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Social pressure for kids to learn | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4403 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 1 of 7 24 January 2014 at 4:39pm | IP Logged |
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I have a little nephew in Germany who adored me until he was nearly 3 years old, at which point he realised I spoke his language in a "different" way. He suddenly announced that Uncle Brian can't speak properly and no doubt I was labelled as some sort of half-wit in his mind.
Now he realises that I'm from a land where another language is spoken we are cool again. But it got me thinking, there must be enormous peer pressure on young kids to learn a language if they are dropped into an immersive environment. Children can be very insensitive towards each other and I'm sure a bit of pointing and laughing, together with comments like "he speaks funny" must make some youngsters totally resolved to learn the new language and perhaps even distance themselves from their mother tongue. As adult learners we are never really subjected to that sort of compulsion, well not to the same extent anyway. Edited by beano on 24 January 2014 at 4:40pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4420 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian | Message 2 of 7 24 January 2014 at 5:07pm | IP Logged |
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From my own experience and observation, it depends. When we arrived in France, my kids were 5 and 7 years old. They go to a bilingual school with children of many different nationalities, so the pressure to learn French was not as strong. In any case, the youngest one seemed to absorb French easily just by relating to French-speaking kids in the playground, while the older, who has always had an education in English, had to work harder to get there.
I think it is even worse when pointing and laughing happen between children speaking the same language! My older sister moved with our parents from the West Coast of Norway to Oslo when she was 7 or 8 years old. She of course spoke the dialect of the region they moved from. One of the first days in school, the teacher asked the other children to be nice to her "even if K... speaks in a funny way". My sister got so traumatised by this that she got totally rid of her dialect, learning to speak "standard" bokmål with a flat Oslo accent. This couldn't happen in Norway nowadays, as people have become proud of dialcts, but I am sure it still happens in other countries with strong regional differences. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Fuenf_Katzen Diglot Senior Member United States notjustajd.wordpress Joined 4150 days ago 337 posts - 476 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Polish, Ukrainian, Afrikaans | Message 3 of 7 24 January 2014 at 6:18pm | IP Logged |
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I'm trying to think back to when I was that age, and I think it depended on the ages. There was one person in 4th grade (so ages 9 or 10 roughly) who came from Guatemala and really didn't speak much English. I don't recall her being outright made fun of, but she was definitely the social outcast because of the language barrier. The next year we had someone from Poland come, and he really spoke no English. He became pretty popular though because he had a very social and lively personality, so I think he made friends pretty easily. I vaguely remember that both times we were prepared a few weeks beforehand that they came from countries where different languages were spoken, so maybe there was a certain "cool" factor.
In middle and high school I don't remember anyone outright being mocked or made fun of, but at the same time, we tended to have people from similar backgrounds, so they spoke in their languages with each other (we had many from Liberia who spoke French, and a few Ukrainians and Russians who all spoke Russian with each other). They did seem to become at least socially fluent fairly quickly though. I think by that age, a lot of us thought it was interesting to hear different accents (I went to a very small school, but we had a surprisingly large amount of people from different countries). 5 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Einarr Tetraglot Senior Member United Kingdom einarrslanguagelog.w Joined 4394 days ago 118 posts - 269 votes Speaks: English, Bulgarian*, French, Russian Studies: Swedish | Message 4 of 7 24 January 2014 at 6:58pm | IP Logged |
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Now that you mentioned it, I do remember that when I was 8-9 years old, I usually spent
the summers at the countryside with my grandparents. I didn't chat quite a lot with my grandpa due to him being busy most of the time but I did with my granny and she was usually сpeaking with a lots of words specific for the county and many of them were either way archaic Bulgarian words or dialect ones and the other ones were borrowed from Turkish. I guess it was annoying to her, not that she ever said something, but every time I heard such kind of word in her speech I'd mock her and insist on speaking properly. Nowadays, of course, I don't do that yet I'm fascinated with the uniqueness and history behind some of these words. So as I'm observing the situation now, there certainly was pressure on me to learn. Strangely it came both from myself and my mom. I remember that when I was 5 or something I loved to read and rewrite passages from exercise books and do some basic maths, then when I went to school I found the first couple of years excruciatingly boring, yet my mom was there to check all my homework after I finish it and she didn't hesitate to make me redo everything for one mistake "In order for me to learn". Now don't get me wrong, I'm grateful that she did that now, but I believe that my "proper speaking" awareness derived from there. Later in high school I didn't seem to bother that much. It was a "national" school which was able to take teens from all over the country so there were accents here and there, yet I remember I laughed only once, and it wasn't even because of the accent but the insanely funny way my classmate exclaimed. :D Edited by Einarr on 24 January 2014 at 7:03pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4225 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 5 of 7 25 January 2014 at 12:08am | IP Logged |
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Depends on the family. I know 1 family in the US who brought up 2 boys in a monolingual English-speaking
environment although the father is Chinese. There is no inclination for him to teach his sons the language or even enrol them in Chinese classes. The older son started taking Spanish in school on his own initiative (no pressure from either parent). There are people in Hong Kong with Cantonese as the mother-tongue decide to enrol their kids in Mandarin or English classes (or both) even with the help of private tutors to give their kids an edge. My parent's generation who lived in both Hong Kong and China were brought up in a Chinese-based education system. Although Hong Kong was a British colony until 1997, a lot of people managed to function without being fluent in a second language. In Europe you have many small countries in proximity to each other, so knowing several languages is an asset. In a place like China people can function without English or another second language. Even being able to speak several Chinese dialects isn't a concern. Edited by shk00design on 25 January 2014 at 12:10am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Hekje Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4484 days ago 842 posts - 1330 votes Speaks: English*, Dutch Studies: French, Indonesian | Message 6 of 7 25 January 2014 at 12:30am | IP Logged |
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Certainly there is a lot of pressure on kids to learn.
It's funny, this thread has given me a better perspective on my mother's experiences coming to the U.S. at the age of 7. She didn't speak any English when she arrived, but by the time she graduated high school, she had won several writing contests. When I was growing up, my mom would sometimes take out her silver and gold medallions from those contests and show them to me with pride. At the time I didn't think much of it. Now, I think I understand a little better how much it must have meant to her. She's often told me how lonely it was growing up and being visibly different from the other kids. It must have really brought her joy to master English and, at least in that aspect, integrate fully into American society. Edited by Hekje on 25 January 2014 at 12:32am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| MargaretT Bilingual Triglot Newbie Czech Republic Joined 3883 days ago 1 posts - 1 votes Speaks: English*, Swedish*, Czech | Message 7 of 7 25 January 2014 at 1:49am | IP Logged |
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I moved to a new country at the age of 7 and spent the first year in a special class focused mainly on learning the new language. At the time I never felt any pressure from other kids at the school or in our neighbourhood, nobody seemed to care as long as I could make myself somewhat understood. A couple of years later, though, I attended the same school but in a 'regular' class, and then I noticed that the foreign kids in the class I had previously attended were looked down upon. I'm not sure if it was simply me who was oblivious, if the atmosphere had changed or if it was simply the fact that my limited language had protected me from this previously...
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