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

Related posts:

1. Second Blogging Carnival on Bilingualism
2. 5 ways to react when Bilingual Children mix languages
3. 10 bloggers and a Carnival, on Bilingualism

Your 3 year old says a whole new sentence in …. (fill in with your minority language), what do you do? Jump with joy? Open a bottle of champagne? Head for the toy shop to buy him a reward gift?

I bet most parents, like me, would at least be very happy and proud and praise the child, just so s/he knows s/he did a good thing. But actually… is this the best way to go about it?

I started a very light-hearted post, just few thoughts about the importance of praising children for their results, and before I knew I realised I had hit one of the single most critical yet underestimated factors about bilingual education and upbringing: the impact of praise on children’s motivation. There is much more to praise than we might think, and actually praise might not be the smartest way to motivate a child, or an adult for what matters. I think these are very important points, they certainly are for me. I know the reflections I’m doing writing these posts will have a dramatic impact on my parenting style and on A.’s bilingual education. And I think you should all take some time to think about it, and not because I say so, but because some of the brightest minds spent really a lot of time (and money) researching and exploring the dynamics of reward and punishment, so most likely they had some valid points to make.

Who are these minds anyway? People like Thomas Gordon and Maria Montessori to start with.

Thomas Gordon was an American psychologist who developed a model for relationship management based on effective and non confrontational communication. Initially he elaborated a model for optimizing family dynamics and communication, which developed into the Parent Effectiveness Training courses and later in the best seller Parent Effectiveness Training book.  Later the same concepts and techniques have been exported to all areas of communications and relationship management, particularly in professional environments, think topics like team management and leadership and rest assured that they are built on his work. His work had such a major impact that he has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three times.

There two things I find slightly disturbing about the PET thing: that it is based on the assumption that parenting can and should be taught and that today it is really a big business. That said, these two factors don’t alter the fact that Gordon had some brilliant and powerful ideas, and that familiarizing yourself with his techniques is more likely to make you a better communicator, hence a happier person, parent, friend, professional, name it.

Maria Montessori made a quite but long lasting revolution. She put the child, and the child’s skills and needs, at the center of her pedagogic approach and laid the foundations for a scientific pedagogy, i.e. a pedagogy based on scientific methods and rigour, not on opinions. She brought attention to the importance of freedom (certainly an innovative concept at the beginning of XX century). The child’s freedom according to het is important not only to stimulate and nurture his/her creativity, but also, in less obvious ways, to help him/her gain self regulation and eventually discipline.

So the first interesting thing is that both Gordon and Montessori address the issue of praise (reward) and punishment as one. But one’d normally think they are very different things, aren’t they? Let’s see…

What is Praise?

When a child does a good thing we make sure he knows, we reward him with our praise, we are sincerely happy about his success and share our happiness with him and with others. This way, we think, he’ll feel good about what he has done and will be inclined to do more of the same.

So what is punishment instead? Let’s change few words…

When a child does a bad thing we make sure he knows, we punish him with our disapproval; we are sincerely disappointed about his failure and share our disappointment with him and with others. This way, we think, he’ll feel bad about what he has done and will not be inclined to do more of the same.

Well, there isn’t so much difference between praise and punishment then! Praise and punishment are two sides of the same coin and they share very similar mechanisms. I had never thought about it and I personally find the idea quite shocking, or at least thought provoking. Because I was under the impression that punishment is bad and praise is good. But if they are so similar may be their effects are similar too and I have to reconsider my assumptions (and trust me, I am).

I want to explore this topic in depth, and I will do it on the next few posts so if you want to receive them just click here.

BILINGUALISM STEP BY STEP

This is thinking time more than action time, and I would encourage you to spend some time thinking about these issues to, because you can’t overestimate the importance of praise and reward in children’s education, and in bilingual education specifically.

So today’s homework is to spend some time to think about what impact praise has on YOU, not on your children.

Have you ever been praised and:

• Felt embarrassed or annoyed?
• Felt they were making fun of you?
• Didn’t believe what you were hearing?
• Had a poor opinion of the person who was praising you?
• Felt pressure to deliver or perform above your abilities and capabilities?
• Felt manipulated?
• Thought there was no need to put more effort given that what you had done was already good enough?

If you answered yes to at least one of these questions you start to see that praise can have drawbacks too. We’ll see later all the pro and contras and how subtle changes can make our praise more effective, in all senses. To receive the updates click here.

Picture by annthrop

Related posts:

1. Pro and Contra of Praise
2. How to praise to boost motivation
3. The Importance of a Social Context (think Playgroup) for Bilingual Children

In order to better answer your questions Bilingual for Fun is hosting some experts on Bilingualism. Today Professor Sorace answers the question Giovanni sent us, Giovanni has a trilingual child and some real concerns about his linguistic development.

