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Best way to raise bilingual children

What is the best way of raising bilingual children?

  • Two home languages (one parent, one language)

    Votes: 14 51.9%
  • Non-dominant home language (one language, one environment)

    Votes: 4 14.8%
  • Non-dominant home language without community support

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Double non-dominant home language without community support

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Non-native language used by one parent

    Votes: 2 7.4%
  • Language mixing and code-switching

    Votes: 3 11.1%
  • Other: Please state

    Votes: 3 11.1%
  • Planet X: We Don't Need No Stinkin' Bilingualism

    Votes: 1 3.7%

  • Total voters
    27

angrysoba

Philosophile
Joined
Dec 8, 2009
Messages
37,757
Location
Osaka, Japan
I found an article about different models for parents raising bilingual children.

In many ways, the context will be extremely important, for example, whether you are trying to raise a child in a society which is already bilingual (such as parts of Canada, or Belgium), whether schooling is in one language and most social community activities in another (such as Ireland or Wales). Or whether you are raising a child in a community of people who speak one language within a broader society of speakers of another language (maybe Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, or Chinese speakers in a community in England, for example).

But what are the best ways in which parents can provide language opportunities to help their children learn more than one language?

Broadly speaking, some parents either choose to restrict themselves to one particular language and only use that one language with a child even if they are competent in the other. This is sometimes known as One Parent, One Language (OPOL).

Or else, sometimes languages are strictly segregated by location (L1 in the house/ L2 outside the house).

Or else, a greater weight is given to one particular language early on to allow it to become strong (usually the minority language) before the other language (usually the majority language) begins to take over.

Of course, all of this makes assumptions about how much influence parents have to begin with, as most children, particularly as they get older or become teens have more interest in talking with peers than they do with their parents and parents' friends.

I'll put the options from the article in a poll.
 
I don't know what the best way is, but I try to speak exclusively in my native language to my kid, but I speak my Wife's to everyone else, because they wouldn't understand me very well.
 
My son grew up in Turkey and speaks both languages well but feels more comfortable using English. He has gone to state schools which are a Turkish language environment. His mother has always spoken to him in Turkish but I have always spoken to him in English. The most interesting Internet discussions being in English accelerated things.
 
Marcello's in a predominantly English (course) school, but his play language is mostly Thai. I picked the first option because he and I converse in English and he and his mom in Thai.

He has the added difficulty of tackling two different alphabets, but at least the Thai alphabet is phonetic, so it's not as difficult as growing up learning Chinese (or Korean or Japanese) and a western language.

School educates them in both, but we pay the big bucks for the "international" aspect, which means "English" (on the "Cambridge Curriculum, Rev.").

I don't know yet what will happen when we get to the US. He's fine with verbal skills in both languages but his reading/writing is not-so-fine in either. I don't know that we'll be able to find someone to tutor him in Thai. We'll see. While it's not as significant as other languages, a second language, particularly one from one of your birth cultures, is a good thing.
 
I don't know what the best way is, but I try to speak exclusively in my native language to my kid, but I speak my Wife's to everyone else, because they wouldn't understand me very well.

Thanks. Which languages, if you don't mind? I wonder, does your child have a greater interest in one language over another?

My son grew up in Turkey and speaks both languages well but feels more comfortable using English. He has gone to state schools which are a Turkish language environment. His mother has always spoken to him in Turkish but I have always spoken to him in English. The most interesting Internet discussions being in English accelerated things.

That's interesting. Does he have a lot of opportunity to speak English other than with you?

I suppose there is also the prestige factor. If English is seen as a respectable, or a fun language, because of the way that it is a medium for more interesting activities then clearly studying it becomes more attractive. I take it that if we are talking about Internet discussions he is pretty much grown up now.

I find that elevators work best.

I liked see-saws, but they have their ups and downs.

Marcello's in a predominantly English (course) school, but his play language is mostly Thai. I picked the first option because he and I converse in English and he and his mom in Thai.

He has the added difficulty of tackling two different alphabets, but at least the Thai alphabet is phonetic, so it's not as difficult as growing up learning Chinese (or Korean or Japanese) and a western language.

