Raising Multilingual Children
120
Raising Multilingual Children
120eBook
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Overview
Have you ever been told that raising your child to speak multiple languages will harm their development? Are teachers or other professionals suspicious of your efforts? Are you sometimes unsure if you are helping your child’s language development, or are you uncertain where to start? It is increasingly recognised among researchers that, far from harming a child’s development, being exposed to multiple languages from birth or early childhood can result in linguistic, creative and social advantages. The authors, all multilinguals themselves, parents of multilingual children, and researchers on language and multilingualism, aim to provide advice and inspiration for multilingual families across the world. The latest research on multilingualism and the authors’ own experiences are used to provide a friendly, accessible guide to raising and nurturing happy multilingual children.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783097593 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Multilingual Matters Ltd. |
| Publication date: | 03/29/2017 |
| Series: | Parents' and Teachers' Guides , #23 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 120 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Julia Festman works at the Pedagogical University Tyrol, Austria. She is the mother of Aya (12) and Noam (8), and they speak German, English and some Hebrew.
Gregory J. Poarch works at the University of Münster, Germany. He is the father of Loïc (15) who speaks Dutch, English and German.
Jean-Marc Dewaele works at Birkbeck, University of London, UK. He is the father of Livia (20) who speaks English, Dutch, French, some Spanish and some martial art Japanese.
Jean-Marc Dewaele is Professor in Applied Linguistics and Multilingualism, Birkbeck, University of London¸ UK. He has been working in the field for close to 30 years and has published extensively on multilingualism and emotion. He is General Editor of Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development.
Read an Excerpt
Raising Multilingual Children
By Julia Festman, Gregory J. Poarch, Jean-Marc Dewaele
Multilingual Matters
Copyright © 2017 Julia Festman, Gregory J. Poarch and Jean-Marc DewaeleAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78309-759-3
CHAPTER 1
Ten Good Reasons for Raising a Child with More than One Language BEFORE Entering School
We very much like Colin Baker's (2007) metaphor of parents as gardeners:
Parents are like gardeners that prepare the soil, plant, water and care. Growth in languages is greatly promoted by skillful gardeners, but is also affected by the nature of the plant, other flowers in the garden, the changing environment, and shifting language climates.
If parents are gardeners, and their children gardens, one could start arguing about the aspects of a garden that require urgent attention. While this book focuses on just one aspect of bringing up children, we assume that gardeners love their garden and are willing to spend time and effort to tend it lovingly. The title of this chapter may sound a little gimmicky, but is a good way to get started on the topic of early multilingualism. Why should parents strive to bring up their children as multilinguals?
(1) The first reason for raising a child with more than one language is a pretty simple one: if you can, why would you not? If the parents speak different languages, it makes perfect sense to contribute to the future linguistic capital of their child. Of course, this should not be taken to extremes: if the parents share 10 languages, it would make little sense for them to try and use all 10 languages in everyday interactions with their child.
(2) Your child will benefit from early multilingualism. For one, because it will not cost them any conscious effort and the results will be really good. Growing up with several languages allows a child to acquire them implicitly without any laborious effort, and they are typically mastered at a very high level. In fact, the child's skillfulness will depend on the amount of input they receive. Regular input is crucial to keep the language system developing. Just imagine how much money parents will save on language tutors. There are solid social, psychological and cognitive advantages to being multilingual, which have been documented in past research (for an overview in German, see Festman & Kersten, 2010). Multilinguals are better and more confident communicators and they are able to overcome obstacles in communication. They can also deal better with ambiguity, they tend to have more cultural empathy and are more open-minded (Dewaele & Li Wei, 2013; Dewaele & Stavans, 2014). Multilinguals have also been found to be better at ignoring irrelevant information, which has been linked to the need to inhibit the languages not in use – something monolinguals do not have to do (Bialystok & Poarch, 2014). Multilinguals have been found to be more creative, possibly because they can view reality through different lenses, and are less bound by the values and constraints of a single language and culture.
