Please follow the link to find out more about this research…
Are you a #multilingual family in the UK or Ireland? How is the #lockdown affecting your children’s use of English and their other language(s)?
Take part in this collaborative research project to help us learn. Includes opportunity to enter a prize draw https://t.co/LaV0YbLMoX
— naldic (@EAL_naldic) April 20, 2020
These resources are for families to use at home. One file is for nursery/primary age, with some links relevant for babies/toddlers. Another is for secondary age. The third came from Peterhead ASL team who were happy for it to be shared. These resources will be helpful for bilingual families, but most will helpful for all families.
There are a range of activities with some links to translated information and resources that can help families.
Aberdeenshire EAL – Resources to support learning while at home – Primary & Nursery
Aberdeenshire EAL – Resources to support learning while at home – Secondary
ASL Ideas (002) from Peterhead ASL
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/newcomers-language-english-calgary-success-1.4880207?fbclid=IwAR1WWVddjGwwc5oJ3iVJ8ZipjP3ZfDk0m-mtBnMO-oFNT_eDKadHpyuf8N4
A language workshop for parents in northeast Calgary is highlighting the many benefits of keeping home languages alive and encouraging parents to pass on their spoken language to their kids.
The workshop was organized by the Calgary Board of Education and the Calgary Public Library’s Saddletowne branch.
“The program came out of research into keeping the home language alive and the importance of it,” said Melanie Wong, a CBE strategist whose focus is English-language learners.
Wong says research shows maintaining first languages improves children’s self-esteem and sense of cultural identity while helping kids succeed in the English school system.
“Sometimes English is the priority because they want to integrate into society, but what we’re finding is that first language is still key,” Wong said.
The CBE’s Melanie Wong says evidence shows that kids who learn their home language as well as English are more successful in school, especially when it comes to excelling in English. She encourages parents to read, write, sing and even joke at home in their own language. (Dan McGarvey/CBC)
“It’s really important because we do notice that the academic gains are better at school when they do have that first language,” said Wong, adding kids who keep up their first language see improved literacy and success in English.
But Wong says there’s also a stigma for some kids around learning and speaking their home language.
Many in the English school system can feel embarrassed to speak their first language once they learn English.
“Once we try to encourage them to speak our home language but they try to avoid it because of the accent issue,” said parent Getu Admasu, who moved to Calgary from Ethiopia in 2001.
Parents like Getu Admasu, who came to Calgary from Ethiopia, say it’s often a challenge to get their kids to learn their home language. (Dan McGarvey/CBC)
“If mom and dad speak their own language at home, the kids will learn. But if we are switching to English, there is no point,” said Admasu.
Admasu says he uses posters in the house with words and phrases in the two languages beside each other, setting his kids a daily target of words to learn to encourage them.
Many parents want their kids to learn their first language to communicate with friends and relatives and maintain strong ties to their culture.
“I’m very interested to keep my home language alive with my kid,” said Chhabi Raval.
Many parents, like Chhabi Raval, want their kids to learn their language in addition to English to keep them connected to their culture, traditions and family. (Dan McGarvey/CBC)
“I want to know how I continue with it because for me it is very important for him to know what language I speak and his grandparents speak. I value it,” said Raval.
“It is very much a challenge. They are small right now so they don’t know but it is something we should give them,” said Raval, who says she doesn’t want her children to miss out.
The workshop included time for parents to play with their kids, encouraging them to use their home language, using books and playing with toys.
The workshop was the first of its kind in Calgary. The CBE says it’s looking at more opportunities at other libraries in the future.
https://www.newsy.com/stories/a-bilingual-brain-solves-problems-faster/
Check inside the link for video.
Language allows us to share thoughts and feelings with somebody else. It’s our cultural glue. Otherwise, we’d live in a world of babel. But there’s much more to language, including elements that affect the structure and functioning of the brain.
While the first words spoken may have been 250,000 years ago, now more than half of the people around the world – estimates vary from 60 to 75 percent – speak at least two languages.
