When the parents of a child - say, a baby - have different native languages and want the child to be fluent in both, is there any evidence to indicate the best way to achieve this?
By virtue of my job (at a university) I know a lot of young bilingual (and often multilingual) couples, many of whom have young kids at home, or on the way. From speaking to them, it seems there are two main approaches to raising a kid who’ll wind up being fluent in both parental languages:
Have the dad speak to the kid exclusively in French (or whatever) and the mom speak to the kid only in Cantonese (or whatever), with English picked up from friends, at school, etc. (this technique becomes the default if the parents, themselves, don’t speak the other’s language well).
OR
At home, and whenever in private with the family, use different languages on alternating weeks (e.g. this week we speak English and next week we’ll use Dutch). Of course, this approach can only be employed when both parents are fluent in both languages.
Is there any evidence one way or the other regarding this issue? One parent I know claimed that method #1 (above) ‘had been shown to be superior’ and, if nothing else, ‘makes it easier for the kid to stay with the plan’. Comments?
It’s also possible there are other ‘methods’ in addition to the two of I’ve described. I’d be interested to hear of them if you know of any.
I was raised bilingually in Dutch and English, and my SO and my mum both work in a research and education centre for early second language acquisition.
Your friend is a little behind the times. About thirty years behind. In the eighties it was thought that unless the child acquired the languages in a very separate manner they would become confused. There was no apparent basis for this theory even then. It’s a load of crap. In fact, they regularly receive calls from people asking this exact question.
My parents at the time went out on a limb and decided not to approach our education that way, because it seemed completely unnatural to them. They both speak both languages fluently, and they mix them freely, so deciding what to speak when would force an unnatural way of communicating. They were warned that we would never learn language, that we could be irreparably damaged socially, that it was a terrible thing to do. I now speak 7 languages and I can assure you, I’m fine. [End of anecdotal evidence]
Basically, any way they come into contact with the languages is fine. It doesn’t even matter if the parents don’t speak the language perfectly, as long as there is another (near-) perfect source they will eventually learn the correct grammar & pronunciation. All the evidence shows that even minimal exposure to a foreign language only enhances understanding of the original language. So even if they don’t become fluent in the other language, the original language will improve. There is also evidence that the capacity for learning languages improves (cite = me)
There is likely to be a period of confusing the languages, of experimenting with them, of finding out who understands what, etc. This is also the case when children learn just one language. For example, first children will imitate, so they learn grammar correctly. When they have mastered that, suddenly their grammar becomes very bad. This is because they have discovered that there are rules, and they are following the rules even in cases where it is an exception. It’s the natural way of learning.
[Back to anecdotal evidence] I remember when I was figuring out that not everyone speaks both languages. I told my mum the kids at school were stupid, because they didn’t understand me when I talked. She said: “try speaking Dutch to them”. Granny doesn’t speak Dutch, but she understand everything. Oma speaks Dutch and English perfectly. Adults usually speak English, some speak Dutch. Children speak either but not both. We are the only people who speak both at the same time, other people find this funny and difficult to understand. Etc.
Children are sponges for language. There is really very little you can do to mess it up.
I’ve taught English to young Dutch children and I’ve been involved in several research projects in which methods of learning English were examined. The way children suck up language is incredible. When I start my lessons with children they don’t know I speak Dutch, I only speak English to them. To date it has never happened that they don’t understand me, even on the first day. They just know what I’m saying. Their parents ask them “how come you understand gracer?” and they respond “we speak English” (they don’t at first, they speak Dutch, but they already think they speak English). It happens like magic, suddenly they speak English with these beautiful English accents. It starts with hilarious phrases, like “Miss, I’m a toilet?” and “What eats an elephant?”. Just keep speaking as an example, repeat the correct phrase back to them (“Would you like to go to the toilet?” “What does an elephant eat? Well, an elephant eats…”) and they pick it up. Magic
Obviously, if for parents it makes sense to speak one language one day and another the next, or have only one parents speak one language, that’s fine. It just doesn’t matter in the slightest. Bilingualism is present around the world, very, very many people are bilingual, and I’m pretty sure the only people who are worried about how children learn the two or more languages are the educated elite of the west
I’m studying a bit of bilingualism at the moment, and from what I’ve been reading, the above post is pretty much spot on.
This paper may be of particular interest to the OP. One of the most interesting things I gathered from it is that acquiring certain features of one language can actually transfer over to the second language, meaning the child learns that feature earlier than a monolingual child would in that language. So, say in German there’s a particular syntactic feature that would normally be learned at 24 months, if it is normally acquired at 12 months old in English, then the feature may transfer over to German and be acquired earlier.
