Monthly Archives: July 2012

26/07/2012 · 11:26 pm

Bilingualism Boot Camp: Day 4

Here we are, in the home stretch. Today was less intensive than yesterday, I’m not sure if I am just getting used to it or if the content was easier today!

1. Issues in Bilingualism: Today we talked a lot about family bilingualism, so I felt right at home. It was interesting to hear about issues from other areas. Also an interesting discussion about dialects vs. languages – how do we decide which is which?

2. Bilingual Education in Wales: Language allocation in the classroom – how do teachers divide up the different subjects into Welsh and English? And more discussion about “translanguaging”, a term that was coined in Wales, in the 1980s. I’m going to try and find a guest write to do a post on translanguaging.

3. Dynamic Bilingual Education: Another fantastic lecture – bilingual education in Mexico, the US and New Zealand.

4. Code-switching: Well, more code-switching data on Welsh-English, Spanish-English and Spanish-Welsh bilinguals…

Tomorrow I won’t be blogging because in the afternoon I’ll be heading home to see my own little bilinguals.

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25/07/2012 · 10:43 pm

Bilingualism Boot Camp: Day 3

Tired, tired, tired… seriously more brain work in three days than in the last three months (maybe even more).

1. Issues in Bilingualism: Bilinguals have better “Executive Control”, ergo, bilinguals are better at multi-tasking… (my own extrapolation).

2. Bilingual Education in Wales: Today’s topic was language use in schools. Question: Should teachers (or can teachers) enforce language choices in the classroom? Strangely, my instinctive answer is that it is okay to “force” use of a minority language, but not to force use of English (as the majority language). Have to ponder that one.

3. Dynamic Bilingual Education: We have long talked about language “maintenance” for Mother Tongue/heritage/first languages. Garcia suggests a better paradigm is to consider language “sustainability” – not to have language stay the same but to allow for language continuation and growth. Like.

4. Code-switching: If you take the time to hook people up to EEG machines, and to design tasks that evaluate grammar, you may get evidence of how people perceive code-switching. Apparently I am a big-picture person and not a detail-person.

Poster session: Presented a poster on the teacher-training project I have been doing with the British School of Amsterdam for the last three years. Now I must take everyone’s advice and make it into a PhD, or write a book, or or or… all great ideas but I am too tired right now.

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24/07/2012 · 11:06 pm

Updates from Bangor: Day 2

So, the end of day 2, and I have just finished my homework. Yes, after almost eight hours of lectures today, we still had homework for tomorrow! I think I am going to rename this the “Bilingualism Boot Camp”…

Thoughts from today:

1. Issues in Bilingualism: There used to be some thinking that bilingual children sometimes start speaking later than monolingual children (I’ve said it myself!). This is now no longer considered to be true. Bilingual children may initially have smaller vocabularies in each of the their languages, but overall they develop at the same rate as monolingual children.

2. Bilingual Education in Wales: First thought, what a success story. From one Welsh-language school in 1939, to over 400 primary school in 2011. That is a fantastic increase in the support for the Welsh language. Second thought – what a shame that still only 20% of the Welsh are speakers of the Welsh language. Why would you live in Wales and not want your children to learn this beautiful language?

3. Dynamic Bilingual Education: My thought today is that if the education authorities in NY knew what was happening on Rap Mondays… it looks daring, it looks controversial, but what an amazing teaching approach for a challenged population (teenagers immigrants in NY).

4. Code-switching: Well, really my thought for the day is that code-switching is not going to be my focus in the future… it’s interesting, but so detailed!

And now I’m off to rest my brain for another big day tomorrow.

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23/07/2012 · 10:43 pm

Breaking news from Bangor: Day 1

As promised, updates from Bangor. It was quite a day – I haven’t spent this much time in lectures in many, many years. All were interesting, but some were more challenging than others.

Thoughts of the day:

1. Issues in Bilingualism – Statistic: 56% of EU citizens speak a second language. 38% master two foreign languages. Question: What would these stats look like in the English-speaking world?

2. Bilingual/multilingual education – Interesting talk about code-switching in the classroom – is it lazy, or is it useful? Question: If you code-switch, why do you think you do it (and I won’t believe you if you tell me you don’t…)?

3. Dynamic Bilingualism in the 21st Century. – Wow. I know a lot about bilingualism, and I hadn’t really heard very much new so far today. But this class will challenge me – Garcia takes all the old notions about L1, L2, code-switching etc. and drops them in a bucket called translanguaging… I’d heard of it before, and was skeptical (I don’t do change easily) but I’m already getting the point and am interested to learn/hear more.

4. Code-switching – Who knew there was a Welsh-Spanish bilingual community in Patagonia? Not me!

And now I’m off for some article reading, to prepare for the onslaught tomorrow…

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· 8:06 am

Talking about Bilingualism in Bangor

The annual Bilingualism Summer School held at the University of Bangor is probably one of the best places to talk about bilingualism. It’s two weeks of researchers, academics and students, all gathered for the same thing – to talk about various aspects of bilingualism. This year, I have the good fortune to be attending for one week (thanks to my wonderful husband, even though he thinks I know enough about bilingualism… and our fantastic babysitter, Susy). So, why am I here? In part, to keep up on what is new in bilingualism – Wales is one of the key areas for bilingualism research. The centre hosting the summer school is renowned, as is it’s most prominent researcher, Colin Baker (from my last post). And in part, to meet other people who do what I do, and see what they are doing the same or differently.
This week I am taking four courses. I’m going to try and blog one interesting thing from each course, every day, to share what is new in the world of bilingualism. So these are the four courses I am taking:

1. Issues in Bilingualism (Eirini Sanoudaki, Bangor University)
This is an overview course of the field, from linguistic, cognitive and social perspectives. I’ve taken a few course like this in the past, but I’m interested to find out what is new in the field.