Finally, multilingual children have also been found to have fewer essentialist beliefs. In other words, they are more likely to assume that a duck that was brought up by dogs will bark (Byers-Heinlein & Garcia, 2015).
(3) Linguistic capital is also cultural capital. Knowing extra languages could be considered an asset in the child's piggy bank. The child will quickly understand that linguistic rules differ between languages and the cultural values linked to them. If a language has a more elaborate system of honorifics compared to language that the child is currently acquiring, they will realise that the subtleties in how you address people in one language are richer, and possibly considered more important than in another.
(4) Understanding that languages differ, and that they reflect different cultures is a powerful trigger for reflection on how languages and cultures function. Having two or more systems allows a child to spontaneously compare how things are expressed in different languages, and what kind of things can be expressed. Indeed, some things may be expressed more easily in some languages, while other expressions may be considered inappropriate in another language. The ability to compare from an early age transforms the child into a young linguist and anthropologist.
(5) Picking up languages at home does not just increase linguistic and cultural capital, it boosts social capital, and future economic capital as well. The ability to communicate with more people in their native language is a huge advantage, highly valued in the business world, in academia, in diplomacy and in the spy business. Ultimately, it may be the difference between a lower paid job and a much better paid one, and many more opportunities when searching for a (new) job.
(6) More languages are more fun. Only multilingual families can enjoy making puns using their different languages. It is doubly funny when outsiders who don't share the same language combination do not get it. Multilingual jokes become a signal of exclusive group membership.
(7) Learning multiple languages early at home takes the pressure off foreign language learning later. From birth, multilingual children find their multilingualism the most normal thing in the world. In other words, they will not be frightened by the prospect of having to learn an extra language in school. In fact, as born 'linguists' they will almost certainly be better at learning new languages compared to their monolingual peers, and they are likely to outperform monolingual children.
(8) Multilinguals are better communicators and more confident. Multilinguals suffer less from communicative anxiety, probably because they know that if they cannot say something in one language, they can always switch to another, or explain it with gestures if necessary. They are less likely to feel frustrated about a communication obstacle, and will see it more as an interesting challenge.
(9) Multilingual children will have no difficulty in communicating with their grandparents, family members or friends who speak different languages. This means that they will be able to maintain their linguistic and cultural roots, and will be able to expand their social network.
(10) Multilingual children can go and study in multiple schools and universities when the time comes, and people will be impressed by their multilingualism.
CHAPTER 2The Stories of Our Multilingual Children
Livia: A Multilingual Journey
Jean-Marc Dewaele
The Early Years
When my daughter Livia was born in London, in 1996, I joked that she would be a perfect participant in my research project on trilingual first language acquisition. My wife's native tongue is Dutch, mine is French, but we speak mostly Dutch together, and we live in a multicultural English-speaking environment. I video recorded our daughter at regular intervals using different languages with different interlocutors. I stopped when she was five years old, when I realised that I lacked the willingness to transcribe everything and to subject it to a rigorous analysis. This turned out to be an unexpected ethical issue between my role as father and my job as researcher. Being a researcher implies some distance from the participant(s); the job of the researcher is to be an impartial observer. Somehow, the father in me did not want the researcher to do his job, because it seemed like an intrusion of my family's privacy, and I did not want to convert Livia's lovely little first words into morpheme counts and mean length of utterance. So, I kept a diary and made recordings, but over the years I have only published a couple of non-academic papers on Livia's multilingualism (Dewaele, 2000, 2006, 2007), and she has written a blog about her views on her multilingualism (Dewaele, 2013).