One of the most important things to stress is that every child is different, and acquires language at different speeds. Just because one study showed that one child had an easier time learning languages when the parents only spoke one language each, doesn’t mean that will be true for all.
There may be cultural reasons for separating the languages though. It might help the child understand when to use a particular language if say, the father’s side of the family only speaks one language. The child may associate that language with that part of the family. But as the above poster says, I wouldn’t underestimate children’s ability to figure this out for themselves. Worst case scenario you can just tell the child what language they should use with that side of the family.
I’m pretty sure most people in the world are bilingual. Estimates are at about 75%, I believe.
This video and this video are both good examples of how effective children can be in code switching. Also note what languages the parents seem to favour (and note how they don’t remain consistent) yet the child has no difficulty responding.
If either one of the languages is the local language, then have the parents speak to each other in the non-local one. The kid will pick up the local language just fine, thankyouverymuch, when he hits kindergarten.
IMO, the parent who speaks the local language should probably use it when speaking with the child. The parent who speaks the other language should use the other language. But the most important thing is the language the parents speak to each other.
Cases in point: my family. My parents spoke English to each other. My father spoke Hebrew (the local language) with us, and my mother English. My siblings and I are all fluent in both Hebrew and English.
My brother speaks English to his children, but Hebrew with his wife. His children know some English but are not nearly bi-lingual. My children aren’t quite bi-lingual either, but are closer to it, having had more chances to be around my mother and hear her speak English with my father and me (although actually not so much to them!)
If neither of the languages is the local one, then I don’t know.
Interesting! I would add, again, that this continues in later life as well. Bilingualism improves further language acquisition and understanding of language, precisely because you have gained insight into these structures.
That’s pretty much what I was thinking, but wasn’t too sure of the stats. Yup, all those people do juuust fine without their parents stressing out about “oh dear, now the little snowflake heard Daddy speak English, he’ll be confused forever!”…
This is what it’s like at our house. I think my parents started out speaking one language in one conversation. Later it just naturally turned into speaking “Dinglish”. We switch right in the middle of sentences: “Look at what papa has gebracht voor jou!” or “It’s your turn om met the dog te wandelen”. Just because it’s confusing for you doesn’t mean it’s confusing for me. One the whole we’ll probably speak one language predominantly per conversation, but switching mid-way can be natural to us. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend speaking like this (after all, the child still needs a rich source of language) but I wouldn’t worry if that way of speaking naturally develops.
The only thing that genuinely still confuses me is when I see the road warning saying “ramp”. “Ramp” means disaster in Dutch, and because it’s a warning sign it tends to scare the shit out of me
We do a mix of weak language as family language, strong outside. One parent one language (OPOL) and the mix described above. Basically I only speak English with my husband, he only speaks English with me. I speak half English half Japanese with my younger son, only English with my elder. My elder son speaks only English with me, half English half Japanese with his father and younger brother. My younger son speaks only Japanese with his father, only Japanese only except when fighting with his elder brother, and half English half Japanese with me! And we are all pretty much bilingual.
My sons “code switch” constantly and we tend to speak in a language that only our family or other local bilingual families understand. For example we had an Easter party a few years ago and my son came rushing in with the other kids after the egg hunt;
“Mummy mummy, we mitsuketa lots of eggs! But it’s daijobu because we chanto waketa them!”
There was a long pause and then one of the other dads said, “And the scary thing is, we all understood that.”
Bilingualism is great. And yes, it’s more normal to be multi lingual than mono lingual in this world. My brother’s kids are bilingual Welsh and English.
I know two cases. I live in Montreal which is already bilingual. My colleague was born in South Africa, but to native German speakers and, while his English is perfect, so is his German (and he also speaks Afrikaans, although after all these years, maybe not). His wife is Argentinian and when their son was born, they decided that he would speak only German at home and she only Spanish. Then he went to a bilingual school and, as far as I can determine, has native fluency in four languages (he certainly does in English; I will attest to that and I’ve heard him speak to his father in what sounded like perfectly fluent English). The parents can at least understand each other’s native language.
The second case is more surprising. The parents are Argentinian. And first cousins. And they had a child quite late in life. He is rather retarded (as well as somewhat physically handicapped). He was able to learn to speak. His English is fluent–but the fluency of a 3 year old. Presumably he is the same in Spanish, since that is what the parents spoke. And French since his special ed was at a bilingual school. Now he is in his thirties and lives at home, spending his days in some sort of shelter. He speaks of his friends there. The parents have arranged, BTW, that when they die he will be sent to Argentina and be cared for by their relatives there. He loved the Harry Potter stories, although his mother had to read them to him.
