Bilingual For Fun™ » Bilingualism and Society

All non native parents are not equal

Bilingual For Fun — Sun, 09 May 2010 14:17:29 +0000

I’m keeping the promise I made to Blogging on Bilingualism (or rather the blogger behind it) and I want to come back on the topic of non native parents raising bilingual children, or rather parents raising children bilingual in a language that is not their mother tongue.

All non native parents are not equal. Whether the minority language is the mothertongue of some family members, at least one, does make a big difference, in many ways.

Just to clarify, some parents, like myself, speak to their children in a language they master well but where not raised in, and no native speakers live with the family. Other parents, like Eve from Blogging on Bilingualism, speak to their children their partner’s mothertongue in order to raise them bilingual, often using the MLAH method.

Yes we are both using with our children a language that is not our native one, but there are strong differences among us.

1) Social acceptance. All parents of bilingual children happening to speak a minority language in public are occasionally, or often, frowned upon by opinionated and often monolingual neighbors, friends, colleagues, name it. If they will explain that that language is the language of part of the family they might get some understanding, or at least tolerance, but if this is not the case they are much more likely to encounter open criticism. In fact I often use this factor to buy some comprehension, my child’s

2) Inner motivation. Motivation is key in most situations, not last when raising a bilingual child, particularly when the child starts to answer you back in the majority language. If the minority language is the language of part of the child’s family you know very well why you’re doing this, you are doing something really important for the development of your child and the building of his identity. But if this is just a foreign language why should you go through all this pain? You learnt foreign languages the usual way and you are doing ok, sure enough your child will manage too, may be later in life, won’t he?

3) Language input. Languages are alive. They need to be nurtured, stimulated, cared for. Some people who live abroad with time have problems in speaking even their mothertongue, imagine what happens with foreign languages then… Sure there are many ways to keep a language fresh, things like books, TV, internet, family, friends, holidays even work can help tremendously. Still, a native speaker partner comes really handy…

However, I want to end this post with a positive note. So let me tell how I address these 3 issues.

1) Social acceptance. I don’t care, really. If people are genuinely interested and nice I might as well explain to them how English plays a key role in my life, has been my dominant language for about 10 years and is strongly associated to a whole part of me and of my life I just couldn’t express and transmit to my child in Italian. I might also add that English is my child’s father language. However, if the person is judgmental and opinionated I shrug and move on, people are entitled to their opinions and I can live without their approval.

2) Inner motivation. My motivation is extremely strong, else I just couldn’t carry on with this. I know very well I don’t want my child to grow into the typical spoiled italian boy, who knows and cares nothing about the rest of the world. In full honesty I shall also add that it helps, in terms of motivation, the fact that English is the language my child needs to communicate with his father, even if he’s not part of our daily lives.

3) Language input. I believe, and this is my personal and unproved opinion, that there are 2 kinds of people. Those who learn languages fast and forget them just as easily and those that learn slowly (sometimes painfully) but then retain everything they have learned with no effort. I belong to the second group. That said, I also read plenty of stuff in English every day (blogs, news, books, newspapers) and have many opportunities to speak it with people.

Thoughts anybody?

Image by A Journey Round my Skull

Blogging Carnival on Bilingualism, April

Bilingual For Fun — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 08:42:29 +0000

Dear all,

here we are for another Carnival. The family of bloggers involved is growing really nicely and this is really contributing to creating a debate on bilingualism and sharing ideas, doubts, tips and tricks. Most of all I think we can all feel less lonely on our journey, and that is of tremendous help when you need to find in yourself the motivation to stick to your plans and speak that language that nobody else around you is speaking, often enough not even your own children!

So let’s go for it once again, and feel free to join us. You can submit your own posts to the Carnival or you can host the Carnival yourself, you’ll find all the info here. Also, to be always up to date with the Carnival, deadlines for submitting, new issues, etc please subscribe to the newsletter. You will receive only one or two emails per month, just for coordinating the carnival.

Here we go!

Sarah, from Bringing up Baby Bilingual, shares a truly inspiring story. Clarisse and her family are raising 28 months old Julia quadrilingual. What is really inspiring, and makes me feel slightly envious, is not the number of languages, but where they live, which languages they chose and how they are exposing the child to the languages. And the picture in the background too! This is just like a dream….

Sandra from bxlsprout is raising her child trilingual, which I understand is the bare minimum necessary to guarantee survival in Bruxelles, where they live (I’m kidding, but just a bit). Her point of view is very interesting and quite unusual. Contrary to most parents of bilingual children, who were raised monolingual, Sandra was raised as a bilingual child herself, so she’s looking at her child’s experience through the lens of her own experience.

Mamapoekie from Authentic parenting gives us a different view of Belgium and Brussels, and indeed the experience of living there is very different depending on whether you are a local or an expat. Why in such a multilingual country is bilingualism and cultural differences among the Flemish and the French “side” still considered an issue? Or is it really? Mamapokie reminds us that languages are often used and abused.

Melanie from Multilingualmania hosts Sandrine, who’s raising her children trilingual in a rather hostile environment. If you think raising a bilingual child is hard for you in your settings, try to imagine what it would be like to raise an autistic child trilingual. No I don’t think we can even begin to imagine, but we can read Sandrine’s story, admire her focus and determination and share similar stories on our blogs, because bilingualism is a gift for all children, also those with disabilities, but their parents all too often feel isolated and criticized for their efforts.

Smashedpea from intrepidlybilingual shares one of those moments when you finally feel you’ve done something right. All your efforts, and doubts and wondering and trying and trying some more were worth it. As I’ve been reading her blog since she started on her journey I’m really happy for her, but also, I think we can learn a lot by sharing the journey with each other. Once you’ve achieved something everything looks obvious and easy, but to keep going when you don’t know where you are going, this is the tough part, let’s just be aware that applies to virtually everybody and let’s share the burden.

Janis from mumversuskids at times finds raising a bilingual child rather demanding, specifically when they start asking really specific questions, which by the way, most parents wouldn’t be able to answer anyway, no matter in which language!

Jan and Souad from babelkid made me laugh. Their child manages to speak Arabic with hardly a whole arabic word in the sentence, yet in her view she is speaking arabic! This is also an opportunity for parents to spend some thought on code mixing and code switching, it’s difficult to expect children not to mix if parents do it.

Maria from Fabmums has a brilliant idea! “Learn though play” and because the kind of game your bilingual child might not be ready available just make it yourself. There you go, really smart!

Eve from Blogging on Bilingualism (last minute entry, my fault) is packed with info and practical advice about traveling with children. It is indeed possible, and it can even be fun, really! all you have to do is make sure you have everything you need. This is a post I’ll go back to over and over in the future!

And finally there’s me, Letizia, here on Bilingual for Fun. I want to question your definition of a bilingual family. More and more families are raising bilingual children against all odds and with plenty of initiative and creativity and a pinch of risk taking. Who are these families? How do they do it? What do experts think of them?

I’m sure you’ll enjoy reading all these posts and getting to know the families behind them. Before I close I have a suggestion to make, I find Twitter a really powerful tool. It’s much more flexible than Facebook and it allows you to stay on top of what’s going on and to connect in a very effective way. I swear i receive no money whatsoever for saying this, it’s just that I’m looking for your blogs on Twitter so I can follow you there but most of you aren’t on Twitter please, give it a chance, try it. At first it’s rather awkward, but after few days you’ll get used and you’ll soon realize how effective it is. If you have questions feel free to ask, at bilinguepergioco AT yahoo DOT com. Or find me a bilingualforfun or bilinguexgioco.

Finally don’t forget to subscribe the newsletter, so you won’t miss any carnival, do it now, here. And please let us know if you’s like to host, here you’ll find schedule and info.

Next Carnival will be hosted at Mummy do that, those registered to the newsletter will receive a reminder, if not just email sbach AT cartside DOT co DOT uk.

Read, comment, share, think, laugh and try something new. In short have fun!

Image from A Journey Round my Skull

OPOL on the Beach

Bilingual For Fun — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 15:09:21 +0000

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!