Eighty percent of primary and secondary students in 24 European countries are learning a foreign language, usually English. Across the United States the number is closer to 20 percent, but this varies by state. In New Jersey, 51 percent of students have a second language course included as part of the school day.
Learning those languages impacts our noggins. Brain scans show that people who speak more than one language have more gray matter in their anterior cingulate cortex, the area linked to everything from learning to social behavior to resolving conflicts.
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Young Kids Who Hold More Conversations Grow Their Brains
A leading neuropsychologist says it’s like a muscle – using it makes it bigger and more flexible. There’s a sort of competition that goes on in the brains of people who speak multiple languages. Since it’s possible to use either language at any moment, their brains have developed ways to regulate which language is spoken. The brain’s executive functions, a regulatory system that includes inhibition, allow a person to focus, and “pause” the language not being used.
Research shows this mechanism has a lot of other benefits. People who speak more than one language are better at switching between two tasks. For example, bilinguals can switch from categorizing objects by color to sorting them by shape more rapidly than monolingual people.
Why is this? Their brains regularly inhibit languages and employ that same regulation to “inhibit” tasks. It doesn’t end there. People who speak more than one language also have the ability to make more rational decisions. When faced with a choice, the inhibition center quiets intuitions and emotions.
This means that bilingual people might be better employees in jobs requiring rational planning, managing complexity and problem solving. Other implications: bilingual children are better at adjusting to environmental changes, and bilingual seniors can experience less cognitive decline. There are even indications that speaking more than one language can lead to faster stroke recovery.
Is picking up a second language easy? Not always, especially as an adult. But the brain-benefits are awfully robust, not to mention it’s useful knowing the difference between embarazada and embarrassed.
Check out this interesting link by Ute Limacher
https://www.anaelisamiranda.com/literacy/how-you-will-start-teaching-your-child-to-read
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Picture your children immersed in a wonderful book. They can’t put it down. They read before bed, in the car, in the dentist’s waiting room. They talk about the coolest things they’ve read. They quote their favorite character. They max out their library card every week.
If that seems like a distant dream, know this: all that starts with the very basic elements of the words they’ll be reading: the letters and the sounds they make. 
★ The first skill to be learned is to listen.
Can your children rhyme? Can they identify the first sound of words? Can they tell you words that begin with /…/? Can they tell you what new word you get if you change a sound in it? For example: “What do I get if I drop the /c/ in cat and put a /h/ instead?” They should easily answer “Hat”. (It’s important to use the sounds and not the letter names here.) You can learn all this by playing games, reading a lot together and talking about how words are built. You can read more about skills children need before learning to read here and here. I also wrote a post on how you can support literacy even before your child starts to read. There is no right age to start learning to read. In some countries, schools start reading instruction at Reception (4 to 5 year-olds) while in other countries they only start at 7. Your multilingual home is unique and only you can decide when you’re ready. These are the next steps of the journey: ★ Your child needs to know the letters and what sounds they make. Teach them the sounds and not the letter names. One at a time. Talk about things that begin with that sound, draw pictures, play “I Spy”, ask your child to find that letter-sound whenever you’re reading together. If you’re not sure how to pronounce the sounds in isolation, here is a video. ★ When your child has already learned a few sounds, s/he can start reading words straight away. Sounding out and blending should become automatic with time. Make word lists or flashcards. Ask them to read words you know they are able to from a page you’ve been reading together. Stock up on decodable readers! Phonic books (like Bob Books) might seem uninteresting but they will build the child’s confidence. After all, they are reading a book all by themselves! ★ At the same time, teach them to form letters correctly. Yes, you can print out a worksheet. But you can also make it creative and fun: write on sand, write with their magic fingers/noses/toes in the air, make an art project, use Lego, sandpaper, you get the picture. ★ Finally, there are words in English that can’t be decoded. They are called sight wordsand need to be learned. Start with the most frequent ones like the, he, she, we, me, are, go, do, no, said and introduce only a couple at a time. These are the mechanics of reading, which should lead to the ultimate goal: comprehension. When reading, discuss the pictures, ask what they think is going to happen next, why a character acted in a particular way, how the characters are feeling and why and if they have ever been in a similar situation. Ask them to retell you the story in their own words. If you’re reading non-fiction, ask them if they know anything else about the topic or if they would like to learn more about it. Teaching and learning to read is a job that requires a lot of patience. Make sure it’s enjoyable for everyone and find what works best for your family. |
At our Free Online Meeting on Multilingualism we talked about code switching or code mixing, what to do if our children keep on mixing their languages, when it is a good sign and when we should worry (9 May 2018)
First of all, the term code switching is widely used as an umbrella term for using different languages in the same sentence, alternating them to some extent. It is not to be confused with borrowing, where a language is integrated into the other:
Ça m’étonnerait qu’on ait code-switché autant que ça! (I can’t believe we code-switched as often as that!)