I have a Chinese friend who has a French husband (in Toronto), but the only language they have in common is English. Her experience is that their children had okay comprehension in all three languages until they started school, at which point English zoomed into first place and Chinese zoomed into last place.
If I may ask you one more thing: what is the Straight Dope on my four-year old Dutch watching and learning from TV and You Tube clips in English?
For instance, he’s a big dino fan, and he looooved the movies Jurassic Park and the BBC’‘s Walking with Dinosaurs. And those are narrated in English, and not available in Dutch narration as far as I know. And he can’‘t read the Dutch subtitles, so I don’t bother with those. My son doesn’t seem to mind the different language at all. But I don’'t think he picks up much, either.
So, are TV, dvd’s, or Youtube clips any good for aquiring a second language for kindergarteners?
The last project I did (I worked for my SO) was called “Mobiel Engels Leren”, children learning English in class, but supported by mobile phone apps outside class. The children who used the phones outside class did significantly better than those that didn’t. They would learn about the zoo animals, and at home could play the associated games as much or as little as they liked. They played a lot (we could monitor how much they played the games), and the children who learned a lot identified that they had enjoyed playing the games.
I think it confirms that enjoyment in learning is very important. Beyond that, it is pretty clear to me that children pick up loads from watching tv. It is unlikely to make them fluent, as they would need more guidance and also interaction, but it certainly helps.
Consider how good the Dutch are at languages: it’s in part because even children watch cartoons in English. The children I taught could often imitate phrases from their favourite tv shows, and had some vocabulary from there as well. It helps the ear for languages to develop at that young age.
If you would like to expose him to some English don’t be afraid to start reading him some books in English, and sing songs. Your English is obviously very good, and you needn’t worry about your accent. I’d offer classes (they’re so fun kids have cried when they ended!), but I’m way north from you Singing songs and reading books would help him pick up more, he would be repeating back to you and speaking himself. You might be surprised that once he has the means to express himself a little, the stuff he picked up from tv starts to surface.
I asked my SO and there are no Early Bird schools in Maastricht, but he says the following schools offer some form of early English:
BS De Burght
BS Joppenhof
Montessorischool Binnenstad
I’ve no idea if the schools are any good, though. Something to think about?
Just another anecdote about pushing the language boundaries:
I have friends living in NYC who are fluent in English and French (mother is from Paris). They speak French at home, have a mandarin-speaking nanny, and the kids (9 and 7) go to a spanish speaking school (half-time spanish). English is still their kids’ default language to others and between themselves- showing how society still determines more of language than one’s family does. The only oddity apparently in any of the kids’ speaking is with mandarin in that their writing and reading and non-middle-aged-female-immigrant vocabulary are all a bit behind.
We also have a neighbor who is probably 60 years old and is the youngest of 10+ children of Japanese immigrant parents. She doesn’t speak a word of Japanese and her parents never spoke more than a handful of English words. The care of the younger children fell upon the older ones and she was in her teens before anyone realized that she hadn’t needed/learned any Japanese. So she has to speak to her 90-something mother through her 70-year old sister as translator. Amusingly they are an incredibly close family
One thing I felt strongly about personally is that I or my husband should not be prevented from communicating with our children in our own ways, that we ourselves felt most comfortable with. I had a couple of Chinese and Brazilian foreign wife friends who were forbidden by their mothers in law from speaking their own languages with their kids. We never get this as English is the “cool” language so it’s more over-excited oohs and ahhhhs we get. But seeing my friends in this position made me so sad for them. I’m fluent in Japanese but pick up a baby and English just comes pouring out. It’s my heart language.
For my husband it’s a bit more complicated because we met and started dating and got married in English, so he says he feels like English is his “home” language setting. He says he comes home and takes off his work clothes and puts on his jeans, and takes off his Japanese and puts on his English. In his case it seems to be that he prefers to follow the language that the person starting the conversation chose. He’s very big on being polite and respecting other people’s feelings and he once said to me he thought it would be “rude” to our sons to pick a language and reply to them in that, no matter what language they started a conversation in. So he switches back and forth in a family conversation, whereas I will tend to stick to English (though I will also use Japanese with my younger son, whose English is sometimes not strong enough to pick up nuances.)