My wife and I have followed the rule of one person – one language (OPOL). I still speak only French with Livia, my wife speaks Dutch, and she is immersed in an English environment. Dutch is the dominant language within the family. Working at Birkbeck, the Evening College of the University of London, allowed me to spend my mornings with Livia until she started nursery school. This allowed me to strengthen her French, and to counter-balance the frequent use of Dutch at home. From the age of five months to the age of two and a half, she went to Amy every afternoon, a Pakistani child-minder who spoke English and Urdu with the English-speaking children. We were a bit concerned that the introduction of a fourth first language (Urdu) might be too much for Livia, but this fear turned out to be unfounded. There was no delay in the acquisition of her languages, though Urdu never developed beyond the first stages. At the age of two and half, she started attending a local English private nursery school, called Rainbow Corner in Muswell Hill, a school attracting children from higher-middle-class educated families in the neighbourhood. She learned to draw, sing, dance, and she picked up a 'posh' English accent, which she never abandoned. She even received two hours a week of formal instruction in French. After coming home, she would use French, Dutch and English with her dolls and repeat the rhymes, songs, and phrases heard at the nursery. On one such occasion she was singing, 'Frère Jacques', a song she had learnt with me at home, sometime before, with a pronounced English accent. A bit worried, I joined in the singing, accentuating the French accent. She looked at me angrily and said, 'Non papa, je chante en anglais!' ('no daddy, I'm singing in English'), (age four). It turned out that she had sung it the previous day at school during 'French class', and had interpreted the familiar French song, in the English version.
Before continuing, it is important to point out the language milestone development of monolingual children. Specialists agree that despite the predictable sequence in the development of lexical and syntactic knowledge, there is some variation in age at which children reach various milestones.
From six to eight months, children start babbling. From the age of nine months to age of one and a half, they typically start producing one-morpheme or one-word units (a meaningful morphological unit of a language that cannot be further divided (e.g. in + come + -ing, forming 'incoming', https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/morpheme)), after which they start constructing two words in mini-sentences until they reach the age of two. For the next six months, they combine multiple words and morphemes. This stage is called 'telegraphic', because their sentence structures include lexical morphemes rather than functional or grammatical morphemes (words that have meaning by themselves — boy, food, door — are called lexical morphemes. Those words that function to specify the relationship between one lexical morpheme and another — words like at, in, on, -ed, -s — are called grammatical morphemes (www.mathcs.duq.edu/~packer/Courses/Psy598/LingMorphology.pd)). The latter typically emerge by the time they are two and half years old.
The development of children with multiple first languages is typically very similar.
Livia started producing her first words at the age of one and two months (1;2). By then, she had had a good passive knowledge of approximately 150 words in French, Dutch, Urdu and English (i.e. she reacted appropriately when asked to fetch or do something). Her first words in English (1;2) were, not surprisingly, produced at the child-minder's house. She pointed to a banana and said, 'bana', followed by 'give!'; later (1;3) she told another child to 'sit down'. She also produced Urdu words like, 'bareesh' ('rain'), 'kee pan', ('what is there'), 'teek' ('OK'), 'bahir jana' ('go outside') (1;3). She never got past the one-word-utterance stage in Urdu, but had a good passive knowledge. This led to some funny misunderstandings on my part, when I picked her up, and on our way home she would point at a cat and say 'Billy'. I was impressed with her knowledge of local cats, until the next cat also turned out to be named 'Billy'. On a different day, she pointed to a flower and said, 'poo'. I got a bit worried, explaining that the words were 'flower', 'fleur', 'bloem'. That way, I learnt another Urdu word.
Her first French words were (1;3), 'poupou' (target: bonbon, 'sweet'), 'froid' ('cold'), 'chaud' ('hot'), 'pabi' (target: 'poubelle', 'bin'). She produced only the first syllable of Dutch words in that period, 'scho' (target: 'schort', 'apron'), 'wa' (target: 'water', 'water'), 'mo' (target: 'mond', 'mouth') (1;3). Other Dutch words emerged in a quick succession: 'tutje' ('dummy'), 'ja' ('yes'), 'bravo', 'opa' ('granddad'), 'oma' ('grandma') (1;8). The first multi-word utterances in French and Dutch appeared at the age of two years and two months, (2;2), for example, in French, 'Four machine est finie' ('oven machine is finished'), 'Papa, Ia pa(r)ti' ('Daddy, Livia is gone'), 'maman manger' ('Mummy eat'), 'Ia content, papa contente?' ('Livia happy, daddy happy?'). The utterances became gradually more complex as she approached her third birthday, 'Je m'appelle Livia avec une barbe et dans mon jardin j'ai des petits abricots et haricots' ('my name is Livia with a beard and in my garden, I have small apricots and beans'), (2;11), and in Dutch: 'p(l)eisters van Ia, voor mij aw aw' ('plaster from Livia, for me ouch ouch'), 'papa TV aan het kijken?' ('daddy looking television?'), 'Nu heb ik een groot bed en ik kan goed slapen en mama en papa kunnen nu rustig slapen' ('now I have a big bed and I can sleep well and mommy and daddy can sleep in peace'), (2;11).