Thanks for this.

As it happens, I should make a full disclosure now, as I have a son who is a year and two months now. My wife's Japanese and I am English.

Although Japanese does use Chinese characters, it does have two phonetic scripts (actually syllabary scripts) and Korean almost exclusively uses Hangul phonetic script now, as far as I know.



School educates them in both, but we pay the big bucks for the "international" aspect, which means "English" (on the "Cambridge Curriculum, Rev.").

I don't know yet what will happen when we get to the US. He's fine with verbal skills in both languages but his reading/writing is not-so-fine in either. I don't know that we'll be able to find someone to tutor him in Thai. We'll see. While it's not as significant as other languages, a second language, particularly one from one of your birth cultures, is a good thing.

Actually, I lazily copied and pasted the options from the article, but neither 1 nor 2 really fit our situation.

We have decided not to do OPOL, partly because I am working so I cannot be around my son long enough for him to learn English solely from me. So, my wife also speaks English to him a lot of the time, and also Japanese to him some of the time. That means we don't make it a rule that the home is an English-only environment.

Aside from that, he will obviously meet a lot of Japanese language in society as a whole, while relatives here in Japan are going to speak to him in Japanese. Eventually, he will probably go to a Japanese-speaking state school, but for now we want him to go to an "international" nursery and kindergarten which will hopefully help him to increase his English-speaking ability and maybe gain some bilingual friends.

Where it could become more difficult is in reading and writing. I am probably going to have to shoulder a lot of the teaching of that.

Finally, trips abroad to English-speaking countries will hopefully have a positive effect just so that he knows, as he's growing up, that English isn't just this weird eccentricity of Dad's.
 
I have some experience of this... it's been one parent one language all the way with no discernible ill-effects. With my family I've always spoken English when on my own with the kids while my wife only speaks French; clearly this only works within the family unit as depending on where we are we'll all speak the prevailing language. But full and fluent bilingualism very early on.
 
When my son went from California to Ecuador while in the Peace Corp, he became fluent in Spanish. While there he met and married an Ecuadorian woman and they eventually moved back here. She gradually became fluent in English.

When their daughters, now ages 7 and 9, were born, the were spoken to equally in English and Spanish. They are both now bilingual. It is amazing how quickly and easily they go back and forth.

The only issue has been with school. Their teachers have all commented that their response time when answering questions is somewhat slowed, explaining that the bilingual students they have taught take a moment to translate in their mind so they can answer in English.

I don't see that as a big problem. Overall I believe it is a positive skill.
 
That's interesting. Does he have a lot of opportunity to speak English other than with you?

I suppose there is also the prestige factor. If English is seen as a respectable, or a fun language, because of the way that it is a medium for more interesting activities then clearly studying it becomes more attractive. I take it that if we are talking about Internet discussions he is pretty much grown up now.

If English is a prestige language it's because it's a language of instruction at many better universities and so seen as important to learn. He communicates almost solely in English with his closest friends.
 
My dad would often refuse to speak Finnish, so I would just hear them speak in 2 languages. I spoke in English to my dad except when all 3 were there, then I and mom spoke Finnish.

I would have lost my written skills if I had not spent a year there in my teens.

My dad had good reason to use English his first 10 years. His accent was horrible. I passed him in English skills in 2 years of America.
 
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The only issue has been with school. Their teachers have all commented that their response time when answering questions is somewhat slowed, explaining that the bilingual students they have taught take a moment to translate in their mind so they can answer in English.....
That may not be the reason unless they were being spoken to in Spanish and had to answer in English.

@Wreybies who obviously is our multiple language expert said he thinks he translates into English in his mind. But I'm sure I don't as long as I've been speaking in Spanish for a few days consistently. I don't find myself needing to translate into English in my head anymore than I need to translate English into Spanish. That step doesn't happen that I can tell.

If you think about it, say you were a native English speaker wanting to speak Spanish. You don't form the English words first in your mind, and then translate them. So why would you need to do it reversing the process? What you want to say comes out in Spanish first. I recognize what the words I'm hearing mean, I don't repeat them in English in my head.
 
