The Bilingual Edge

Kendall King, PhD, Alison Mackey, PhD

• Editorial: HarperCollins e-books
• Año: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061870866
• Categoría: Didattica
• Categoría: Teoria e pratica della didattica

It's no secret that parents want their children to have the lifelong cultural and intellectual advantages that come from being bilingual. Parents spend millions of dollars every year on classes, computer programs, and toys, all of which promise to help children learn a second language. But many of their best efforts (and investments) end in disappointment.

In The Bilingual Edge, professors and parents King and Mackey wade through the hype and provide clear insights into what actually works. No matter what your language background is—whether you never passed Spanish in high school or you speak Mandarin fluently—King and Mackey will help you:

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• select the language that will give your child the most benefits

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• find materials and programs that will assist your child in achieving fluency

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• identify and use your family's unique traits to maximize learning

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Fancy private schools and expensive materials aren't needed. Instead, The Bilingual Edge translates the latest research into interactive strategies and quick tips that even the busiest parents can use.

SECTION THREE

How?

CHAPTER 6

How Can You Best Promote Language Learning at Home?

Language learning—like all learning—begins at home. And language learning—again, like all learning—works best when it’s enjoyable for everyone involved, integrated into everyday routines and interactions, and meaningfully connected with real life. These points are the guiding principles of our approach and are well supported by a vast array of research from very different fields of study. In this chapter we integrate key research findings on language learning in different sorts of families with practical tips on child care, playgroups, and grandparents to help you create the optimal second language learning environment for your child in your home.

HOW CHILDREN LEARN TO USE ANY LANGUAGE

Children learn language through daily contacts, emotional bonds, and everyday interactions with their caregivers. Language learning happens, for instance, while children are playing everyday games like peekaboo and being talked to while having their clothing changed, sitting in their car seat, and being fed and bathed. Through thousands of these interactions over many months, young children gradually learn about the role of language in social life. And eventually they begin to recognize the language patterns that are produced within these interactions and become able to participate in them.

Here’s the fascinating part: As children become more adept at communicating and participating in these day-to-day interactions, their caregivers naturally begin to use more complex language forms with them. The interactions between caregiver and child gradually become more complicated and sophisticated. In this way, the caregiver supports or scaffolds the child’s emerging ability to speak.

And—there’s no big surprise here—children’s own language development is closely linked to their parents’ language. For instance, researchers who have examined vocabulary growth have quantified the sort of language input children receive (for example, the number of words per hour). They’ve demonstrated a clear relationship between the number and kinds of words children hear and the number and kinds children produce. In a nutshell, children who hear more language and more complex language in everyday interactions tend to produce more language themselves. What seems to matter is not what children are explicitly taught about language (for example, through the warnings that many of us heard growing up, such as “Don’t end your sentences with a preposition”). Rather, what counts is what children hear and are exposed to in their day-to-day lives through everyday conversations, at the dinner table, in the car on the way to the grocery store, or in the backyard.

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QUICK TIP: Immerse Your Child in Language All Day

Children learn their first, second, and third languages best by being exposed to rich, dynamic, engaging interaction in each of those languages. The best way to get your children talking is to surround them with language.

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First language learning happens as part of routine interactions in everyday life. There is no explicit teaching here; for instance, to our knowledge no community of parents ever explicitly teaches their young to conjugate verbs in the past tense. Rather, first language learning is pleasurable, intimate, and interwoven with everyday life in meaningful ways. To be optimally successful, learning a second language should be much the same. In other words, second language activities—with older and younger children alike—are most effective when they are fun, playful, interactive, and connected to everyday activities. This sounds good, but what does it mean in real life (and in real homes, where there’s laundry to do, carpools to coordinate, dinner to cook, and lots of other immediate demands)?

