Tag Archives: expats

05/12/2012 · 8:59 pm

And now for something completely different…

Today, December 5, is the eve of St.Nicholas Day. In the Netherlands, this means it is “pakjesavond” – the night Sinterklaas leaves present in children’s shoes. Being of Canadian extraction, this tradition is not part of my holiday rota. However, my children have spent their whole lives here, and so it’s been necessary to integrate the “Sint” into our lives.
Although my professional specialisation is language related, in many ways language and culture are integrally linked. And of course for multilingual children, being multicultural is a part of their world view as well. Last year I spent time researching the “Third Culture Kid” field, and considering its implication in my own work. I also had the honour of meeting Ruth van Reken (http://www.crossculturalkid.org/) at the annual Families in Global Transition conference, where I spend some time with her discussing issues relating to TCKs and language.
I’d like to take the opportunity to share an article I wrote on this subject for a local newspaper (http://www.theunderground.nl). It’s a departure from my normal blog content, but I think it may be applicable to the lives of many of my readers. Enjoy!

Home is where the Sint is.

My field of specialization is language, but in talking about bilingualism, the topic of culture frequently comes up. Given the season, it’s appropriate to talk about an important aspect of culture from an expat child perspective.
Most adult expats have little problem answering the question “Where are you from?” – we identify with the country of our birth. For expat children, who are sometimes not even born in the country of either of their parents, the question is more complex. These children are known as “Third Culture Kids”, or TCKs. Third culture kids are children who have a culture that is specific to being raised abroad – they have some of the culture of their parents’ countries, and some of the culture of the country they are living in at any given time, as well a little bit of culture from everywhere they have lived. In fact, TCKs are the ultimate cultural melting pot.
So what does this mean for parents? Essentially, in the same way that parents need to consider language maintenance when leaving for a new country, they also need to consider “cultural maintenance”. The obvious example for those of us living in the Netherlands is the issue of Sinterklaas. The festive season in the Netherlands is very centred around children – the arrival of the Sint on the boat in harbours around the country, the procession through town, the decorations everywhere with Zwarte Piet and friends. All the schools I have visited pay some homage to the Dutch tradition, whether it is in arts and crafts, story time, or seasonal celebrations. Discussions at the school gates are often focused on whether or not the Zwarte Piets left anything in the shoes last night, and the olieballen vans are everywhere.
So how does this affect families who are not Dutch? While we are here in the Netherlands, most of us choose to participate in Dutch culture to some degree – it is much easier to access culture than to learn the language! When we leave the Netherlands, whether to return home or for the next posting, we need to remember the cultural needs of our children, who are now at least a little bit Dutch as well. Over the years, I’ve sent many a “Sint-package” to friends living in a new place – all the essentials: pepernoten, candy, Zwarte Piet hats, shoes, so they can celebrate the Sinterklaas season with their children in the US, Malaysia, Dubai or wherever they now call home.
For the children, this is an important part of bringing their “old” self into their new place – they cannot shed the trappings of a country they used to call home as easily as adults can. In “Raising Global Nomads”, Robin Pascoe discusses the importance of establishing and maintaining meaningful family traditions that incorporate elements of the different “lives” that your children have lived. By doing this, expat families and third culture kids can feel a sense of belonging in a new place, without needing to leave the old “home” completely behind. So if you are an expat family looking at leaving the Netherlands in the near future, consider what traditions and cultural experiences your children would want to take with them – you can’t take the “plakje kaas?” from the cheese shop, but you can take care to pack the Sinterklaas costumes and some wooden shoes, and arrange for a good friend to send you a “Sinterklaas care package” in the next holiday season, wherever it may find you.

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19/03/2012 · 4:58 pm

Top 5 Reasons to Choose Bilingualism for Your Children (otherwise known as Talking to Monolinguals)

One of the main reasons I started doing seminars for parents was the lack of information among many monolinguals in our community about the benefits of bilingualism. In the expat world, we meet many, many bilingual families, but there are also a lot of families who are strictly monolingual (let’s be honest, they are mostly English-speaking families…). I addressed it briefly in my seminal post (“But Dutch is a useless language”), and it’s come up again in my Friesland posts, but today, I’d like to give a little run-down of the Top 5 reasons monolinguals should consider using a language in their environment to promote bilingualism for their children.

Reason 1: The experience of acquiring a second language has great knock-on effects for children. Studies have looked at areas as far-ranging as maths and creativity, and found that either bilinguals come out ahead of monolinguals, or they are the same – no negative effects from properly introduced bilingualism.

Reason 2: Learning another language makes you more empathetic to others who are struggling to speak your language. And we can all use a little more empathy in our worlds.

Reason 3: Especially for expats: Having your kids learn some (or a lot) of the local language helps them feel more at home in the place they live, and they can take a little bit of it with them.

Reason 4: Acquiring a additional language at a young age (any language!) has the potential to turn your kids into better learners of other languages later.

Reason 5: New research has found that active bilinguals do better in terms of aging – on average, they develop age-related memory diseases (Alzheimer’s) up to five years later than monolinguals. Why? Well, that’s the subject of a future post…

Do you know any monolingual families choosing bilingualism for their children? Are you a monolingual family choosing bilingualism for your children? If so, you are not alone, and I’d love to hear your story.