The only issue has been with school. Their teachers have all commented that their response time when answering questions is somewhat slowed, explaining that the bilingual students they have taught take a moment to translate in their mind so they can answer in English.

As Skeptic Ginger says, this is surprising.

In an international school where I work from time to time, we have a lot of staff who grew up fluently bilingual in English and Japanese. When they speak to a monolingual English speaker they speak in fluent English, and when speaking to a monolingual Japanese speaker, they speak fluent Japanese. When talking together they code-switch. A group of these bilingual students will chat to each other, alternating freely - and sometimes mid-sentence - between English and Japanese without missing a beat. None of the speakers think it is unusual at all and they don't spend any time trying to translate.

I wonder if the teachers are projecting their own interpretations on to their students which may not be correct.
 
I'm with the dissenting vote, Wasapi. Are these teachers who have any actual language-teaching experience; e.g. not just teachers who've taught bilingual kids before?

It also may depend on the age. Bilingual kids are a little slower to take command of their languages. Marcello was distinctly non-verbose up to about two years old. Up to Kindergarten they may just be still in that lag-time from being bilingual, but it's not from translating. They're thinking in the language they're using (if they're truly bilingual). Marcello converses fluently in both Thai and English and doesn't miss a beat, and it requires considerably more than a beat to translate a question from language A to language B in your head and then formulate an answer in language B and translate back to language A to respond.
 
I didn't vote, because I don't know which is best, but this is very interesting to me. I suspect my kids will grow up with me speaking English to them and mum (and in-laws) speaking Chinese; they'll then be educated in Malay, unless the government here changes policy yet again, so should hopefully end up trilingual. GF speaks all 3 fluently, though she thinks it's more one big language and she'll often use all 3 in one sentence! Much more likely to use English words for technical stuff, which is probably a result of a multinational job.

I suspect it'll be much more fluid than that, as I'm trying to learn Chinese and Malay as well, and it's hard to be totally rigid and disciplined, plus some of GF's family speak Hokkien or Cantonese, which adds more complexity.
 
Voted first option.

Spoke only English in a non-English country to my son. To make it work, as a father not home most of the time, this took significant nighttime and weekend efforts. To complicate things, in his childhood we were in a bilingual area, and sent him to another school to learn French. In the end, the mix was:

Home: Spanish/English
School: French/Catalan (kindergarten), French/Catalan/Spanish (grade school)

The kid didn't speak much until nearly 4 years old. Then he spoke all four languages just fine. Bit nerve-wracking there until he did start blabbing.
 
<snip>

A group of these bilingual students will chat to each other, alternating freely - and sometimes mid-sentence - between English and Japanese without missing a beat. None of the speakers think it is unusual at all and they don't spend any time trying to translate.

<snip>


I bet that can lead to some interestingly constructed sentences. Sounds like fun.

I regret never having learned a second language.

Unless Southern counts. :p
 
My nieces are becoming bilingual with OPOL (my sister's husband being French). As they are only four and one, it's a bit too soon to judge how well it's working, but with the four year old it is notable that she'll drop French words into her English conversation and vice-versa, depending on which word comes to her mind first. She calls me tatie or auntie interchangeably. I speak to her in French if I'm in a conversation with her and her father, English if she's with me and my sister.

On the other hand, my cousins (who are English) moved to France just after their first child was born and have since had another child and moved to Switzerland, so the children speak mostly English at home, French and German in the community and at school. The parents are becoming fluent in German as they were in French, but the children picked up the languages much faster.

I don't think there's a necessarily best way to become bilingual, just the way that works for the family and their particular circumstances.

A friend of mine is Irish (speaking Irish and English), living in France with her Polish husband so their newborn daughter will be exposed to four languages.
 
I'm with the dissenting vote, Wasapi. Are these teachers who have any actual language-teaching experience; e.g. not just teachers who've taught bilingual kids before?

It also may depend on the age. Bilingual kids are a little slower to take command of their languages. Marcello was distinctly non-verbose up to about two years old. Up to Kindergarten they may just be still in that lag-time from being bilingual, but it's not from translating. They're thinking in the language they're using (if they're truly bilingual). Marcello converses fluently in both Thai and English and doesn't miss a beat, and it requires considerably more than a beat to translate a question from language A to language B in your head and then formulate an answer in language B and translate back to language A to respond.