English was the language used with her dolls and with her friends, 'Paddington sleep' (2;4), 'We're gonna sleep now' (2;7), 'I prepared the lunch and now you don't want to eat it?' (3;0), 'Why did you put down your jacket?' (3;0), 'Sorry nursery, those little babies are actually scared of the nursery, could you please leave them alone?' (3;11).
Mixed utterances usually involved two languages, sometimes French and Dutch: 'Papa, papa, Ia bijna tombé' ('Daddy, daddy, Livia almost fallen') (2;2), 'fermer deur sinon kou' ('close door otherwise cold'), (2;2), sometimes English-Dutch, 'Ikjumperuit' ('I jump out of it') (2;5), sometimes English-French, 'La maîtresse dit', 'Can I have something?', 'et alors je dis: honey!' ('The teacher says: Can I have something? and then I say: honey!') (3;3) and rarely English-French-Dutch, 'Mimi, what do you préfères, een boterham?' ('Mimi, what do you prefer, a slice of bread?') (2;10).
She soon realised that objects and body parts are referred to in different words, in different languages, as illustrated in the following conversation about my feet, as we sat barefoot on the carpet watching television. She used the English word first, then the French word, and finally the Dutch word, with a diminutive (2;5), (L = Livia, D = Daddy).
L: 'Grands feet papa!' ('Big feet daddy')
D: 'Grands pieds?' ('Big feet?')
L: 'Oui, grands pieds.' ('Yes big feet')
L: (pointing to her feet) 'Voetje, nongrands feet.' ('Small foot, not big feet')
At one point, she used homonymy to translate formulaic expressions with hilarious results, the English 'thank you very much' became 'dank u voor de match' ('thank you for the match'), (2;7) in Dutch. When she heard me ordering a 'cappuccino', she enquired on our next visit, whether I wanted another 'cup of chino'?
Language awareness came very early. She understood very soon that most of her friends, our neighbours and her child-minder, did not understand Dutch and French, but spoke English and other languages. English had become the default language when meeting an unknown child in London. The situation at home was different because of our ability to speak and understand all three languages. When her friend Laura, (age four), came over to play for the first time, when she was almost one and a half years old (1;5), she used her three languages. She must have noticed that her words in Dutch and French did not elicit any reaction, so she shifted to English, and by the third visit, she only used English words. She clearly considered the language spoken by of a person or a 'doll' as equally important as their name or hair colour. While taking a bath with the family of yellow plastic ducks, she picked the mother duck and said, 'Maman petit canard spreken Nederlands' ('Mother duck speak Dutch') (1;9). I ran off to write it down, amazed by the fact that she reproduced our family's language patterns to the family of ducks, and that she showed explicit awareness of the languages around her.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Raising Multilingual Children by Julia Festman, Gregory J. Poarch, Jean-Marc Dewaele. Copyright © 2017 Julia Festman, Gregory J. Poarch and Jean-Marc Dewaele. Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
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Table of Contents
Preface
Chapter 1. Ten Good Reasons for Raising a Child with More Than One Language BEFORE Entering School
Chapter 2. The Stories of Our Multilingual Children
Chapter 3. Some Background Information on Learning, Methods and Language Policies, and Suggestions to Ensure Successful Early Multilingual Acquisition
Chapter 4. Developing a Good Language Policy for the Multilingual Family
Chapter 5. How to Foster a Multilingual Home and How to Deal With Some Concerns about Multilingualism
Conclusion