HOW TO BEST SUPPORT SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING IN YOUR HOME

Parents who want to promote a second language in their home often feel they don’t have time. Modern life—and modern parenting—are both incredibly busy, and learning a second language can seem to be an extra add-on to already overscheduled lives. There’s good news for the busy (and the weary) here, however. These two realities—first, that language learning happens naturally in real-life contexts, and second, that day-to-day living is often too full of activities and obligations to squeeze anything else in—actually complement, rather than compete with each other. Second language learning works best when it is integrated into all of our busy everyday routines and many activities. It doesn’t need to be an extra.

Not all parents are fluent speakers of the language they hope their children will learn, and so, how child language learning happens—and what’s most feasible—will differ by family. We’ll consider best strategies here for three family language profiles: majority, mixed, and minority. While these are broad-stroke categorizations, parents usually find it helpful to identify which profile fits them best and to consider possibilities accordingly. At the end of the chapter, we’ll discuss in detail suggestions concerning babysitters, playgroups, and grandparents that are relevant for all families.

If You Are a Majority Language Family…

In majority language families, parents are monolingual speakers of the majority language. For instance, in the United States, Britain, New Zealand, and Australia, this means that the parents speak English as their first and best language. In Mexico and Spain, it means that the parents are native Spanish speakers. Majority language parents might have some limited knowledge of a second or foreign language, or they might be completely monolingual. These families generally are not worried about teaching or maintaining the majority language (nor should they be) so much as introducing a second language to their children at a young age.

For instance, Alison’s family is a majority language family. She was born and mostly educated in Britain. Her husband Dave was born and educated in the United States. They speak English with each other (of course) and each has a smattering of other languages. So, Alison knows a little Japanese from when she taught English as a Second Language in Japan. Her husband learned Spanish in high school and college, and Japanese during a study abroad program. They are trying to introduce their two-year-old daughter Miranda to both Japanese and Spanish, as well as keeping her proficient in two dialects of English (British and American). Alison makes sure Miranda interacts with plenty of people who speak British English, and both Dave and Alison involve her in as many Japanese and Spanish language–based activities as possible. She has music and movement classes in Spanish, a Spanish lesson once a week at her preschool, and one of her babysitters speaks Spanish. At home, they have a weekly Japanese night when Miranda dresses up in her Japanese clothes, they eat Japanese food, and they try to speak only in Japanese. To supplement their limited language skills, they also have a Japanese-speaking language student come over and play with Miranda during the semester. When she is older, Miranda will enroll in formal Japanese language classes. So, within her majority language family, Miranda is growing up understanding that there is more than one language with which to express herself. As she gets older she may keep up with both Spanish and Japanese, or she may settle on one.

For majority language families, use of the second language can (and in optimal circumstances, should) begin in the first months of infancy. Parents should try to incorporate the second language into as many aspects of life as possible. Even parents who know only bits and pieces of the second language can use it with their infants and babies. Young babies love the sound of human voices and one language is just as good as the next for soothing, entertaining, or stimulating them. Mothers or fathers, for instance, can sing the same nursery song in the same second language over and over (after all, babies love repetition!). One mother we know sang “Los Pollitos” (a popular Spanish-language children’s song about baby chicks) in Spanish every single time she changed her son’s diaper. He loved it—and was so entranced that he didn’t wriggle around during the changing routine—and before she could believe it he was singing it with her. Another father we know counted in Spanish each and every time he went up and down the stairs with his young son. This sounds very simple, but allowed two-month-old Jacob to regularly hear simplified, but real Spanish many times a day in a way that was connected meaningfully to real life (in this case, to real motion, as he felt each and every step up and down in his father’s arms!). Another mother we’ve worked with made a point of learning the phrases for simple games such as “where’s the baby?” and peekaboo in French so that she could always (and only) play these games in French with her daughter. She herself was surprised to hear her eighteen-month-old daughter say “Où est le bébé?” (“Where’s the baby?”) to her baby doll one day!

Majority language parents should not worry too much about speaking the language absolutely perfectly or with a non-native-like accent. It’s less important for your child to hear, for instance, perfect Korean than it is to have some early and meaningful exposure to Korean. And there’s lots of evidence that language learners can benefit greatly from interaction in the second language, even if it’s not coming from the mouth of a native speaker of that language!

