How To Bring Up A Bilingual Child
Monday, 10th November 2008
A look at the different approaches you can employ to introduce languages into the home from young
Babies and young children seem to absorb new languages far easier than adults. So if you want your children to be bilingual or multilingual, it’s a good idea to start as early as possible. The way to do this depends on your family situation and what seems to work best for you.
One popular and successful approach is the “one parent – one language” method, which usually involves each parent speaking only their native language to their children. Although this is not possible if the parents both speak the same language.
Another approach is using a different language in the home to the language(s) spoken elsewhere. The home language might be a minority language indigenous to a country or region where another language is dominant, for example Welsh in Wales or Irish in Ireland, or an ancestral or heritage language from the parents’ country of origin. In this approach, the children acquire the home language mainly at home, and also from relatives and others in the community who speak it. And they usually acquire the majority language from school, peers and so on.
Some parents raise their children to speak languages they themselves don’t speak natively. Many worry that the children will learn imperfect versions of those languages, however this won’t necessarily be the case if the children have access to resources such as books, CDs and DVDs in those languages, and if they have regular contact with native speakers.
The exact method you use will depend on your own circumstances. What is important is that you decide as soon as possible how you will manage the family languages and do your best to stick to your decisions. If relatives or friends try to persuade you that bringing up a child mutilingually is a bad thing to do, you can assure them that multilingual children often do better at school than monolingual children in all subjects, not just in languages.
It is also possible for older children up to about 8 or 9 years old to become fully bilingual, if they receive intensive exposure to a new language. Beyond that age children can absorb new languages, if they feel sufficiently motivated and it’s made fun for them with a variety of activities – reading, singing, playing, watching films, etc. If their parents learn the language with the children and are able to show good reasons for learning it, such as communicating with relatives or other people in your local community, the children are more likely to do so.
When children are acquiring two or more languages, there might be some initial delay, however they soon catch up and even over take their monolingual peers. At first they will probably not be aware that they are speaking different languages to different people, but any confusion this may cause will most likely be short-lived.
In most parts of the world, being bilingual or multilingual is the norm, not the exception, and children who grow up in multilingual environments normally acquire the languages they hear around them.
Tags: learning, children, bilingual, cactus kids
Posted by Simon Ager under Attitudes to Language Learning, Teaching Languages,
Permalink