Antonella Sorace is professor of Developmental Linguistics at the University of Edimburgh, and together with her team created Bilingualism Matters, whose objective is to bridge the gap between research and the community.

Giovanni asks:

“I’ve been living in London for 10 years where I met my partner, a Swedish girl with whim we have a 3.5 year old child. Sandro goes to kindergarten here in London. His friends speak a good English, but Sandro is not fluent yet.

At home his mother and the baby sitter speak Swedish to him, and I speak Italian, when I can. Between me and my partner the common language in English, so when we are all together we speak English, although sometimes we translate in our languages. This is probably a bit confusing for Sandro.

Sandro doesn’t speak either Italian nor Swedish, but sometimes mixes words from either language into English sentences, he seems to understand well both languages, if I ask him something in Italian he would answer in English, but appropriately. So far we just tried to give him exposure to all languages without sacrificing the communication between us, but now we are noticing delays in his speech development and we are getting worried. We would welcome any advice.

Thanks.”

Professor Sorace, are Sandro’s parents’ concerns justified?

Their situation is not unusual. I know many trilingual children who understand three languages but say little in either language. Delays are normal, particularly for trilingual children. The fact that Sandro’s understanding is good should reassure his parents.

Also it is quite normal for a child to mix languages, borrowing words from other languages. Growing up he’ll normally develop both grammatical and social rules for his code mixing, i.e. he’ll mix more if the parents mix languages too. Sandro will certainly learn English, give that he lives in London, so the parents are right in speaking their own languages, which need more input.

It’s also important to accept that the development of the three languages might differ, because it’s very rare that the child receives the same amount and quality of input in all languages. However he’ll still develop and understanding of the languages, and later on if circumstances change his command of the language might become fluent.

In any case parents can be reassured: trilingualism doesn’t cause confusion in the child.

But when should parents start worrying if the observe a delay?

“I don’t personally deal with speech impairments, but I am in touch with some speech therapists who tell me that before seriously considering the risk of speech problems one should wait until the child is 3 year old and should consider also the mastering of other communication channels, like visual communication. Of course bilingual children can have speech problems too, but the incidence is just the same as among monolingual children, hence speech problems are not to be attributed to bilingualism”

Whom should parents ask for a specialist’s opinion?

“ We are trying to inform speech therapists to help them distinguish normal reactions from pathologic ones, however all too often doctors and teachers recommend to abandon Bilingualism, without really knowing what they are talking about. So it is really important to identify speech therapists that have experience with Bilingualism.”

Did you like this post? You can receive free email updates from Bilingual For Fun, you’ll find it very helpful!

Related posts:

1. Lisa's recipe for trilingualism
2. The expert’s advice: English as a third language
3. Linda and her international, and multilingual, family

It is commonly accepted that monolingual children learn how to talk from many people: mum of course (that’s where MOTHERtongue comes from to start with…), but also teachers and children they see at school, TV (or rather videos), etc. Funny enough though, what is widely accepted for monolingual children is not really taken into consideration for bilingual children. But bilingual children learn to talk exactly in the same way, i.e. from multiple people and interactions, only they have a lot less opportunities to interact… If this is not factored in, it is very likely that the children will understand the minority language, but won’t speak it, as so many bilingual parents report. When this happens the children are missing out on a great opportunity (relatively speaking though, because let’s never underestimate passive bilingualism, which is already a big achievement!) and all too often the parents feels betrayed and frustrated, if not guilty of “not getting it right”. But the relevance of a social context for the development of a language can’t be overestimated, it is an essential component to motivate children and parents just have to come to terms with he limits of their own role, fundamental in shaping a child, but not sufficient.

Barbara Zurer in Raising a Bilingual Child (to be reviewed on this blog) rightly points out that parents must provide children with “opportunity” and “motivation” for the minority language. However a common mistake is to assume that if the parents is motivated, so will be the child. Unfortunately it is not so… The parents’ motivation is rooted into his/her experiences and projections. Much in the same way, a child’s motivation is rooted into his/her experiences, the language must have a purpose and a meaning according to his/her view of the world. Only in this way will motivation come from within, as opposed to doing something “to make mummy happy” (or daddy of course).That’s why it is important for the child to feel the urge of using the language in some contexts, with people and activities that are uniquely associated to the language.

Obviously there are many way to create and nurture a social context for the minority language, the extended family is a great resource in this direction (creating not only a social but also an emotional environment and bonds), friends can be of great help too, more difficult instead – at least in Italy- is to identify a child centered social context, what we mean by that is Playgroups, or other forms of children get-together.

Related posts:

1. More information about Playgroups. What, When, Where and most of all Who
2. 7 Strategies to use when a bilingual child doesn’t want to speak a language
3. What are the cons of Bilingualism?