Another interesting article on Bilingualism: Bilingualism Makes Children Smarter.
The article reports the results of a research conducted in Belgium by Prof. Van de Craen. Funny enough last week I attended a very interesting conference on bilingualism (more on this later, a lot more actually, hopefully not a lot later) and there I attended a speech delivered by Prof. Van de Craen himself.
It has been a very interesting speech, informative and also funny. There is one thing on which I don’t agree with the Professor. Answering a question I asked he said parents shouldn’t really make things more complicate than they actually are; in raising their children bilingual they should just behave normal and the children will grow up bilingual. I don’t know what normal means when it comes to bilingualism. I was raised monolingual, and that’s what’s normal to me. I see that every family has a different approach (or sometimes strategy) to bilingualism, so it’s difficult to say what is normal. Moreover I see that families have questions and doubts, and telling them to behave “normal” is unlikely to answer these concerns.
Research seems to be a bit disconnected from real life and I think this is an important point. It looks like by exploring the depth and wonders of the human brain they lost track of what it is all about, i.e. helping families to raise bilingual children, which only can be achieved by listening to their questions and giving them answers they can actually make use of in their daily lives.
That said I found Prof. Van de Craen speech very interesting and his research sends really encouraging messages to all parents of bilingual children. In particular he said something I liked and which I want to cite: “A trained brain is different from an untrained brain, just like a trained muscle is different from an untrained muscle”. I hope you’ll enjoy the article.
Yet another picture from A Journey Round My Skull, Ghost in The Rain
Related posts:
Bilingual children in non bilingual families
2 Comments
A couple of things: one is, I’d be really interested in hearing more about the conference you attended. Where/when was it? Was it open to the public or just academics? Hope you are able to post more on that soon.
Second, I totally agree with your comments that research is a bit disconnected from the reality of parenting in a bilingual household. Yes, what indeed does “normal” mean? I’d say if we acted “normal” they would not be bilingual, but maybe passive bilinguals? Anyway…I’d be interested in to know if the presenter has kids he raised bilingually or has just researched it?
Interesting article, by the way – thanks for posting it.
I’ll post more soon. No worries! But I won’t be able to tell you whether the professor has bilingual children or not.
However , just to play the devil’s avvocate, I assume that the argument goes that if behaving “normal” meant raising children to be passive bilingual that would be OK, may be better than overcomplicating things to force them to be active bilingual. I could see why someone would reason this way, but I still think there’s more to raising bilingual children than behaving “normal” and that making conscious decisions about bilingualism does not imply forcing things on children and damaging the parent-child relationship, although it can’t be denied that this may happen and I strongly agree that a positive parent-child relationship is an absolute priority, certainly more important than bilingualism.
L.
L.
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