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How to raise Bilingual Children? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6273 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 34 of 69 01 February 2009 at 9:19am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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In London, quite a few children with Turkish or Turkish/Kurdish parents speak Turkish, and sometimes also Kurdish, to their parents (who may not know English well), and to one another they will sometimes speak Turkish, sometimes English. I am not sure whether or not to use the phrase code switching to describe it, but many first encounter English in kindergarten, it seems.
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| andee Tetraglot Senior Member Japan Joined 7078 days ago 681 posts - 724 votes 3 sounds Speaks: English*, German, Korean, French | Message 35 of 69 02 February 2009 at 4:02am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Thanks Volte - I believe it may have been the first link; but somehow my mind remembers it differently.
I agree with Emilia in essence where you shouldn't force things upon your children and you should encourage their interests. Our current natural environment is Korean and English - and we can't imagine our child not speaking either of those. Not just because they would be cut off from half of their family, but also because I am mildly resentful of the fact that I wasn't taught my heritage language as a child and I had been cut off from half of my family as a result until I made the effort to re-discover Polish - I would hate my child to feel the same. Our future home is likely to be Japan for several years, but not until the child is about 3 or 4 and where they are likely to assimilate the language without our input from playgroup/kindergarten, etc. Which leaves the dilemna of wanting to use a language (my heart says Polish) before moving to Japan - this could be viewed as forced, but I can't say forcing part of your own culture and family history is unnatural. Spanish or French would feel artificial and mildly contrived to me because I can't offer the same cultural awareness as I have for Korean and Polish, and the likelihood of me using these with the kids is pretty limited unless we are relocated to those parts of the world. The issue of wanting to use Polish with my children and then intending on moving to Japan is where it can become confusing and I don't really want to go that far - the 30% exposure comes into play, and whilst many experts believe 4 languages can be absorbed by the infant brain, the fact that Japanese won't be in our environment until the child is a toddler is something that troubles me. I can't find much literature on bi/trilingual children then becoming immigrants of another language group. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6440 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 36 of 69 02 February 2009 at 5:55am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Mine too. Perhaps it was this one from 2005, then? I remain utterly incapable of finding his 2008 update on them, though.
Teach them Polish. I know people who have been bi/tri lingual and then became immigrants into another language group; obviously, the fact I know them biases the sample, but none of them seem the worse for it. With English, Polish, and Korean, they shouldn't have much trouble with the Romance languages; Polish shares most of the tricky grammatical parts with them. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Alkeides Senior Member Bhutan Joined 6149 days ago 636 posts - 644 votes | Message 37 of 69 02 February 2009 at 8:05am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
This? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 38 of 69 08 February 2009 at 4:17pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I think your argument seems to be falling two different ways simultaneously. If a language is spoken from day 1 it is not artificial: that is how the majority of languages in the world are learned -- it's the natural way. What is artificial is sending a kid to classes or hiring a tutor. The thing is that you are not "forcing" anything on an infant at that age if it's just a naturally used language -- it's not like the piano: you have to sit down and consciously work at learning the piano, but babies just pick up the language as they go. It's not an opportunity that comes back. I am very grateful that throughout my infant years my mum had me listening to, and singing along with, French kids' songs. I loved doing it, but I stopped around the age of 4 because none of my peer group did it. My mum never tried to get me to pick it up again -- she never forced anything. I was a monoglot until the age of 11, when I started high-school French, but that early exposure made all the difference and started me on the road to becoming a successful polyglot. It's also worth noting that most of the toys and games around the house were from companies like Galt Toys, who specialise in educational toys. But I enjoyed them -- they were fun. My mum didn't want to bring up geniuses, just well-rounded kids. It wasn't about making us successful, but giving us the choice to be successful or not. Once we started at school, we all got into whatever the other kids were doing, and we weren't forced into a "you must learn" routine. We moved away from the educational toys and got on with our lives, but the legacy stayed and we're all very capable thinkers and doers. Consider this: Is it wrong to feed your children before they are old enough to chose their own dinner? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Emilia Newbie Italy Joined 6141 days ago 26 posts - 27 votes Speaks: Italian* | Message 39 of 69 09 February 2009 at 11:02am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Parents purposely speaking to their children in a different language, in a language associated to a particular cultural circle which is not the cultural circle of parents and/or the community, even moreso if we are talking about a language parents are not native-like fluent in (on all levels, from street talk to academic writing), ARE doing something inherently artificial. The fact that they do it purposely and that the child grows up considering it normal does not take away the "artificiality" of the whole thing. Children can grow up speaking Klingon with no problems, if you speak it to them - problems arrive when you realize that you have immersed them artificially in foreign cultural element, on a daily basis, at home, taking away from them cultural-linguistic unity which is *theirs* (even if it is a complex unity, as in cases of children from culturally and/or linguistically mixed families) and poisoning it with a foreign element for the sole sake of raising them polyglot. I may be old-fashioned, but I think that it teaches children a couple of very bad things - as if their natural cultural-linguistic unit were insufficient in some way, so you need to speak foreign languages to them?
Actually, you do not have to. I learned to play many pieces as a child before I learned a lot of solfeggio, harmony and other formal things needed to understand what kind of system lies beneath the music. On the top of that, I have met many individuals with an ear for music without much formal training who played very well - comparable to people with an ear for languages without much conscious knowledge on morphology and syntax. If I "played" around the piano with my child the same way my father played with me, it would definitely not be "forcing" anything. Still, I believe that music is an entirely different question. It does not have such a strict relationship with the culture as a particular language does. Forcing children to go to music school or take classes is bad, just like forcing them to play sports is - both is a matter of choice of how one wishes to handle one's free time. Language given to the child, however, is by default *not* a child's choice. It is not comparable to learning a foreign language, also not of your choice, at school. Home environment is something entirely different. Deliberately giving up on your culture, or adding artificial flavors to it (and anything which does not fit it in some "natural" way IS artificial - if you do not live or have not lived in Italy, have no relatives nor anything to do with Italy, simply speaking a language to the kid in your own country, because you learned it, IS adding an artificial cultural and linguistic component to home life - something very different from sending them to learn foreign languages in some different environments), is a VERY serious issue. Doing so with the sole purpose of giving child an "early start" or of "good cognitive effects" is even worse and it is in NO WAY COMPARABLE to educational toys or anything of the kind. We are speaking of CULTURE here predominately, of a language in which you must not only be competent but also culturally versed to be able to handle all the needs of your children and feel it as your own, which is not exactly something you just get with time.
Ecco, a perfect example is your first sentence - "the opportunity that does not come back". Utilitarian way of thinking. Let children be children first; why not use the infant years for establishing a good relationship with them, in your own culture and language, and teaching them respect and love for that which is theirs first? I am not advocating not sending your children to foreign language lessons, music lessons or sports - on the contrary. After all, sometimes you have to offer some things to a child before he/she can choose. But, I am advocating speaking the language of your home culture in your home and raising your child in that spirit. Also, singing children songs in another language is a bit different issue than actively teaching it to your children or speaking it to them full time, isn't it? I am not sure how far did your exposure to French in early childhood go, were you actually a speaker of the language or just understood it passively, but it definitely seems different than some of the examples of forcing a foreign language on children I have seen.
Feeding your children and taking care of their primary needs and making choices for them in that respect is one thing, and cannot be compared to forcing them to grow up at *home* with an artificial foreign cultural element and, thus, foreign native language. Not even remotely. I am all for learning languages. I would not be lurking these forums (and occasionally posting) if I were not. But, some principles are principles - I am not for teaching languages to your children (or maths, for that matter), and I am especially not for actively using foreign language in your cultural environment. Languages can be learned without that in a plethora of ways. I am, of course, only expressing my opinion. I realize that some people think differently and still teach their children foreign languages or speak them with them. And I am okay with that, even though to me it looks like culturocide. :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| SlickAs Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5878 days ago 185 posts - 287 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French, Swedish Studies: Thai, Vietnamese | Message 40 of 69 10 February 2009 at 4:07am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I could not disagree more. It is only "un-natural" if both parents and the community form a single linguo-ethnic group and you are consciously NOT teaching the child that language. Such as if the husband and wife are both Italian, and the child is being brought up in Italy, but the parents are teaching the child English but NOT Italian. But if the child learns the heritage / community language as well, then what does it hurt?
It is perfectly common in Montreal to bring up children tri-lingually. Heritage language + the 2 community languages. So common that even those without a forieng heritage language, such as mixed couples (French-English) often intentionally introduce a 3rd language by hiring a Spanish nanny, or sending the kid to a Spanish play group, or playing Spanish kids TV to babysit rather than Seaseme Street. It doesn't hurt them at all. I must know at least 100 people in Montreal who are fluently and natively tri-lingual from such an arrangement growing up. Allophones, they are called, and there are hundreds of thousands of them in Montreal (including most of those from Italian descent for example). This socio-ethnic group of people also happen to be the most educated on average, and higest average earners in Montreal. French au-pair's are in demand across the world why, excatly? Could it possibly be that parents want their children to have French? This has been going on for generations and generations. When the Romans conquered Greece, and discovered Greek culture, guess who Roman families hired as nannies? It would be the Greeks. And why? So their children learn Greek and therefore will have access to Greek Learning in their education. These days Americans are hiring Latina nannies for exactly that reason in places like Miami. You are not going to "break" the kid or anything. Edited by SlickAs on 10 February 2009 at 4:19am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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