Code switching can involve a word, a phrase or a sentence and there is always a base language. In these examples, the base language is French with integrations in English.
Vas chercher Marc and bribe him avec un chocolat chaud with cream on top
(Go fetch Marc and bribe him with a hot chocolate with cream on top)
Des wild guys à cheval
(Some wild guys on horseback) (Grosjean 1982)
“Code switching is not a haphazard behaviour due to some form of semilingualism but it is a well-goverend process used as a communicative stratagem to convey linguistic and social information”. (Grosjean 2013)
The reasons for code-switching are many: using the right word or expression, filling a linguistic need, marking group identity, excluding or including someone, raising our status etc.
Code-mixing, on the other hand, is a stage of bilingual language acquisition. Bilingual children naturally mix their languages. They use both languages in a single sentence. It is not a sign that the child is not learning the languages properly, on the contrary, it is a sign that the child is acquiring those languages in a quite systematic way! With mixing the languages, the child proves to naturally find interchangeable elements of the sentence.
I like to compare this code-mixing to playing with lego. Imagine you have a box full of lego in different colours. Each colour stays for another language you are acquiring. If the child wants to build a house, she can choose to build a very colourful house, or build a house with one colour only. The colourful house is the one that stays for a code-mixing conversation and the one colour house for a conversation in one language only.
Many parents fear that by mixing the languages our children will never really learn to speak one of the languages correctly, but this usually is not true.
Lanza (2004) identifies 5 parental discourse strategies:
– I personally wouldn’t advise to use this strategy because our children usually would only use languages they know we understand when talking with us, or if they use another language it is because they really don’t know the words in our languages! Pretending not to understand our children is interpreted as not being honest! I know this first hand as the one who was asked this question by people I knew were just being difficult and wanting me to “stick to only one language” and I always felt being silenced. Denying that we understand what our child is saying can stop the communication, affect the relationship – if one constantly applies this strategy !
I would also never advise teachers to use this strategy, as it can lead to complete silence. It builds a wall instead of a bridge, and when communicating with each other, we want to build bridges…
It also gives the child the opportunity to find other words, paraphrase what he/she wants to say, and keeps the conversation flowing.
We can use a mix of all these strategies (except the first one for the reasons I mentioned before) and see which one works best for us, our child, our family, and the situation we are in.
There are always situations where we feel insecure about what to do and it is ok to seek for help whenever we feel this way. Parents always should trust their gut: we know our children best and when there is anything that feels just “not right”, it is our responsibility to take action for the sake of our child. This applies to their overall wellbeing.
At what point should we worry when our child mixes the languages?
There are a few situations when we should observe our child’s code mixing a bit closer.
I know by experience that this kind of code mixing can be discouraging, but it could be only a phase. Try to find out what the reasons can be for such a mixing:
Our children can produce this kind of sentences when they are tired, or when they just switched from talking in the other language (B) and are now transitioning to talk in language A. If this phenomenon is only temporary, we shouldn’t worry too much, but if it pertains and our child seems not to be able to form one grammatically correct sentence anymore, then we should seek for help.
