Tish Davidson
4753 Mattos Drive One time print rights for sale Fremont, CA 94536
(510) 713-8145 Words: 1,270
davidson@att.net
http://home.att.net/~davidson/Tish.htm
Annette Gendler of Chicago wants her three children, ages 9, 7, and 4, to be fluently bilingual and bicultural. She and her husband, both German speakers, have spoken German to their children from birth and have reinforced their exposure to the language with regular trips to Germany to visit relatives. In fact, her older children have even attended school in Germany for short periods. Despite this commitment to raising bilingual children, Gendler says, "It takes a lot of dedication to see it through. Our kids' English vocabulary expands so much faster than their German one, and it takes a lot of work to keep it up."
More than 5,000 languages are spoken worldwide, and for about half the world's population, bilingualism or multilingualism—knowing three or more languages—is the norm. This is not true in the United States, where about 215 million people over age 5 speak English only compared to 47 million who speak another language at home. Among this group, Spanish predominates with 28 million speakers, followed by Chinese (about 2 million speakers), French (1.6 million), German (1.4 million), Vietnamese and Italian (about 1 million each). Forty-three percent of Californians speak something other than English at home, with Texas, Florida, Hawaii, Arizona and New Jersey all having a high percentage of speakers of other languages.
Why Encourage Bilingualism?
All normal children have the capacity at birth to learn multiple languages. However, within the first eighteen months, children focus on sounds that are common in the primary language they hear and gradually lose the capacity to make sounds such as the trilled "r" or glottal stops common in other languages. Still, until about age 10, children pick up languages with relative ease. However, this does not mean that they will become fluently bilingual simply because a second language is in the air. The Linguistic Society of America says that "the hard part is making sure they have enough natural exposure to both languages."
Families choose to raise bilingual children for several reasons. The first is simple necessity. About 11% of the population of the United States is foreign born, and many children grow with parents or grandparents who speak minimal English. Esperenca Cardosa, a bilingual adult, was born in the US, but her parents spoke little English, so Portuguese was her first language. "It was just a matter of being able to communicate," she says.
Other parents want their children to retain the their ethnic heritage, to be able to communicate with relatives living abroad, or to be able to read religious texts, such as the Koran, in their common language. Some, such as Brooke Hadley of Austin, Texas, have set high language goals for their children simply because they want them to appreciate diversity and be able to communicate with all kinds of people.
Hadley, who has a college degree in French but says she is not fully fluent, is teaching her one- and three-year-olds American Sign Language and French with the hope that they will be trilingual. "Parenting is already a tough job," she says. "Add to that introducing and consistently working on a new language, and obstacles will come up that other parents don't deal with. The good news is, all the hard work and dedication pays off."
Myths
About Bilingualism
Despite the obvious advantages of being bilingual, some parents worry that exposure to more than one language will confuse their children and result in language delays. The language delay theory, popular 50 years ago, has been proved untrue. Research shows that young children who are exposed to two languages know on average the same total number of words as children who are monolingual. However, the words are divided between two languages, making these children appear to be vocabulary deficient for a short time during their language development. This difference tends to disappear by elementary school.
Some parents believe that it is necessary to give their children a good grounding in one language before beginning another. However, the longer one waits to learn a language, the more difficult it becomes to achieve native fluency. Exposing children to two languages at birth does them no harm, and may help their long-term language development.
But what about language confusion? Most bilingual children, and even adults, mix words from their two languages in the same sentence. This is does not necessarily mean that they lack fluency in either or both languages. However, because different languages are used in different settings, children often know the English word for items used at school or seen on television, while they know the foreign word for things such as food and or familial relationships. For a while they may also mix grammar structures of their different languages, but by the time they reach school age, these quirks generally disappear.
Strategies
for Bilingual Families
There are multiple approaches to raising bilingual children, although experts do agree that children need balanced exposure to both languages in order to achieve fluency. Some parents, such as Sean Dent of Burlington, Massachusetts, practice the one-parent, one-language rule. His children, ages 3 and 8, live in Quebec with their mother, a native French speaker. However, they watch English television and movies almost exclusively and have books read to them in English. In addition, when they visit Dent, he speaks to them only in English.
"Kids are amazing in how fast they learn when they sense your expectations," he says. "It's easy to give in and speak their first language, but that's a mistake." A drawback to the one-parent, one-language approach is that the children may spend much more time with one parent than the other, and thus one language may become dominant, while the other fades.
Another strategy families use is to speak one language exclusively at home and for their children to speak another in school. This approach can, as noted, result in periods of unequal vocabulary development, but can be very effective in developing listening and speaking fluency. A third, somewhat artificial approach, is that everyone in the family speaks one language on certain days and the second language on other days.
One problem bilingual families encounter is that as children grow they often become resistant to speaking the non-dominant language and begin answering their parents in English. This reduces younger siblings' exposure to the second language, and as a result, the first child in the family is often a fluent speaker of the second language, while later siblings are able to understand it well, but speak poorly. Parents can work through this problem by repeating the child's English response in the second language and having the child spend time with relatives or other adults who speak little English.
In the end, there is no one "right" way to raise bilingual children. Those children who achieve the most complete fluency in listening, speaking, and writing, are children who have a lot of exposure to a second language from birth, with emphasis on natural exchanges between fluent adults—parents, caregivers, and grandparents, for example. Their exposure is supplemented by CDs and videos in the second language and later by some type of formal instruction in writing the nondominant language.
Giving children a second or third language expands their horizons and gives them a better understanding or the world. Brooke Hadley sums it up best when she says, "I can't describe the joy I feel when one of my children has picked up a new foreign word or a new sign, I can see all of our hard work in action, and that's the driving force that keeps me going. What’s more, accomplishments in language development build self-esteem in your children, and that is priceless."