I don't recall how old Marcello is, (sorry, you may have mentioned it again up thread, but my memory is defected!). Now that my girls are 7 and 9, I don't believe they still have any time lapse in answering. It was more so when they very first started school. I also now believe that their teachers were making an assumption and I followed from there. It may well be that there were other factors that were not taken into consideration.
 
From day 1, for both my children, I spoke my language, the mother hers.

From feeding, nappy changing etc.

Breakfast, lunch and dinner etc.. it depended - arguments tended to be in German, reason in English :-)

Both of them (18 and 22) fully bilingual.

Even now, separated as a couple, when we do meet together as a family, the language interchanges.

I still love swearing in German though, as a result of their mum, but still cannot say 'squirrel' in German, much to my children’s delight, and their English version of 'Eichhörnchen'is similarly as crap.

I do not think it is the amount of time spent but how it spent BTW.

I too was the 'bread winner' but used more of my weekends with them. It balanced itself out in the end.
 
I don't recall how old Marcello is, (sorry, you may have mentioned it again up thread, but my memory is defected!). Now that my girls are 7 and 9, I don't believe they still have any time lapse in answering. It was more so when they very first started school. I also now believe that their teachers were making an assumption and I followed from there. It may well be that there were other factors that were not taken into consideration.

Marcello's now 7. Your current findings with your kids agree with mine. As I mentioned, Marcello was slow to speak in any language (he was working on Dad/English, Mom/Thai, Amah and Neighbors/Cantonese, poor kid). Until he was about five he was reticent to answer in any language (to a direct question). I don't know how that compares to your experiences from earlier years.

I wasn't questioning you, actually, but the instructors. I've heard this offered up before, but as I said, it is a poor explanation. When they're talking about "less quick to respond", they're talking about a few seconds, not a few minutes. The kids just couldn't possibly be doing multiple translations in that time. It's just that they have a limited command of all their languages, although their combined language skills in their two or three tongues may well be more advanced than the monolingual kids.
 
Speak one language on alternate days so in one week one language is spoke for three days and the other four
 
Parent are bilingual.

Ya think?


Mebbe not so much.

I can't remember where I read this, but my understanding is that by the third generation most children of immigrant families have little or no command of their grandparent's native language.

Especially if they are not in some sort of ghettoized neighborhood where the language is commonly used on the street.

My personal experience supports this, at least anecdotally. I had friends in school who needed their parents to translate much of what they said to their grandparents and vice-versa.

This was in a coal mining town where immigrants of many flavors were common. Italian, German, Polish, Nordic of several subtypes, etc.. We even had one neighborhood where you could still hear Welsh spoken in some of the local shops as late as the 1960's.

I went to an elementary school where the corner bar across the street had a bocce court beside it. We used to go over after school all the time and watch them play. The kids I went to school with couldn't understand most of what the old-timers there said.

So the parents were generally bilingual, but their children usually were not, at least in any practical definition of the term. The few that were had parents that demanded they learn their "mother tongue". They weren't always all that happy about it, either.
 
I read it as perhaps each parent having a different mother tongue, not both being bilingual.

I've probably read too much Kumarese in other threads and mentally translated.

demi-lingual?
 
I don't understand exactly what the poll options are.
Two home languages (one parent, one language)

A language for each parent?

My ex-husband did not speak English when he entered kindergarten (though he probably knew "kindergarten, because my in-laws were German). He had to spend an extra semester in kindergarten. You wouldn't know English was his second language. He still speaks German.

Now I am with teenagers all the time, some of whom are recent immigrants from Mexico and beyond the "just pick it up" stage. Some are self-conscious about their English and are too shy to practice. Singalongs are a low-stakes way to build skills - rhythm and melody aid memory and making mistakes is no big deal.

ETA: Most of these kids aren't particularly literate in either language. The recent immigrants are slightly ahead in math.
 
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I don't understand exactly what the poll options are.


