were fantastic and offered helpful and practical ways for parents to raise their children multilingually, which is of personal interest to me, as my husband is a native German speaker. The last session on new media was fantastic and showed a number of ways in which a bilingual family is using new technologies to foster their children's mother tongues. The use of blogging, email, keypals, and DVDs was inspiring and offered so many awesome ideas. I got very excited by the possibilities and with this, my first foray into blogging, figure I can try it out and see how it works. The lecturer didn't mention the use of podcasting as a way to foster mother tongue maintenance and development. I plan to contact him and see what he thinks of my idea of using podcasts to help foster the mother tongues of my students.