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Picture by Wickedchimp

Bilingual children, grandparents and extended family

L. — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:34:11 +0000

Quite often in OPOL families parents give up using the minority language in presence of the extended family, a sign of respect towards those who don’t understand the language. It is certainly a very good thing to involve the whole family, but it doesn’t necessarily need to happen at the minority language’s expenses. And by the way, what makes you think that grandparents refuse the second language altogether?

Involving the whole family in your bilingual project is often easier than you might think, providing you communicate it clearly and strategically:

Explain what you are doing, your objectives and motivation, and how this will impact your children
Address your relatives’ doubts and fears
Actively ask for help and support
Offer your support to the whole family, make sure this experience is positive for them too
Acknowledge and reward their efforts

Explain what you are doing, your objectives and motivation, and how this will impact your children

The whole family cares for children and understands that the world they’ll live in is different from the world they grew up in. Also, normally grandparents understand that for children of mixed origins it’s important to communicate with both families. So don’t assume that they won’t understand what you are trying to do, but talk to them. Explain in detail why you think bilingualism in important for your children, both in terms of personal development and of future opportunities. Tell them which methodology you chose and why it is important to be consistent with it.

Address your relatives’ doubts and fears

Anybody who doesn’t have a direct experience of bilingualism is confused about it, and this is very normal. Certainly it is puzzling to see a one year old child switching among languages and it is fair to wonder whether this will confuse him, or her. Just to put things in perspective, when research started to focus on bilingualism it did so with the assumption that bilingualism was bad for children and determined to prove it. It took decades of systematic research to prove it was otherwise and some of these prejudices are actually hard to kill. So don’t get mad at grandma if she’s worried for the child, but spend some time explaining to her how things are and answering her doubts.

Also, quite often grandparents or other relatives might just fear that they will be cut out from the child’s life, unable to understand him or her. Don’t underestimate these fears, rather address them. Explain to them that the child will learn the majority language without any problem and will always be able to communicate with them, tell them that the child might mix the languages in the beginning, but will sort them out soon enough, that learning a second language does not impair first language acquisition. Listen to them and reassure them.

Actively ask for help and support

People like to get involved and engaged, to feel responsible and part of a project. So don’t just ask them to watch you, ask them to help, make them aware of the role they can play and the impact of their actions. Make the children’s successes their successes too.

Grandparents and relatives can assist you in many ways: they can encourage the child, they can play minorità language DVD or CD when you are not around, they can answer the the child’s simple requests even when they are expressed in the second language, they can just accept a bilingual conversation and be positive about it, etc.

Offer your support to the whole family, make sure this experience is positive for them too

As mentioned above, all too often resistance stems from fear, fear of not being able to cope or of being let out. It’s up to you to give everybody the support needed, so that this experience will be pleasant for all.
Translate what you say to the child into the majority language, answer their questions, help them understand the few simple words a child might say in the second language (water, potty, sleep) so that they can satisfy his or her needs. In short, help them learn with the child.

Acknowledge and reward their efforts

Understanding and speaking two languages is very easy for you, but terribly difficult for your relatives, don’t ever forget this. Acknowledge and praise their efforts, make them feel good about it. If grandma gives a glass of water to a child who’s asking for some Eau praise her, celebrate both the child’s and grandma’s success.

Finally, few words on my personal experience. My parents, A.’s grandparents, don’t speak any foreign language, they have some basic knowledge of English – grandmother – and French – grandfather. However they do understand why learning a second language is so important for A. and supported my efforts from day one.

Initially I would translate for them everything I said to A., or if I didn’t they asked me to. Then they started to ask less and less, and I began to rely more on gestures to help them understand what I was saying. Then grandmother began to translate for grandfather when he didn’t understand, and I encouraged her to do so, as this is a great way of learning and she was happy when she got it right (learning is very rewarding at any age! Later in life people are more likely to lack opportunities than enthusiasm for learning). A. is now 21 month old, few days ago I told my mother “Well, you have been learning quite some English too. Haven’t you?” “We certainly did!” was the proud reply, “We are really learning a lot!” Here you go, two pigeons…

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Picture by Futurestreet