HaBilNet Members

Annick De Houwer is Professor of Language Acquisition and Multilingualism at the University of Erfurt, Germany. Previously, she held professorships in Language Learning and Language Teaching (also at the University of Erfurt) and in Communication Science (at the University of Antwerp, Belgium).

Dr. De Houwer's 1990 Cambridge University Press book The acquisition of two languages from birth constituted pioneering work in bilingual acquisition, and her 2009 textbooks with Multilingual Matters, Bilingual First Language Acquisition and An Introduction to Bilingual Development, are used all over the world. She has published widely in journals and edited volumes. In addition to her work on multiple aspects of bilingual acquisition, she has done research on standard-dialect variation, Dutch child language, interlingual subtitling and language attitudes. She is co-editor (with Lourdes Ortega) of the 2019 Cambridge Handbook of Bilingualism.

Already as a doctoral student, when she was working on purely linguistic aspects of bilingual development, Annick heard from parents of bilingually raised children who felt miserable because their young child did not speak their language. From early on in her post-doctoral career Dr. De Houwer attempted to understand why some children raised with two or more languages only spoke a single language (here is a review of what we know about that now). While continuing her more linguistically oriented research, she expanded her work to include the more socio-emotional aspects of early bilingualism. In 2006, she launched the concept of harmonious bilingual development (HBD) in a French journal. Publications on HBD in English soon followed (here is the best known). Ever since she developed expertise in the field, Dr. De Houwer has been committed to bringing research based insights on early bilingualism to the general public through talks, publications and web-based materials (you can see some early videos with her through the HaBilNet YouTube channel.)

Dr. De Houwer has lived in 6 countries on 4 continents, with a total of 5 societal languages. She regrets not having had the chance to learn one of them (Urdu; click here for an account of her language learning). The others are the current languages of the HaBilNet website, hopefully with more to follow. Annick grew up in a monolingual family, was part of a bilingual family, and adores her trilingual grandchild.

Check out Dr. De Houwer's full CV here and see this link to find out more about her work.

Hilde De Smedt is a speech therapist who for 35 years has been working in the center for integration Foyer in Brussels, Belgium. In all those years multilingual education and multilingual child rearing has been a central theme.

In the beginning Foyer's aim was to integrate minority languages into education (click here for relevant publications). Hilde De Smedt was partly responsible for the coordination of these projects. The basic idea was that the languages that come to us through migration are an added value for the children involved but also for our society. Every year 500 children attended this form of multilingual education as proposed by Foyer. The results were positive and led to improved educational trajectories for children with a migration background. In 2011, however, the Ministry of Education of the Flemish Community canceled support for these projects.

Foyer then chose to focus even more on strengthening multilingual families and supporting their multilingual approach. Today, families are often not concerned with bilingualism in the narrow sense (two languages), but there are several languages involved that have a functional, emotional and/or cultural meaning. Currently Hilde De Smedt leads the Advice Center for Multilingual Education (PIM, Partners in Multilingualism). Professionals like speech therapists and educators can get advice from us, parents can come and talk to us, and children with language difficulties are very welcome as well. We try to find the right approach to help them, with full attention to all the languages that play a role in their lives.

Hilde De Smedt is also active internationally. She has lead and still leads European projects on the theme of multilingual education and parenting. A first project ran from 2016 to 2018: Talking About Language and Emotions at Home, TALES @ home. The project Planting Languages – seeds of success started in 2019 and runs until 2021.

Recently, Hilde De Smedt gave an interview on her work (in Dutch). You can watch it here. The video also features some school-aged children who talk about their multilingualism. You can download a list of Hilde De Smedt's recent publications here. In this Dutch article Hilde writes about her 35 years of experience at Foyer.

