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…
Tag Archives: trilingualism
The Proof is in the Pudding…
Seven things I learned in Friesland
1. Friesans are Dutch, but not. And Frisian is like Dutch, but is not Dutch. In fact, it’s closer to English than to Dutch. I feel that I should have learned this much earlier in my Dutch experience – professional shame on me!
2. Friesland has almost 50 trlingual primary schools – Frisian, Dutch and English. It’s a great program, and it’s working.
3. Researchers and trainers across Europe are at work on programs meant to bring foreign languages (what “foreign” means is another topic…) to school children from earlier ages.
4. There is an institute in the Netherlands doing fantastic work with children with communication issues (Kentalis). They have staff who understand and work with families dealing with language issues in bilingual children.
5. The results of the Poliglotti4.eu research program show that EU teachers want more training in working with language learners.
6. There are families in the EU that are monolingual, and so dedicated to the idea of bilingualism for their children that the parents are undertaking the job of learning and teaching their children another language (Google “Hocus and Lotus”.
7. There is a whole network of like-minded people out there, ready and happy to talk about bilingualism with me, in my Year of Talking About Bilingualism!
Filed under Introduction
“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.
Filed under Content