2. Bilingual/Multilingual Education: Classrooms, Challenges, Research ((Jessica Clapham, Anwei Feng, Bryn Jones, Gwyn Lewis, Enlli Thomas, Bangor University)
With an obvious focus on bilingualism in education, I chose this course due to the work I do with schools/teachers. While the schools I work with do not use bilingual models, they do deal with language learning in an immersion setting. Also might get the chance to talk about Canada… one of the success stories for bilingual education.

3. Dynamic Bilingual Education for the 21st Century (Ofelia Garcia, City University of New York)
This course has a political bent, designed to promote discussion about the “policies, programs and practices” of bilingual education for immigrant and minority communities. Garcia is a prolific author on the topic, and expects us to be prolific readers… this course has two textbooks and 18 research articles as required reading this week… watch this space to see how this goes!

4. Code-switching (Margaret Deuchar, Bangor University)
This course is exactly what it says on the label… a whole course about code-switching! Although this is a topic that every bilingual knows something about, this course is designed to prepare for research into code-switching, and using bilingual corpora and transcription tools etc.

So, if you are interested, stay with me over the week, as I blog from Bangor.

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19/07/2012 · 10:11 pm

Building Your Bilingualism Library

One of the points I bring up in all my seminars is that parents who are raising bilingual children need to learn the theory behind the process. The reasons for this are varied, but overall, I believe that parents have a better chance creating a smooth road to bilingualism if they understand the factors that influence successful bilingualism.
On that note, I am going to recommend some of my favourite books. My personal bilingualism library runs to over 50 titles. Parents don’t need all of those, of course, but they do need more than one. Which books they need depend to some extent on the bilingual model they are using.
However, there is one book that I think is an essential in any parent’s library. Colin Baker’s “A Parents’ and Teachers’ Guide to Bilingualism” is that rare book that is both heavily theoretical and completely accessible. It is written in an easy to use question-answer format, and you just look up your question in the index, and then go to the 1-2 page answer. Baker covers just about all the topics you might have questions about, from family language use to literacy to language refusal. None of the answers are very in-depth, but they are all a good start. Baker is one of the most prominent researchers in the field, and every answer in the book is based on the best research available. In addition, there are plenty of references for further research/reading for people who are interested in learning more. Another strong point is that the readability and concise nature of the sections mean it is also accessible to speakers of other languages than English.
So if you only get one book, this is the book to get.
Happily for me, next week I am going to Wales, to the Bilingualism Summer School at the University of Bangor, which is the home institute of Colin Baker. If I’m really lucky, maybe I can get him to sign my copy…

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10/07/2012 · 11:29 am

Talking about bilingualism in the summer holidays.

Summer holidays can be a boon or a bane for bilingual families. For some, it means an opportunity to go on vacation in a country where one of their languages is spoken. For families who can manage regular travel to their “home country”, this can be a valuable tool for helping children to develop in the minority language. Although it can be restrictive to always go to the same place for holidays, the benefits for the children to have an “immersion” vacation are immense. As children get older (and their school friends become more important than their parents…) it can be difficult to encourage them to continue in meaningful communication in the home language. The opportunity to “live’ in the culture, even just for a couple of weeks, reinforces the usefulness of the minority language. The more varied the activity plan, the better, as it is good to allow kids to interact with family members, to use the minority language in public places, to play with other children who only speak the minority language. These invaluable interactions help bolster the language skills of children who are at risk of becoming passive users of one of their languages. So, if you have a minority language, and it is at all possible to go “home” for the summer, or somewhere where the “home” language is spoken, take the chance – you won’t be disappointed in the results.
On the flip side, there are families (like ours) in which the minority language is also the school language. So for us, maintaining the usage of the school language over the holidays is important, especially as it competes with English (an unfair competition!). It takes a concerted effort for me, as the minority-language speaking parent, to change my input over the summer to favour French over English, to replace some of the time they would be doing French at school. On the other hand, I could just start planning a holiday in France!

Bon Voyage everyone!

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03/07/2012 · 8:44 am

The Proof is in the Pudding…

Or in this case, in the classroom. Yesterday, I spend the morning at my children’s school, helping with the “Defi-Anglais”, or the “English Challenge”. Every year, they pick a subject, and have a cross-grade team competition, and this year it was English. Needless to say, I went along to help out. Over the morning, we saw 20 groups of 7-8 children, aged 8-11. That’s a lot of kids… What was really interesting to me was seeing their language backgrounds, and comparing them with their levels in English.
One of the things that I talk about in parent seminars is the research support for the positive influences of bilingualism on other language learning. There is a body of evidence that suggests that people who are bilingual from an early age are better learners of other languages later on, both in proficiency and in phonetics (accent). This is one of the arguments I offer to parents who are reluctant to have their children learn Dutch because it is a “useless” language (see my earlier blog/rant on that topic…).
Although I did not approach yesterday’s Defi as a scientific experiment (maybe I should have!), I did pay attention to how the kids stacked up in terms of language(s). At this school, there are three levels of English offered: 1, 2 & 3, with 3 being the top level. It was quite striking to me how many of the bilingual children were also in Group 3 in English (as their third language). The bilingual population at this school is mostly French/Dutch bilingual, but there are also speakers of Greek, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Portuguese and many African languages. Being very unscientific about it, I’d hasard a guess that more three quarters of the bilingual children were in Groups 2 or 3 in English, and about the same amount of the monolingual French speakers were in Groups 1 or 2.
Of course, there are many, many other variables (languages used in the home, outside the home, language of extracurricular activities, travel etc.), but it is still food for thought…

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