EDUCATION
Raising successful bilingual children
Is your child bilingual….or trilingual? Have you lived in a number of countries? Is your child mixing English and your home language? Does he or she refuse to speak in your home language? Are you worried about the effect this might have? Tese are common questions for expats and multilingual families.
Tere are two ways we learn languages: through acquisition, the unconscious way we all learn languages as a child; and through learning, the conscious and struc- tured approach taken in learning a lan- guage other than your home language. An acquired language is never forgotten. A child who has acquired two languages – one learnt at home and another at school – is well on the way towards becoming a bal- anced bilingual, equally comfortable in both languages, socially, academically and, eventually, professionally.
In learning languages, another important area of distinction is the difference be- tween social versus academic use of lan- guage. It general it takes about two years to
become proficient in social language, but 5-7 years for academic language. Educators and parents can be misled into thinking that a child is proficient in the new lan- guage when what they have is only social language and not the complex academic language necessary to be successful in a mainstream classroom. Classroom and English as an Additional Language (EAL) teachers need to be aware of these needs and provide support allowing children to develop their English to the next level.
Te challenge for non-English speakers en- tering an English-speaking classroom is that they will need to gain social and aca- demic language whilst trying to keep pace with schoolwork. Ideally, such students will receive not only specialised EAL sup- port, but also language and literacy sup- port in their home language as well.
Raising a bilingual child is not always easy. Nonetheless, for parents who want their children to be balanced bilinguals, there are some basic guidelines to follow:
Speak to your child in your language.
Keep speaking your language even when she replies in English. It only takes one person to develop a child’s language – but this person needs to be consistent in the use of language. It is normal for children to mix languages, especially at a young age, but parents should not mix languages when speaking to their children.
Be persistent. It is easy to fall at the first hurdle.
Te two most difficult times to enforce this are at the dinner table and during the after-school run. If both parents speak the same home language, dinner table conver- sations should be conducted in the home language. If one parent speaks the home language he should continue speaking with the children in that language, even if the other parent doesn’t understand the lan- guage. Whilst this sounds an unusual prac- tice, it soon becomes commonplace for that family if practised consistently. When
A child who has acquired two languages is equally comfortable in both languages socially and academically. 20 FOCUS The Magazine November/December 2017
www.focus-info.org
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