A language for each parent?

My ex-husband did not speak English when he entered kindergarten (though he probably knew "kindergarten, because my in-laws were German). He had to spend an extra semester in kindergarten. You wouldn't know English was his second language. He still speaks German.

Now I am with teenagers all the time, some of whom are recent immigrants from Mexico and beyond the "just pick it up" stage. Some are self-conscious about their English and are too shy to practice. Singalongs are a low-stakes way to build skills - rhythm and melody aid memory and making mistakes is no big deal.

ETA: Most of these kids aren't particularly literate in either language. The recent immigrants are slightly ahead in math.

In this option, two parents with different first languages speak to their child exclusively in their first languages. The idea being that the child will pick up both.

This is a popular option, and I know a few parents for whom it seems to work.

However, the problem I have with it is that it assumes parental language is sufficient and perhaps that each parent has enough of a chance to interact with their child.
 
In this option, two parents with different first languages speak to their child exclusively in their first languages. The idea being that the child will pick up both.

This is a popular option, and I know a few parents for whom it seems to work.

However, the problem I have with it is that it assumes parental language is sufficient and perhaps that each parent has enough of a chance to interact with their child.

I think my exes' parents knew their English wasn't so great so they did not try to model it to him. That's just a theory.
 
In this option, two parents with different first languages speak to their child exclusively in their first languages. The idea being that the child will pick up both.

This is a popular option, and I know a few parents for whom it seems to work.

However, the problem I have with it is that it assumes parental language is sufficient and perhaps that each parent has enough of a chance to interact with their child.

IIRC, it works unless the kid figures out that the parents communicate with each other in one of the languages; many kids then exclusively speak that language.

In either case, the kid will always have to figure out the language in the society it grows up in, so if mother tongue is important, I would stick to that if possible and let the other come by itself.
 
I'm almost bilingual - my parents lived in Canada for a few years before I was born, and my mother worked at the American Embassy in Helsinki for her career. So my parents, both being fluent in English, used to talk about everything they didn't want the children to hear, in English. What better motivation for a kid to learn a language? :D

So me and my sister heard English around the house, and we watched shows in English on TV - including one channel we had that had English shows without Finnish subtitles.

That background was enough that once we got to third grade in school, and began to learn English, for both my sister and me it came really naturally, and picked up the language without much effort.

I think children's brains are like language sponges - as long as they hear more than one language around the house when they grow up, they can get the benefit of being bilingual.

When I was 12, I spent six weeks in the summer with family friends in Canada, in an environment where nobody spoke Finnish, and that really solidified English in my brain as a language that is totally second nature to me. And my sister is probably more fluent in English than she is in Finnish, given that she's lived in London for more than a decade now.

So I don't think the details matter that much - as long as the child is exposed to both languages early, and enough, it's possible to learn the language so well, that it's like a second native language.
 
I'm almost bilingual - my parents lived in Canada for a few years before I was born, and my mother worked at the American Embassy in Helsinki for her career. So my parents, both being fluent in English, used to talk about everything they didn't want the children to hear, in English. What better motivation for a kid to learn a language? :D

Lol

My mother's parents are Serbian immigrants. Her two older sisters were born there but my mother and her brother were born in Canada. She tells the story that if there was something my grandparents didn't want the younger ones to hear they would speak their original language, Romanian. However by the time my mother was a teen she knew what they were saying, though she never let on.
 
Parent are bilingual.


I'm glad you joined this thread Kunar. Your experiences as a quasi-sentient raccoon are quite relevant here. As I understand it you speak two human languages, English being one of them. You also speak the native language of your raccoon parents, correct? We need clarification because we don't know if you are the first generation of your family to gain the ability to speak a human language.

Do you have a mate and Cubs? If so, what language(s) are you teaching them? Are you and Mrs. Kubar sticking to human language(s) or also teaching a native raccoon tongue?

Inquiring minds want to know.

As an aside, do you know Bat-boy? I was wondering if the speech capable animal mutants and human/animal hybrids are part of a larger community. I do hope what I just did wasn't the equivalent of asking a Canadian from Ottawa if they know someone from Toronto!
 
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