Dual Language: Good or Bad? What I Learned Watching My Students Grow Up Bilingual
Elena caught me as I was wiping the snack table. Her daughter, Marisol, was tying and untying her shoe for the third time, not ready to leave. “Can I ask you something?” Elena said. “Marisol refused to speak Spanish all weekend. Her grandmother video-called and she just walked away. My mother was really hurt. Is the dual-language class making her hate Spanish?”
I knew exactly what she meant. I had watched Marisol that morning switch from Spanish to English mid-sentence while telling a friend about her cat. “Mi gata es…” then “she slept in my bed.” She didn’t seem upset or confused. She seemed busy.
But Elena’s question wasn’t a small question. It’s the same one that shows up in parent forums and school meetings: Is dual language good or bad for kids? The short answer, from the research and from my classroom, is that it’s mostly good. But that “mostly” carries real weight, because a child’s relationship to two languages is not always smooth.
In our class of four- and five-year-olds, about half come from Spanish-speaking homes and half from English-speaking homes. The goal is for everyone to leave with some level of fluency in both. By late winter, a typical morning includes kids negotiating over blocks in English, then someone yelling “¡Mi torre!” when a tower falls. No one thinks twice. But at home, it can feel different.
The thing parents often don’t see is how much a child has to manage. Marisol has an English-speaking classroom and a Spanish-speaking grandma. Her brain is doing something harder than simply knowing two vocabularies: she has to figure out which language belongs where, and sometimes her favorite words live in different places.
So when Elena told me about Sunday’s video call, I wasn’t surprised. Kids don’t refuse a language because they hate it. They refuse because it’s harder in that moment, or because they’re doing something that makes English feel more natural. Marisol was drawing with her cousin in the same room. Her attention was split. English felt like the “now” language, and Spanish felt like the “later” language.
Instead of giving Elena a long explanation, I tried a few things with her right there. “Next time Abuela calls,” I said, “don’t announce that it’s time to speak Spanish. Set the scene in a low-pressure way. Say ‘Abuela has a new song she wants to teach you. Should we sit by the phone?’ Or just say ‘Grandma’s calling to say goodnight.'”
It sounds small, but it shifts the child’s focus from the demand to the relationship. It also helps to have a physical anchor: a specific book, a photo album, a stuffed animal that seems to speak only Spanish. For Marisol, we decided that her grandmother would read a short picture book over FaceTime, holding it close to the camera, pointing to the pictures instead of asking direct questions. Direct questions like “What is this?” and “Say it in Spanish” put pressure on a child who is already trying to figure out how to answer. When the language becomes a rule, the child starts to avoid it.
A few weeks later, Elena came to pickup and laughed about a different moment. Marisol told her baby cousin “siéntate” when he tried to stand on the couch. Then, in the same breath, she asked Elena “Can I have a yogurt?” in English. Elena said, “Is she getting them mixed up? Should I correct her?”
I told her no. Code-mixing, or using both languages in one sentence, is not a sign of confusion. It’s a sign that a child is borrowing from the language that’s closest to a word or a feeling. “Siéntate” feels more direct and likely came out because that’s the word she hears when adults care for her baby cousin. “Can I have a yogurt” came out in English because that’s the phrase she uses at school. It’s not a broken sentence; it’s a kid using every tool she has.
The research backs this up. Bilingual children sometimes have slightly smaller vocabularies in each language when you test them separately, but their total vocabulary across both languages is usually the same as, or larger than, a monolingual child’s. They may take a second longer to find a word in one language, but that’s a processing difference, not a delay. What matters is whether the child can communicate what they need, and whether the adults around them understand.
That said, not every dual-language situation works easily. A lot depends on the model. A true dual-language program where both languages are used for instruction and neither is just a “specials” class is very different from an English-only classroom with a Spanish song once a week. And at home, a child who is only exposed to the minority language in short, stressful bursts may resist more. If the family tries to enforce “We only speak Spanish at home” but the child’s whole media, school, and friend group is in English, the child can feel like the home language is a cage, not a gift.
So what can a parent do when the language is slipping? I’ve seen families succeed with a few predictable, concrete habits. One is anchoring a minority language to a routine: “Saturday mornings are Spanish cartoons and pancakes.” Another is giving the child a role: “You’re the teacher; teach Abuela your favorite English song, and then she can teach you one in Spanish.” That flips the power dynamic.
It also helps to reduce the amount of correction. When a child says “La pelota is red,” repeating it back as “Sí, la pelota es roja” is enough. The child hears the right version without feeling judged. If we make every sentence a grammar test, kids start to see their home language as homework.
By spring, Marisol had stopped walking away from the video calls. She still answered her grandmother in English more than half the time, but she would sing “Las mañanitas” in Spanish and hold the phone close so her grandma could see the new kitten. Elena seemed relieved, but also aware that this could shift again. She told me, “I just want her to be able to talk to her abuela.” That’s the real question, I think. Not “Is dual language good or bad?” but “Does the child have a language in her life that connects her to people and experiences?” The grammar will come later. The connection is the part that’s hard to rebuild.
I don’t know whether Marisol will feel proud of her Spanish in middle school. Some kids go through years of wanting to sound like everyone else, and then come back to the language in college or after a move abroad. Others hold onto it firmly because their grandparents live nearby. Right now she’s four, and she’s figuring out who she is in two languages at once. That’s not a problem to solve. It’s just a process that goes in steps.
I still think about what Elena said, about her mother being hurt. That pain is real, and it’s easy to blame the school or the curriculum or the child. But language and family are tangled up, and a four-year-old isn’t separating them neatly. She’s trying on different sounds and deciding which ones fit. Our job is to keep both languages available, without making them a requirement. Some days that looks like chaos. Other days it looks like a girl singing happy birthday in Spanish for her great-aunt, and knowing exactly what she means.
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