Dr. Jürgen M. Meisel is Professor emeritus at the Institute for Romance Studies of the University of Hamburg in Germany and Adjunct Professor at the Division of Linguistics of the University of Calgary in Canada. His main research topics have been first and second language acquisition, language change, Creole studies, multilingualism, the grammar of Romance languages and grammatical theory. He has played a pioneering role in the establishment of both the field of naturalistic second language acquisition by adults and the field of early bilingual acquisition.

The German Society for Linguistics has awarded Professor Meisel the prestigious Wilhelm von Humboldt Prize 2020 for lifetime achievement. The award ceremony took place on March 4, 2020, as part of the annual DGfS conference at the University of Hamburg.

Dr. Meisel has been founding co-editor of the premier journal Bilingualism: Language and Cognition (Cambridge University Press). His latest book is Bilingual children: A guide for parents, also with Cambridge University Press.

Dr. Meisel has had decades of experience in advising parents in bilingual families. He will be happy to do so for HaBilNet as well, in German, English, French, or Spanish.

Lourdes Ortega is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University, USA. At Georgetown, she is the Faculty Director of the Initiative for Multilingual Studies. She is best known for her award-winning meta-analysis of second language instruction, her best-seller graduate-level textbook Understanding Second Language Acquisition (also available in Mandarin), and for championing a bilingual and social justice turn in her field of second language acquisition. Her latest book is The Cambridge Handbook of Bilingualism (co-edited with Annick De Houwer).

Dr. Ortega was born, raised, and college-educated in southern Spain, spent a year at the University of Munich in the early 1980s, worked for almost a decade as a teacher of Spanish in Greece, and obtained her doctorate in the United States, the country where she has lived for over 25 years. These choices have afforded her a different dominant language at different periods in her life so far: Spanish, German, Modern Greek, and English. Her trajectory has shaped her professional identities as an educator and a researcher. Lourdes is committed to investigating what it means to become bilingual or multilingual later in life, across both elite and marginalized contexts for language learning, including in higher education settings. In her work she seeks to encourage connections between research and teaching and to support harmonious bilingualism and the well-being of all multilinguals.

Check out Dr. Ortega's full CV here and see this link to find out more about her.

Adam Winsler is a Professor of Applied Developmental Psychology at George Mason University, USA. He has investigated children's transition to school, the development of self-regulation and private speech, Vygotskian sociocultural theory and bilingualism and early schooling for English-Language Learners. Amongst others, his current research explores childcare, school readiness, and school trajectories among ethnically and linguistically diverse, immigrant, low-income, urban preschoolers using data from the large-scale (n > 30,000) longitudinal Miami School Readiness Project.

Dr. Winsler has shown that social and behavioral skills and proficiency in Spanish are valuable resources for low-income English language learners during their transition to school and has collaborated on a foundational co-authored article on how to measure and report on bilingualism in developmental research.

Dr. Winsler is the author of more than 100 journal articles and book chapters and has published two books, including one entitled Private speech, executive functioning, and the development of verbal self-regulation (co-edited with Charles Ferneyhough and Ignacio Montero). He has received over $2 million of research funding. Dr. Winsler also served as editor of the journal Early Childhood Research Quarterly.

Check out Dr. Winsler's full CV here and see this link to find out more about him.

Adam Beck is the author of the popular guide Maximize Your Child's Bilingual Ability: Ideas and inspiration for even greater success and joy raising bilingual kids, praised worldwide by parents and leaders in the field of child bilingualism for its practical and empowering approach to the bilingual aim. He is also the author of the playful "picture book for adults" titled I WANT TO BE BILINGUAL! (illustrated by Pavel Goldaev), which emphasizes the most important information parents need for realizing joyful success on a bilingual journey.

Adam is the founder of the influential blog Bilingual Monkeys and the lively forum The Bilingual Zoo. Along with his books and his online writing, he provides empowering support to bilingual and multilingual families through personal coaching, online and off, and through speaking appearances at conferences and workshops worldwide.