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27/01/2012 · 9:40 am

Don’t forget to pack your Mother Tongue

NB. This post is a reprint of an article I wrote for a local paper (The Underground) in October, 2011

For families who arrive in the Netherlands with monolingual children, the choice for bilingualism should be an easy one. The benefits, short and long-term, of bilingualism, have been established and documented over the last few decades, and the research is convincing. Bilingual children show linguistic, cognitive and social benefits from being raised with two languages. Whenever feasible, bilingualism is a fantastic choice for our children. One of the key elements of successful bilingualism is “adequate input” in both (or all) languages. This means that the child must hear enough of the language to process how it works, and acquire a reasonable vocabulary. If a child receives adequate input, they can acquire any language successfully. If they do not receive adequate input, they may acquire a language only partially, or lose it later in life.

For monolingual families, especially those with English or another major European language as the Mother Tongue, the path to bilingualism can be simple – one language at home and another at school. Living in one language, and going to school in a second language is one of the most successful paths to bilingualism for many children, as the input receive in each language is adequate, in terms of amount and also generally in terms of quality.

But what about families who arrive in an expat situation with two languages to maintain, or with minority languages to maintain? For these families, finding a path to successful bilingualism can be more challenging. This is for two reasons. Firstly, the only languages of schooling easily available in The Hague are English, French, German and Dutch. For families from other language backgrounds, it is necessary to add another language – a school language- on top of the home language(s). Often, if the parents opt for non-English schooling, the children still need to master English to a certain point, as the language of the greater expat community is English. As the pool of languages involved becomes wider, the opportunities for input in each of these languages are reduced. Secondly, access to means to maintain minority languages can be a challenge. While it is easy enough to find people to provide input in English, or French, or even Spanish, it can be more difficult to find or establish a community of practice in lesser-represented languages. Without the crucial adequate input in the Mother Tongue(s), there is a risk that the child will not maintain a successful level, and therefore will not become a successful bilingual. Whatever subsequent language choices we make for our children, the maintenance of their Mother Tongues (s) – the language they have heard from birth –is absolutely critical. The choice to forfeit a Mother Tongue in favour of a more “useful” language generally leads to cognitive disadvantages for the child, and should not be considered an option.

Let’s look at two different language situations, and see how these families’ needs can be met.

The first case is a French-Italian bilingual family moving to The Hague. Upon arrival, the children have had adequate input in both languages – Italian from the father, and French from the mother. The decision is made to place the students in a French school, which guarantees that continued adequate input for French will be achieved. However, this leaves the father as the only source of Italian, and like many expat working parents, he works long hours and travels frequently. How then can this family ensure that their children maintain their Italian as a Mother Tongue? One possibility is that the mother, if capable and willing, starts speaking Italian to the children outside school hours. If this is not possible, then the family needs to carefully plan for ways to incorporate Italian into their daily lives. This can happen by means of a babysitter, activities with Italian speaking children and families, and maintenance of strong and frequent contact with Italian-speaking family.

A second case is a family arriving with children who speak Twi (an African language) and Spanish. This family decides to place their children in an English-language school, thus increasing the language load to three necessary languages. Again, it can be accepted that the English at school should be adequate input for the language needs of the children, but this leaves the after-school hours and weekends to maintain two other languages. For this family, finding the resources to support the Mother Tongues is a difficult task. Again, real-world interaction with speakers of these languages is crucial to success. Finding or establishing communities of practice, either within The Hague or extending to other areas, is a necessity. Ensuring that the children have the resources and support necessary to learn to read and write both languages is also critical – as they have access to the written word and books in these languages, they increase opportunities for the cognitive processes necessary for successful language maintenance.

The bottom line is that bilingualism is a goal worth striving for, but for many families, it is not a decision to be taken lightly. Successful bilingualism involves planning on the part of the parents, and a commitment to ensuring that our children maintain their Mother Tongue and successfully acquire the other languages we choose for them.

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15/11/2011 · 4:58 pm

“I didn’t think it would be so hard!”

I’m going hors-piste this week (notice the code-switching…) to address something that came up in a seminar I gave this weekend. After I finished my mini-talk, a participant came up to me to tell me that she hadn’t considered that raising her child with four languages could be difficult.
A statistic that I often cite is that 60-75% of the world’s population is bilingual. I then go on to talk about why families need to plan for successful bilingualism. These two points seem incompatible – if so much of the world’s population is succesfully bilingual, why I am telling people that it is hard enough to do properly that they need an official plan?
The answer is found in the contrasting situations between most bilingual populations and parents who attend my talks. The areas of the world that have the highest numbers of bilinguals are areas where they practice societal bilingualism. This means that the whole community is bilingual, and in the same way. So, in Kenya, most children are raised with one family language, Swahili, which is the greater local language, and often also with English (as a post-Colonial language). When the whole community is doing the same thing, children get enough exposure to all of the languages involved, without any need for “planning” by the parents.
Living in the Netherlands, within a large international community, I tend to see a lot of families that are raising their children with two European languages, or one European language and one other. The bottom line is that if you are a Ukrainian – Italian couple living in the Netherlands, there is a good chance that you don’t have a Ukrainian-Italian-Dutch community around you. Therefore, the responsibility to provide enough of each language to allow for successful bilingualism is a greater challenge.
This is why I encourage all families who are raising bilingual children outside of their communities of practice to have a Family Language Plan. If you think about your current situation and make plans for contingencies such as moving, you have a better chance at providing the long-term support you child needs to be successfully bilingual.
Is it “hard” to raise a successful bilingual this way? Some families do it more easily than others, some languages are easier support. Families dealing with a need for three or more languages, or families who move often, need to think carefully about what their language priorities are and how they will reach those goals. This gives their children the best chance for success on their bilingual journey.

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