What age is best for a child to reinforce his second language?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Sorry if my title didn’t make perfect sense. Details:

6-year old boy, U.S. born to Brazilian parents.

At age 5, he could barely read and write his name. Thanks to his wonderful kindergarten (I can’t say enough how impressed I am with his school!), he’s rapidly learning to read and write, and I’d say he can already recognize about half the words in his children’s books. When we read together, every time he learns a new word, he seems to easily remember it.

I am his mother’s boyfriend, and his de facto stepfather. His biological father lives nearby but sees his son infrequently.

Here’s his living situation: Mother, 38, fluent in Brazilian Portuguese, speaks basic English. Sister, 17, fluent in both languages. Grandmother, 68, speaks no English at all. I visit frequently…I’m American but maybe 85% fluent after nearly five years’ learning.

He speaks plenty of Brazilian Portuguese, enough to communicate with both his grandmother and his extended family. However, he doesn’t know enough to follow many of the basic rules, and says many things incorrectly. I’d venture to say my Portuguese is better than his.

I should add that he’s really excited about reading and writing, and always telling me about new words he’s learned to spell, and I try to teach him new words whenever I can.

In summary: I think it’s wonderful for anyone to be bilingual, but especially in his case so he can communicate with his (large) family. I remind him that his other relatives in Brazil speak no English, and he says he’d like to go there someday and meet them.

His grandmother is a retired schoolteacher, and his mother studied to be a teacher before coming to the U.S. They both speak excellent proper Portuguese, with good grammar, spelling, and pronunciation.

I suggested that they start teaching him the basics of reading and writing Portuguese now while he’s young. They counter that he’s still in the beginning stages of reading and writing English, and that throwing in another language will only confuse him.

Whenever I happen to think of a Portuguese word that he knows and is easy to spell, I try to teach him. He’s already learned and remembered that “gato” means “cat” and “casa” means “house,” and knows how to spell both words, for example.

So anyway…when should he start learning to read and write his family’s native language? When should his family start correcting his mistakes?

2

Both of you are right. Throwing in another language now will “confuse” him, and his performance in school will probably suffer as a result. My opinion is that since he is so young, this doesn’t matter: he’ll easier recover from the temporary confusion and come out stronger for it.

The only thing to watch is his confidence. I’d contact his teacher first and explain and ask for help. The teacher will understand what’s going on if his performance slips and the rest of you can help him at home.

In general, most people who have learned a second langauge as a teen or adult really don’t understand anything about raising bilingual children. They assume their own experience translates, and it doesn’t. I think your biggest hurdle isn’t the kid but his family: if they’re not fully on board, you won’t get far, and they won’t get fully on board unless they understand how easy it is for him to lose the language forever. [Okay, he can re-learn as an adult, but you know what I mean.]

3

I teach Kindergarten in an International School and this comes up a lot. Our advice is talk to the child as much as possible in your own language. Read with them as much as possible in your own language.
Children at this age don’t really get confused, he isn’t learning a new language, he’s just having more exposure to one he already knows. Most reading skills are transferable from one language to another: if you are stuck on a word sound it out, can you predict what might happen in the story? Can you make text to experience connections? And so on. The same applies to the writing process.
I would encourage one family member to speak only portuguese to him, maybe the grandmother? And the mum carry on in English, or they both speak portuguese and he gets his English at school. It is better if they don’t flip from one language and back to the other, consistency is important.

4

I’ve got bilingual kids. Yep, consistency is important. It’s important to have an anchor language for each person. Eg, Grandma is Portugese, you are English. In group settings, you can switch but in general should stay with the anchor language.

This advice may be more relevant when the kid is younger and before he understands that there is such a thing as different languages.

My kids growing up knew that grandparent aged spoke shaghaiese, younger chinese spoke Mandarin, and cacausions spoke English. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Then never got confused.

5

It’s not, it is a horrible punishment from God, inflicted upon sinners. (See Genesis 11:5-8.)

This is America; we speak English here. So should he.

If he has to retain some Portuguese to be able to speak with his Grandmother, OK. But you certainly shouldn’t do anything to encourage this!

6

Are you serious? I mean, first off, if so I think you are rather badly misunderstanding that passage. Secondly, I think you are ignoring the enormous practical benefits of bilingualism. Thirdly… well, this is not the Pit.

7

woah woah woah woah waohssssssssssssssssssshhhhhhh

I disagree.

Young children can (and do) handle languages. While a child may appear to “lag” in one language because of others, the child will catch up and then and be ahead of his peers. Trust me, if Portuguese is not his daily language then it won’t keep him down.

On the verbal front, use both.

My son is fluent in English (at kindergarten, all are fluent) and he makes mistakes in spelling and grammar. Ever notice how kids add ‘ed’ to the end of every past tense?

“She biketed home.”
“He walkted to school.”
“I sawwed her do it!”

They’re figuring out the ‘proper’ English rules. They still make sense. They are logical. It’s a process and it will come in time.

The important thing is that he has appropriate contact language at home. Does he communicate with his mother? Peers? Grandparents? You?

Portuguese will help, not hurt.

note: my son had problems reading and writing. it drove me nuts. i chucked his teacher’s whole-language approach and did it my way. you know what else helped? hebrew! because he’s able to compare the different functions of vowels, he ‘rethought’ the way how words are written. comparative languages are handy. this is a kid who confuses ‘b’ and ‘d’ and ‘aah’ and ‘uhh’ sounds and he’s reading hebrew words faster than English ones. now his written English is rapidly improving.

if the kid is fluent in his verbal English, he’ll be fine.

8

This, a thousand times.

While my mother never made any effort to teach us her language (Catalan), we inevitably encountered it whenever we visited her family or went on vacation elsewhere in Catalonia; nowadays the Bros can read it (at a level higher than your average word-guessing Hispanic, I mean - they understand those words with no Spanish equivalent) and I, having taken a course on “Catalan for people who know the language but whose family/friends are an obstacle to their using it”, can speak it but spell it badly (not worse than my Catalan relatives, mind you - but enough to need a spellchecker).

We never had a problem with the concept that it was a different language, with different words and different rules; we never used a word by mistake in the other language. Any words which us or my fully-bilingual cousins (both Spanish/Catalan and Spanish/Basque) used cross-language are frequently used cross-language; for example, the words for family relationships.

Kids don’t have more of a problem with learning two languages simultaneously than with learning math and drawing simultaneously. In fact, being familiar with the grammar of one language can be helpful for the other one. Playing word associations in multiple languages is FUN! (False friends, true friends, puns, a word which exists in both languages but means different things in each - red(EN)= a color; red(ES)=web, net).

9

Yeah, what she said!

Subtractive bilingualism sucks.

10

We’ve always spoken both English and Norwegian in front of the young flodnaks, and their teachers and other adults have always praised their skills in both languages.

IMO the best age for a child to learn their family’s other language is “as young as possible” or “right now”.