An educator for over 30 years, Adam has worked with hundreds of bilingual and multilingual children as a classroom teacher and private tutor. Originally from the United States, he has lived in Hiroshima, Japan since 1996 and is raising two trilingual children in Japanese, English, and Spanish. He attended college in New York, graduate school in San Francisco, and was a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Czech Republic, where he taught English at the University of West Bohemia in the city of Plzen.

Adam also has a background in theater arts and worked for many years in children's theater as a director and playwright. He is the author of the award-winning humorous novel for children and adults titled How I Lost My Ear (illustrated by Simon Farrow), which critics have called "an extraordinary imaginative achievement" and compared to "the best of Roald Dahl."

Adam is on the HaBilNet consultation team.

Nina Schwöbel has wanted to know all about language ever since she started talking. Now working freelance in the field of language, she speaks, teaches and does research into languages (mostly German and English). Her basic degree was in English and Linguistics, which she studied at the Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena, Germany. During her studies she went abroad to live and study in Wales with the Erasmus program. Impressed by the every day bilingualism in Wales, she did an internship at a bilingual day care when she returned.

Soon after, she started working at an English immersion project offering holiday camps for children and teenagers. She studied to become a German as a foreign language teacher and then decided to go for a Master's degree in Applied Linguistics at Erfurt University, also in Germany. She finished her studies in 2018 with a focus on Bi- and Multilingualism and a thesis as part of Dr. Annick De Houwer research project ToddleTalk, for which she continues to work.

Nina helps HaBilNet behind the scenes and helps coordinate the contact forms and a whole lot else. You can find her CV here.

Ekaterina Tiulkova is passionate about languages and their teaching. She is originally from Tyumen (Siberia, Russia), where she discovered linguistics and French. She came to France in 2015 to train as a teacher of French as a foreign language and to carry out research on French-Russian bilingual children. She is currently a doctoral student in Language Sciences at the University of Toulouse – Jean Jaurès in the Octogone-Lordat laboratory (EA 4156) in France under the supervision of Professors Barbara Köpke and Vanda Marijanović.

The original titel of her dissertation is „L'impact de l'input dans le développement harmonieux du bilinguisme précoce franco-russe" (The impact of input in the harmonious development of early Franco-Russian bilingualism). Its goal is to study the conditions supporting the positive development of several languages within a bilingual and bicultural family context, with a main focus on well-being. In 2020, this doctoral project highlighting harmonious bilingual development obtained financial support from HaBilNet.

In addition, Ekaterina Tiulkova is a lecturer at the University of Toulouse – Jean Jaurès where she works in the Departments of Language Sciences (linguistics and didactics of L2) and Foreign Languages (Russian). She is also the founder and president of the Toulouse student Association des Russophones et Russophiles (ARR).

Ms. Tiulkova helps HaBilNet shape texts in French and helps find relevant materials in French. You can find her CV here.

Dr. Melissa Baralt is an Associate Professor of Spanish and Linguistics at Florida International University (FIU) in Miami, Florida, United States. Baralt is an applied psycholinguist whose work cuts across the humanities, social sciences, and medical sciences. Specializing in first and second language acquisition, language development in children, and language teaching, her research seeks to shed light on the sociocultural, cognitive, and environmental factors that lead to successful language outcomes. Dr. Baralt has published research on psycholinguistics, online language learning, language teaching, bilingualism and prematurity, heritage language learners, and minority student experiences in second language classrooms.

Prior to coming to FIU, Baralt was a primary school teacher in Maracaibo, Venezuela. Now at FIU, she aims to advance knowledge on how the brain acquires language and what teachers, caregivers, and parents can do to maximize the language learning process. At present, her funded research follows two strands.

The first seeks to provide language-based support for at-risk Latinx children in order to maximize their language and literacy outcomes. More specifically, Dr. Baralt is examining the effects of bilingualism on preterm-born children, the neural recruitment of executive function in children, and how to support at-risk children's early language environments. She and her team have created a free mobile app, Háblame Bebé, which delivers information about and support for Latinx children's bilingual language development. This app was funded by the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), Maternal and Child Health Bureau (MCHB). Dr. Baralt and her team have recently received a G08 grant from the National Library of Medicine (NIH) to enhance the Háblame Bebé app with additional support resources for bilingual families.