I think it is mostly about being HAPPY as a family! Your first aim is surely to strengthen and protect the bonds of your relationships. On the other hand bilingualism (or multilingualism) is great and it adds a dimension to your life that is special. I was determindly monolingual until I’d been in Japan three years and we decided to get married. My kids have had the chance to be both all their lives and my elder son in particular says he really appreciates having two sides of himself, and says that no matter what language speaker he eventually marries he will certainly use both languages with his kids, plus learn his partner’s language if necessary. That makes me happy!
From what I have read, I think I can adumbrate the main points of raising a bilingual child thusly:
The kid needs loads of input in both languages. (At least 30% of daily language input daily, is a number I’ve seen thrown around).
The parents need to present a positive attitude toward both languages. Kids are sensitive to language stigmas.
Both languages need to seem necessary. Rejecting a language is also a natural linguistic instinct.
Language may be improved through one-sided input, but it is learned through conversation. The language acquisition instinct is geared toward both understanding and being understood. You’ll often hear that long ago it was often recommended that deaf parents play the radio or TV for their kids, so they can pick up spoken language, and this never worked. The give-or-take with an interlocutor drives the language learning engine.
De Houwer, Bilingual First Language Aquisition, has a breakdown of the success rate of different strategies in establishing fully bilingual children (both understanding and speaking both languages). I hope you’ll forgive me for not reproducing the chart (page 112), but it shows that the input strategy most likely to be successful is that both parents speak both languages. A close second is for one parent to speak both languages, and the other to use only one language (though it must be taken into account that a child is more likely to lose interest in the language that is not spoken in the larger community). The third input pattern – 1 person/1 language – in which each parent uses only one language with the child, still has a pretty good shot at successfully producing a bilingual child.
However, this can be affected by how parents choose to deal with the child’s language production (134-140). These strategies may be schematized on a scale from monolingual (insisting the child only speak to the parent in the language that parent wants to impart) to bilingual (languages may go back-and-forth with no pressure to use a particular one). The parental-input aspect above seems to favor use of either language freely, but on the side of what output is expected of the child, it seems that a child who is given to view a language as optional is likely to cease speaking one (though probably still understands it – becomes ‘passively bilingual’ as its called). Note that none of these strategies listed by De Houwer involve explicit coercion of the child. They range from acting like you don’t know what the kid is talking about to just using whatever language is currently in play. As I understand it, part of the language instinct includes feeling out the role and attitudes toward different languages among different groups of interlocutors. Even into adulthood, people have a tendency to code-switch at about the level that is the norm for whomever they’re talking to.
As others have said, the idea that raising a child bilingual may cause language delays or confusion or lead to a failure to understand language at all has been discredited. Of course, I’ve only read about it from fans of bilingualism, but the reasons make sense. First, lots of things cause language delays, and bilingualism gets blamed first. Second, confusion or mixing can happen, and is no cause for alarm in the first place, and sorts itself out anyway in the manner I mentioned above – people code-switch among code-switchers. Finally, it seems that the evidence that bilingual children do not pick up language well has been roundly criticized for mis-characterizing the results of other class-based educational disadvantages for the results of bilingualism.
My former brother-in-law (husband’s sister’s second ex-husband) was from Holland, and told me that Dutch commonly speak about four languages: Dutch, German, English, and (I think) French. His English was pretty good, but he did tend to get confused by less-than-literal phrasing. To his credit, he had no qualms about speaking up if someone said something he didn’t understand.
So would I. But there are women here married into farming families, often deep in the country, living in the same house with them. In Japanese culture the daughter in law is at the bottom of the heap. Some of the foreign women stuck in that situation have no means of fighting back for their own cultural reasons, or financial, or just sheer exhaustion and depression. MILS here think they have every right to bully their daughters in law, particularly the daughter of the eldest son. After all, it happened to them and it’s their turn now.
Then there is the simple thing of one x-speaker against say eight or ten Japanese speakers in the family who surround the child all day, and the point made earlier in this thread that kids pick up on social cues and they will not use the other language if Granny tells them off or belittles them or their mum every time they attempt to do so. A losing battle.
The Dutch are also very direct. For example, in a meeting a Dutch person would just say: “that is a bad idea”. In English, if you were to say “interesting” (in the right tone) everybody would understand that you mean it’s not interesting at all, let’s go on to the next point on the agenda. That might be one of the problems he would have with the less-than-literal phrasing: in Dutch people are literal and direct.
And yes, everybody here speaks Dutch, English, German and French. Not fluently of course, just as foreign languages. But on the whole, they’re pretty good.
