New to this topic? Start with our companion article: Concept Development in Bilingual Children: What to Target | Brisbane Speech Pathologist
Our companion article explains how concepts develop across languages — the theory and the clinical reasoning. This article is the how-to: practical strategies that families can use at home, approaches therapists can bring into sessions, and the handful of simple tools that work beautifully across any language combination. The good news is that none of it requires special training or expensive resources. It just requires confidence in the languages you already speak and a willingness to notice the concept-building moments hiding in everyday life.
Strategies for Families: Building Concepts at Home
You don't need special training or expensive resources to build your child's concepts. What you do need is time, conversation, and confidence in your home language (or languages). A few of the things that often help bilingual families:
Keep Using Your Home Languages — Confidently
This is the single most important thing you can do, and we unpack the full evidence for it in our myth-busting and research articles. The short version: talk to your child in the language you're most fluent and expressive in. That's where the rich vocabulary, the complex sentences, and the natural conversations live — and that's where concepts get built. If different caregivers speak different languages, that variety is a strength, not a problem.
If your child is learning the concept of "same and different," for example, you can explore this during dinner in your home language: "Look, your plate and your sister's plate are the same. But your cups are different — yours is blue and hers is red." The concept transfers, even when the language changes.
Narrate Daily Routines
Daily routines are goldmines for concept building. Cooking, shopping, getting dressed, bath time, tidying up — these activities are full of opportunities to use and repeat important concepts like:
- Size and quantity: "We need a big pot. Not that one — that one's too small."
- Sequence: "First we wash the rice, then we put it in the pot, then we add water."
- Categories: "Let's put all the fruit in the bowl and the vegetables in the fridge."
- Location: "Your shoes are under the table. Can you put them next to the door?"
The best part? These concepts come up again and again in daily life, giving your child lots of repetition without it feeling like practice.
Read and Tell Stories in Your Home Language
Storytelling is one of the most powerful ways to build concepts — and it doesn't require a book. Telling stories from your own childhood, your culture, or your imagination gives your child exposure to complex language, narrative structure, and abstract concepts like feelings, motives, and consequences.
If you do have picture books in your home language, that's wonderful. But even with an English-language picture book, you can tell the story in your home language using the pictures as a guide. This builds the concepts, and when your child encounters the same story structure or vocabulary in English at school, they'll already have the foundation.
Use All Your Languages Without Stress
Some families worry about mixing languages, but there's no need. If it's natural for you to use two (or three, or more) languages during an activity, go ahead. You might explain a concept in your home language and then say, "In English, we call that..." — or move between several languages if that's how your household naturally flows. This helps your child build connections between all of their vocabulary systems.
The goal isn't perfect separation of languages. It's rich, meaningful communication in whatever language feels right for the moment. The parents who feel most confident using their home language are usually the ones whose children develop the strongest conceptual foundations.
What This Looks Like in Sessions
If you're a parent wondering what good inclusive therapy looks like (or a speech pathologist working with bilingual children), these are the kinds of approaches that make a real difference. They apply equally to children from CALD backgrounds and to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children who may be navigating traditional languages, Aboriginal English, and Standard Australian English.
Learn About the Child's Language Background
Before you can support a bilingual or multilingual child effectively, it can be helpful to understand their full language profile: which languages they speak and hear, how much of each, in what contexts, and with whom. For some children that's two languages; for others it may be three or more. This information shapes your goals, your targets, and your expectations.
Kohnert (2013) emphasises that understanding a child's language environment is essential for distinguishing between a language difference and a language difficulty — and for setting goals that make sense for that child's life.
Target Concepts, Not Just English Words
When a child needs to build conceptual understanding (like categories, sequencing, or spatial concepts), the concept itself is the goal — not the English word. If a child already understands a concept in their home language, therapy can focus on connecting the English label to the existing knowledge, which is much faster than building the concept from scratch.
Ask parents: "Does your child understand this concept in your home language?" If the answer is yes, you're starting from a position of strength. In my experience, that one question reframes the whole session — suddenly we're not teaching from scratch, we're building a bridge.
Invite Families Into the Process
Parents and family members are your greatest resource. They know what the child can do in the home language, they can practise concepts at home in ways that feel natural, and they can provide cultural context that makes therapy more relevant and meaningful.
Practical ways to involve families:
- Ask parents to list words their child knows in the home language for key concept areas
- Send home visual supports that parents can label in their home language
- Encourage parents to practise target concepts during daily routines in whatever language feels natural
- Check in regularly about what the child is saying and understanding at home
Use the Child's Strengths as a Starting Point
If a child has strong concepts in one language, build on those. Start with what they know, label it in the new language, and provide lots of opportunities for practice. This approach — building on existing knowledge rather than treating the child as a blank slate — is more efficient and more respectful of the child's bilingual identity.
Visual Supports and Real Objects: Tools That Work Across Languages
Some of the most effective tools for building concepts across two languages are beautifully simple.
Real Objects
There is no substitute for the real thing. When teaching concepts like "rough" and "smooth," let the child touch sandpaper and silk. When teaching "full" and "empty," use actual cups and water. Real objects provide sensory information that transcends language — the child understands the concept through experience, and then language labels can be attached in either language.
Photos and Pictures
Photos of familiar items, people, and places are incredibly useful. They can be labelled in both languages (either verbally or with written labels), used to sort into categories, sequence into routines, or match to real objects. Unlike language, the visual image stays the same regardless of which language is being used.
Gesture and Sign
Simple gestures or signs (such as Key Word Sign, which is widely used in Australian speech pathology) can serve as a bridge between two languages. A sign for "more" means the same thing regardless of whether the spoken word is in English, Cantonese, or Arabic. Gestures provide a shared reference point that supports comprehension while language is still developing.
Strategies land better when hearing is clear. All the home strategies in the world won't do much if a child isn't catching the words cleanly to begin with. If it's been a while — or never — book a hearing check with a paediatric audiologist. It's a small step that makes everything else work harder.
Bringing It All Together
Building concepts across two, three, or more languages is not about multiplying the workload. It's about being smart with the work you're already doing. When families use their home languages confidently, when therapists target concepts rather than just English words, and when visual and hands-on tools provide a bridge across languages, bilingual and multilingual children can develop strong, transferable conceptual knowledge that serves them in every part of their life.
We love working with multilingual families to find strategies that fit naturally into your daily routines and respect your child's full language profile. If you'd like to talk about how we can support your bilingual child, get in touch.
Alexandra Bouwmeester is a Senior Speech Pathologist (MSPA, CPSP) with over 14 years' experience supporting bilingual and multicultural families. She offers mobile speech pathology to families across Brisbane's south side and Logan, bringing cultural sensitivity to every family she meets.
References
Kohnert, K. (2013). Language Disorders in Bilingual Children and Adults (2nd ed.). Plural Publishing.
Paradis, J., Genesee, F., & Crago, M. B. (2021). Dual Language Development and Disorders: A Handbook on Bilingualism and Second Language Learning (3rd ed.). Paul H. Brookes Publishing.
Thordardottir, E. (2010). Towards evidence-based practice in language intervention for bilingual children. Journal of Communication Disorders, 43(6), 523–537.