Dr. Baralt's second strand of research is about how to best support language teachers as well as minority language learners, with a special focus on the needs of African American and Black Diaspora learners in second language classroom contexts. She has been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities that supports a collaboration between FIU and Florida Memorial University (a historically black college in Miami) to improve modern language curricula and teacher-training with an aim of improving Spanish language courses for African American and Black diaspora students, who remain underrepresented in foreign language programs.

Baralt is a U.S. 'military brat' who moved extensively as a child due to her father's job in the United States army. Before moving to Venezuela, she lived in Georgia, Kansas, Italy, South Carolina, Washington, Pennsylvania, Hawaii, Virginia, Washington D.C., Perú and Spain. Dr. Baralt is multilingual.

Check out Dr. Baralt's CV here and see this link to find out more about her work.

Follow Háblame Bebé on social media!

Barbara Köpke is Professor of Neuropsycholinguistics at the University of Toulouse 2 and head of the Octogone-Lordat Laboratory. Her research involves neuro- and psycholinguistic aspects of language processing in bilingual subjects with specific attention to 'extreme' situations such as L1 attrition, simultaneous interpreting, and aphasia. Her work has appeared in journals such as Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism and Neuropsychologia, and she is the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook on Language Attrition.

Dr. Köpke grew up in Germany and has been living in France for the past 35 years, where she uses French and English for her work and German as well as a little Spanish on other occasions. Her research has mostly focused on the dynamics of bilingualism over life and the cognitive specificities caused by the daily use of several languages. She seeks to draw attention to the specificities of bilingual or multilingual speakers, both healthy and disordered, in order to support harmonious bilingualism.

Check out Dr. Köpke's Curriculum Vitae and find out more about her work here and here.

Janice Nakamura is an Associate Professor at Kanagawa University, Japan. She researches child bilingualism within the Japanese context and works closely with intercultural families. Her work has appeared in journals such as the International Journal of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education, International Multilingual Research Journal, and Multilingua.

Dr. Nakamura grew up multilingually in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and increased her linguistic repertoire of English, Hakka, Cantonese, Mandarin and Malay to Japanese when she moved to Japan in 2002. Dr. Nakamura tries to uncover linguistic and non-linguistic barriers to family bilingualism by investigating parent-child interaction and family language policy. She draws attention to the importance of fostering bilingualism in the home through her research on receptive child bilingualism and monolingual mixed-ethnic children's lost opportunity for minority language acquisition.

Check out Dr. Nakamura's CV here and see this link to find out more about her work.

He (Sabrina) Sun is a research scientist at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She has been trained as an applied linguist in China, the United States, and the Netherlands. For a short time, she was a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Annick De Houwer's lab at the University of Erfurt in Germany.

Her major interests are 1) child heritage language maintenance and eBook reading, 2) individual differences in early bilingualism, and 3) harmonious bilingual experience. Her research is about how cognition and environment co-shape the developmental rate and route of early bilingualism, and how the bilingual experience influences children's social-emotional skills and executive function. Dr. Sun's work employs both linear (e.g., mixed-effects model) and nonlinear (e.g., network analysis) techniques to look into the variability and stages of early bilingual teaching and learning.

Her work has appeared in journals such as AERA Open, Applied Psycholinguistics, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, and the Journal of Child Language. It has been featured by media such as The Straits Times and Channel News Asia CNA. She is an Associate Editor of the Asian Pacific Journal of Education.

She seeks to call for attention from parents, early childhood educators, policymakers, and other stakeholders to the importance of harmonious bilingualism for children's social-emotional wellbeing and academic outcomes.

Follow this link to find out more about Dr. Sun's work or visit her personal website.