In each of these cases, parents are not doing anything extra. They are just doing the routine talk of everyday life, but doing it in the second language. This approach has a number of advantages. Perhaps most obvious is that it doesn’t require much extra work for the parents—other than memorizing some key phrases or silly songs of course. Most parents talk to their children much of the time; the only difference is that parents are doing that talk in a different language. An added bonus: New parents often complain of feeling a bit brain dead and in need of mental stimulation in those very time and labor intensive (and repetitive) first months—this approach provides a perfect way to make those everyday routines a bit more challenging and stimulating for mom, dad, or whoever is the caretaker. Parents might even find that they will brush up on their second language skills, too!

Aside from being relatively simple (and potentially entertaining) for the parent, this approach also corresponds with what we know about child language learning. In particular, we know that children benefit from live, human interaction. Infants in particular enjoy and benefit from repetition, repetition, and yet more repetition. Further, these sorts of games and rituals correspond to what we know about language learning more generally—that is, it is more effective when it is fun, integrated into real life, and meaningful for the child.

The options and opportunities for language learning and interaction become more plentiful as the child grows (and as the parents recover from the first few months of sleep deprivation and total exhaustion!). For instance, even parents with only very basic proficiency levels in the second language can read simple board books with their children in that language. These books can be read over and over (and over and over). Young children can learn basic vocabulary in this way, become familiar with different styles of language (for example, formal versus informal), and of course develop a lifelong love of reading.

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SPOTLIGHT ON RESEARCH:

Reading Books Promotes Language Learning!

Researchers High, LaGasse, Becker, Ahlgren, and Gardner conducted a study with five-to eleven-month-old children from 205 families in 2000. The parents were recruited during their visits to the pediatrician’s office and were interviewed about their home reading practices. The families were then randomly divided into two groups: (a) an intervention group that received a book at the time of each visit from the pediatrician and a handout on the benefits of reading to young children and (b) a control group that did not receive these materials. After three visits (or when the child was twenty-two months old), the researchers interviewed the parents again to see if their reading practices had changed, and they then assessed how many and what types of words the children knew. Parents who received the books and information did report increased reading with their children as compared to the control group. They also found that for older toddlers (eighteen to twenty-five months), this increase in reading aloud was linked to a higher score on vocabulary skills relative to same-age toddlers who did not receive the intervention. In a nutshell, reading aloud clearly seemed to affect these toddlers’ language skills.

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Recent research indicates that children’s vocabulary size in their first language is directly related to how often they are read to in their first language. What about when there are two languages in the picture? In 2002, Janet Patterson found that the same held true for children learning two languages. She looked at the spoken vocabularies of sixty-four two-year-olds who were learning Spanish and English. She found that the size of their vocabularies in each language could be predicted by how often they were read to in each language. In fact, the frequency with which children were read to in a foreign language had more of an impact than even the total exposure they had to the language. Reading everyday children’s books is a great way to teach children vocabulary words, and Patterson’s work suggests that reading may be a better vocabulary booster than conversation in that language. This is something to keep in mind each and every day. (See the back of the book for suggestions on great places to buy foreign language books.)

In sum, language majority families will likely want to strive to incorporate the second language into everyday routines and activities as early and as much as possible. Parents can do this in fun, interactive, and meaningful ways, not by explicitly teaching the language, but by integrating it into everyday life. Alison’s family, as we mentioned above, does this in three main ways: attending classes taught in Spanish in the community, organizing Japanese nights at home, and hiring babysitters with language skills. This is less work and more fun than most parents had ever imagined second language instruction could be!

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POINTS TO REMEMBER FOR LANGUAGE MAJORITY FAMILIES:

• It is important to incorporate the second language into everyday routines and activities as early and as much as possible. This can be done in fun, interactive, and meaningful ways.
• Even parents who know just a little of the second language can incorporate it into silly songs, games, and other intimate routines.
• Consider having a fun family night that centers around the second language. This can be as simple as making (or ordering) a pizza and talking about all the ingredients in Italian.
• Reading to chi...