OPOL on the Beach

I recently landed on a beach, together with A. of course, like most Italians this time of the year and I want to share some reflections on the experience of using the One Parent One Language technique (OPOL), outside of one’s habitat .

Our holidays at the seaside are not chic, we go back to the origins (ie the place where my father is from) which is one of the most beautiful and less touristic places in Italy  (I won’t say where it is because I have no interest in turning my beaches in a Rimini lookalike…) Suffice it here to know that our neighbours on the beach are mostly locals, some people who are from here but now live elsewhere, few regulars and three German families.

Right away I found it rather weird to speak English to my son on the beach, the fact in itself didn’t surprise me, but realizing I was feeling uncomfortable did.  By now, I thought, I should be fully accustomed to speaking English even if everyone around us speaks Italian, translating when necessary, but I realized that my habit was strongly linked to the context. I came to realize that a mother’s life is not really full of excitement, I  see more or less always the same people, go to the same playground, etc. etc. Many people know me and I know them even if we don’t talk to each other, I always know what to expect, like how many and what kind of people I will find in a place, whether the environment will be hostile or favorable, etc.

Change the context, and suddenly you’re not prepared any more. I don’t know whether people will be staring at me or not, what they will think, whether they’ll think I’m mad or lucky.  So at first I studied the environment to understand how myself and my bilingual child shall move in that context and how we would be welcomed. The fact that I know this place since I was born did not help me much, because now I interact with different people and in a different way. When I was alone or with a small child I did different things, I even went to a different beach … All this of course I understood only later, after a bit of thinking, at the time I just acknowledged an unexpected feeling of discomfort.

And then a friend who was also on holiday in the area came to see us  with her two children. V. and her children live in Berlin (ah, Berlin!) so the children speak Italian and German but no English. And then I made a mistake. Knowing that V. speaks a very good English and that her children are bilingual, I lost the automatic reflex of translating everything I said in Italian, obviously a silly thing to do given that her children don’t speak English. Partly because of this and partly because of her experience in Berlin, V. noted that according to her talking to children in public using a minority language might isolate them from other children.

Hmm, I started to question my OPOL strategy. V. has a point, we all know how difficult it is to speak a minority language in public, only I hadn’t thought much that this might be difficult for my child too… However in my circumstances I do not have much choice, either I apply OPOL or goodbye bilingualism, and I know that bilingualism is important for my child (because of very personal reasons).

So I didn’t give up, but I became more careful. I took great care in translating everything and including others in our conversations. It’s also true by the way that A. attracts lot’s of attention because of its features and is very sociable, so the risk of isolation is truly minimal (at least for now, I keep my fingers crossed for the future).

So what happened in the end? I started to notice that most of the children with whom A. plays on the beach and the adults we interact with began to say Bye Bye. It was Bye Bye all over the place ! Some people even venture to say, One, Two, Three! With great amusement of both children and parents!

In short, also on the beach we created our habitat. People know that A. is bilingual and are not bothered. Maybe someone will find the idea bizarre, but I don’t care, on the contrary I like to see that many adults and children play with the idea of using some words in English and A. is not isolated in any way.

Finally, seeing how these children spontaneously began to use English words gave me an idea…so since this Monday on our beach there are English playgroups for children: English On The Beach. But this is another story and I will tell you more some other time, for now let me just tell you that we are all having great fun!

[starrating template_id=4]

Picture by Wickedchimp

Related posts: