Raising a Bilingual Child- - Couverture souple

Pearson, Barbara Zurer; Living Language

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1400023343 ISBN 13 : 9781400023349

Editeur : Living Language, 2008

Synopsis

If you would like your children to experience the benefits of becoming bilingual, but you aren't sure how to teach them a second language, then Raising a Bilingual Child is the perfect step-by-step guide for you. Raising a Bilingual Child provides parents with information, encouragement, and practical advice for creating a positive bilingual environment. It offers both an overview of why parents should raise their children to speak more than one language and detailed steps parents can take to integrate two languages into their child's daily routine. Raising a Bilingual Child also includes inspirational first-hand accounts from parents. It dispels the myth that bilingualism may hinder a child's academic performance and explains that learning languages at a young age can actually enhance a child's overall intellectual development.

A propos du livre

Extrait :

CHAPTER 4

Establishing a Bilingual Environment

In chapter 2, I discussed the issues involved in language development in general. Everything you learned for
learning one language holds just as true for learning two or more languages. You see that, as parents, you do not teach
children language, but you create better or worse environments in which your children’s language develops. In this chapter, we explore special strategies for creating enriching environments within your household so that your child can learn a second
(or third) language.

The key to raising bilingual children is for parents (or less often, the school) to establish the minority language. The
language of the broader community–the language of school, commerce, government, and the mass media–is a given. In
every culture, all healthy children learn the majority language, even when their parents do not. But families must make a
special effort to “grow” both a majority language and another one. The minority language may be a heritage language that
parents or grandparents have brought from another country, or it could be another language chosen by the parents for
any of a variety of reasons. For example, it might be a second official language that children are expected to learn, as in
Canada, Switzerland, or Hong Kong. Sometimes speakers of a country’s majority language opt to educate their children in a
language that they believe will have strategic importance later in the child’s life, such as Spanish in the United States. Or it
could be that the individual seeks to communicate in another modality, as with a spoken and a signed language.

For any given person being raised in a bilingual situation, we cannot know whether she will become actively bilingual or
not. But we can be aware of trends. We can compare groups who are bilingual to others who seem to have the potential for bilingualism, but did not pursue it or did not achieve it. With my colleagues in the University of Miami Bilingualism
Study Group, I explored the practices and ideas bilingual groups have in common. From these studies, I pinpoint
the key ingredients in their experiences for fostering the second language. At the end of this chapter, I explore ways
to take advantage of this knowledge in your families. Then, in chapter 5, you will hear from parents who have used these
principles, and together we will evaluate how their strategies worked for them and how they might work for you.

I emphasize ways to strengthen the minority language because that is the more difficult case. However, the same principles
are effective for a child who is learning a new community language, such as an expatriate or a recent immigrant. Parents
wishing to encourage or reinforce the use of the community, or majority, language can also employ these strategies.

As you read this chapter, I’d like you to consider where your child will hear and use her languages and what other resources
are available to give the child’s languages a broader context than just your nuclear family.

The Foundation for a Bilingual Family

If you do not buy a lottery ticket, you will not win. Similarly, if you do not maintain a bilingual environment, you will not have bilingual children. Luckily, the odds of children becoming bilingual are not like the odds of winning a lottery. If two languages loom large in your life, chances are they will be part of your child’s life as well. But if you, the parents, are not actively using two languages daily, then bilingual upbringing must be a conscious construction on your part. Having access to meaningful
interactions in two language environments gives you the ticket to play. The stage is set for your family to become bilingual. But then you must actively seize the opportunity. You must want to make it happen, and you must believe that your actions can have an impact on whether it will happen.

Beliefs and Attitudes

Annick de Houwer, a psycholinguist in Belgium, suggests that these two beliefs on the part of the parents are the best predictors of whether children will learn two languages: Parents must have

· a positive attitude toward bilingualism and
· an “impact belief”–a belief that their own language practices have an impact on the child’s practices.

It is crucial for you, as parents, to have an awareness of how your own language practices affect your child’s learning, and you must use your knowledge of your role to insure the quality and quantity of your child’s language exposure. These two beliefs usually go together, but either one can be absent. You probably know a parent with an impact belief but without a positive attitude toward bilingualism. For example, someone who has been speaking a minority language with his child–
and witnessing that she learns it–has an impact belief. He sees that his language behavior shapes his child’s language behavior. But suppose that the child’s teacher convinces this parent that his child’s intellectual growth will be hampered if he continues to raise her with two languages. Now he no longer has a positive attitude toward bilingualism. He has
replaced it with a negative one, and the child, who had been on her way to becoming bilingual, loses the second language (amazingly quickly, it turns out).

The opposite situation is also all too common. One example comes from an intensive study of the Taiap people of Papua, New Guinea. In interviews with researcher Don Kulik, almost all the parents expressed satisfaction with their own bilingualism and a desire that their children also become bilingual in the local Taiap language and Tok Pisin, one of the important languages of the wider society. However, they were not aware of how their own language use affected their children’s language
learning. They thought that it would happen outside the home and that what they spoke to the child made no difference.

We do not have to travel to New Guinea to find people with similar ideas. Many parents I heard from were like the Taiap speakers. As Mark and Cindy, an international couple living in Paris, said, “We just thought if we were in the countries where the other languages were spoken, it would happen on its own.” But despite the fact that they spent long periods of
time in France and Italy, their children heard primarily English addressed to them, and so far, at ages four and one, they have learned primarily English. The parents did not see what role they needed to play in order to capitalize on the opportunity that their living abroad presented to them.

So, neither belief is sufficient by itself. If parents lack one belief or the other, the environment they provide for their children will likely lead to weak or nonexistent learning of one of the languages. With both a positive attitude toward bilingualism and an “impact belief” that their own language use shapes their child’s language use, parents will be motivated to take the practical steps that foster both first- and secondlanguage learning.

Practical Considerations

In police lingo, parents must establish “motive and opportunity” for the minority language. They need to find ways to give children

· enough reasons for them to want to use the minority language and
· opportunities for enough exposure to it for them to be able to learn it.

Where will the “input,” the interactions that provide the raw material for children to learn the minority language, come from? Who will speak it with them, and in what situations? Parents must specifically consider where speakers are found who can use the other language. If you, yourselves, are to be major sources of the second language, it may be useful for you to record your interactions for a week or keep a diary that will give you an idea of what your language practices are actually like.

You also need to take the child’s perspective, not your own, on the value of the second language. You cannot assume that your own desire to use the language will translate automatically into the same desire in your child. Although it is usual for children to adopt parents’ attitudes and for them to want to please their parents, the use of the language must
have value in the child’s world, from the child’s point of view. How will you make the language attractive and indispensable for your child, so that, with time, mastering it will evolve into the child’s own goal?

The Odds That a Child Will Become Bilingual

Some small studies from these last decades have indicated that not every family that embarks on bilingual upbringing ends up with children who can use their two languages comfortably. Until very recently, we did not have any evidence from large-scale studies about bilingual “success rates” in large, unselected populations. Early accounts of child bilinguals were often case studies of linguists’ children (for example, Leopold, Vihman, and Deuchar)–children whose parents were knowledgeable about language and cared deeply enough about it to make it their life’s work. I am not suggesting that all children of linguists will become bilingual and all others will not, but there may be more attention to language in the households of linguists than in the
average home. Thus, they would not serve as a model for most families. More importantly, if a linguist’s child did not become bilingual, the parent did not write about it, so we do not know how many books about incomplete bilingual learning never got written.

A relatively large survey of bilingual outcomes is reported by Suzanne Barron-Hauwaert, a parent and member of the editorial board of the Bilingual Family Newsletter. She surveyed more than one hundred families, readers of the Newsletter and participants in a bilingual family chat- list, about four-fifths of them living in Europe. Even in this self- selected group, the overall percentage of children whose parents described them as passive bilinguals was about 20%, and even higher
among the seven-to-eleven-year-olds, for whom the percentage was closer to 40%.

In a larger, less selective study, Annick de Houwer and colleagues found that approximately 25% of children of bilinguals were not active bilinguals. The researchers contacted 18,000 Flemish families in Belgium, a country with two official languages, each in its monolingual region, and asked parents to list the language(s) spoken at home by each individual in the home. Of the 2,250 households where parents reported speaking more than one language at home, 75% had children who were also bilingual.

The Belgian results provide a “half-empty/half-full” perspective on parents’ expectations. We can look at the half-full glass and say, “That’s good; three out of four children in bilingual households become active bilinguals.” Or we can take the half-empty viewpoint and say, “One fourth of the children in bilingual households do not become bilingual.
Why not?!” Because 75% of the children in de Houwer’s survey were reported to be bilingual, we see that it does not take an exceptional family to raise a bilingual child: it was the majority outcome in this sample. By the same token, though, we see that it is not an exceptional case when a child in a bilingual context does not become bilingual.

Factors Affecting Whether the Child Becomes Bilingual

Exposure, Exposure, Exposure: The Input Cycle

Of all the relevant factors for enhancing language development in general that we discuss in this chapter–for example, positive
attitude, frequent use, or official status–quantity of input is the most important for learning a second language. Without interacting with people using the language, no learning takes place. Without enough interaction, learning can take place, but the children do not reach enough of a comfort level in the language that they will willingly use it. In our University of Miami infant study, we found that the children with too little time in such interactions–less than about 20% of their
waking hours–learned words and phrases but did not make their own sentences in the language.

When the child uses a minority language, she invites more input in that language, so the cycle is self-reinforcing, as in Figure 7. A greater amount of language input leads to greater proficiency in the language, which leads to more use, which invites more input, and the cycle starts again. On the other hand, if the child does not use the minority language, it stands to reason that she is using a different language and getting less exposure to the minority language, so she develops less
proficiency, which leads to using the minority language even less, and that leads to getting even less input in that language.

Other Factors

Still, this system does not exist in a vacuum. Other factors play a role in how much input is delivered and how much is taken up by the child.

The Connection between Proficiency and Use

It is common sense that children will not use a language if they experience too much difficulty getting their ideas across in it. So, short of grammar drills, parents must do all they can to boost children’s facility with the language. Here, again, amount of exposure is critical, but the age at which the child begins hearing the language is also important. A child with an earlier exposure to a language will have an easier time learning it than the child with a later exposure to it, even if the quantity
of language input is the same for both. So the younger child will use the language more and acquire greater fluency in it. But as the arrows in Figure 7 indicate, this is a two-way street. Greater proficiency leads to more use. More use leads to greater proficiency. But less proficiency leads to less use and eventually to even lower proficiency.

The Connection between Attitudes and Use

Similarly, positive attitudes of parents, siblings, and peers toward a language can add value to the language and make it more attractive to the child. A language in and of itself is generally interesting only to linguists. What makes a language interesting to the average person is who speaks it and what they say in it. Are there children who speak the language that your child would like to be around? Do you know songs in it that your child would enjoy singing with you? Do people react favorably, and perhaps comment on how impressed they are, when they hear you speak the language? When children feel that their
language is special (but not strange), their positive attitude encourages their use of the language, thereby increasing the effectiveness of the cycle. Conversely, if parents, siblings, or peers think, for example, that the people who speak the language are backward or stupid, or if others make jokes about it, their negative attitudes will subtract value, lead to reduced enthusiasm for using the language, attract less input, decrease proficiency, and so on.

In some cases, the amount of input alone will make the difference between learning two languages or not, but attitudes affect how eager one is to find the input. In a study of trilinguals by de Houwer, parental language patterns accounted for 84% of the variation in the children’s language patterns. That is a very high percentage, which tells us that the children’s use of the three languages reflected the parents’ language patterns very closely. Still, parents’ language use was not 100% of the story. Patterns of exposure to the minority language are key, but there is also room for attitudes, values, and social circumstances to influence children’s language choices.

In practical terms, the amount of input avai...

Revue de presse :

“A timely and well-written book! ... [It] helps parents prepare their children for the future....”

--J. Kevin Nugent, Ph.D., Director, The Brazelton Institute, Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard University; Professor, Child and Family Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst

“This book is sure to become a classic! ... Parents should appreciate this important book. Pearson ... inspire[s] all of us to celebrate the richness of linguistic diversity in our lives.”

--Kenji Hakuta, Ph.D., Lee L. Jacks Professor of Education, Stanford University, Author of Mirror of Language: The Debate on Bilingualism

“This is a book that inspires confidence that the choice of bilingualism is a good one for parents, for children, and for our society.”
--Donna Christian, Ph.D., President, Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington D.C.

“Pearson has used her keen insights about the issues that parents are concerned about to paint an in-depth and interesting-to-read handbook.”

--Fred Genesee, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology, McGill University, Co-author of Dual Language Instruction: A Handbook for Enriched Education

“Barbara Pearson' s [book] is a wonderfully written, sparkling composite of research results, personal narratives, practical advice, and wise enthusiasm for the project of bilingualism [...].”
--Thomas Roeper, Ph.D., Professor of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Author of The Prism of Gramma

“I thoroughly agree with the author’s insights and recommendations which are both research-based and flexible and comprehensive enough to accommodate different family situations.”
--Lourdes C. Rovira, Ed.D., Associate Superintendent, Curriculum and Instructional Support, Miami-Dade County Public Schools 


“I enjoyed reading Raising a Bilingual Child and found it informative and accessible.”
--Chris Rosenberg, Principal, Starr King Elementary School, San Francisco

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Living Language
• Date d'édition: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1400023343
• ISBN 13: 9781400023349
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 368