I would only worry if I see that the child can’t form a sentence – even an easier form of it – in the two (or more) languages correctly when talking in that language only, in a monolingual setting; even not if given time.
In fact, if this happens, communication can become almost impossible as the meaning is difficult to be understood, even by multilinguals who code-switch between the same languages!
When this happens with a child that used to talk in a comprehensive way before, we should seek for help. A Language Consultant or a Speech Pathologist who is fluent in all languages involved would be ideal.
My first advice is always to assess the situation. What makes the child struggle to form a grammatically correct sentence? It depends on the child’s age and stage of bilingual or multilingual language acquisition, the situation (formal, non formal, at school, with people the child knows or not…), the topic (if it is a familiar topic or not), and if the child is tired or stressed for any reason.
Something that always helps in these situations is to give the child the time he/she needs to recollect the thoughts and listen. Encouraging the child to talk can be done by just being silent. You can also bridge between the languages the child knows. There are several techniques that have proven to be effective. What surely never helps is to make the child feel your anxiety or put any kind of pressure into the difficult conversation: the more anxious the child becomes the more this situation becomes a problem.
What I found helped in a similar situation was singing, or playing music in the backgrouns. With the help of music, different intonations and a topic that is dear to the child, the situation is more relaxed and the child (and the adult!) feels more comfortable.
If you have any question about this topic or if you would like to discuss a personal issue, please don’t hesitate to contact me at info@UtesInternationalLounge.com. – I’m only a mail away 😉
François Grosjean, Life with Two Languages: An Introduction to Bilingualism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.
François Grosjean and Ping Li, The Psycholinguistics of Bilingualism, Wiley Blackwell, 2013.
Elizabeth Lanza, Language Mixing in Infant Bilingualism: A Sociolinguistic Perspective, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004.
The information below first appeared in the pamphlet ‘Raising Bilingual Children’ written by Antonella Sorace and Bob Ladd in May 2004 and was published by ‘The Linguistic Society of America’. It has been reproduced here in its entirety with the Society’s permission.
For further details you can email the ‘The Linguistic Society of America’ on lsa@lsadc.org or visit their website at http://www.lsadc.org.
Sorace, A. and Ladd, D.R. 2004. Raising bilingual children. Series: Frequently Asked Questions, Linguistic Society of America.
There are many reasons, but the two most common are:
In the first case, both the mother and father may want to be able to use their own language when talking to their children. This is the bilingual home situation. In the second, the parents may want to be able to use their own language at home even though their children also need to function in the world outside the front door. This is the bilingual setting situation. Our own situation is an Italian/English bilingual home in an English-speaking setting, and some of what we say here is based directly on our experience bringing up bilingual children.
The short answer is no. Children are incredibly sensitive to the different ways people speak. Even when they only hear one language, they learn very quickly about differences between the way men and women talk, the difference between polite and impolite ways of talking, and so on. For children, the bilingual situation is just a matter of another difference between people!
Fifty years ago educators throughout North America used to tell immigrant parents that it was better for their children’s schooling if they spoke English at home. Some researchers thought that early exposure to two languages put children at a disadvantage. Newer research tells us that this is not so, and there may be advantages to being bilingual (in addition to knowing more than one language), such as more flexible thinking. The disadvantages that earlier research found were generally economic disadvantages, linked to the hardships of immigrants’ lives.
Bilingual development sometimes results in slightly slower language development than for some monolingual children. Our older child was still saying things like ‘Where you are?’ instead of ‘Where are you?’ in English at four and a half. This is a normal developmental stage for monolingual English children, but they usually figure out that they have to say ‘Where are you?’ by the time they’re three or four. Our older child just took a little longer.
Like adult bilinguals, bilingual children often use words from one language when speaking the other. (This is called code-switching.) But this doesn’t mean they are confused about which language they are speaking. In our Italian-English bilingual home, a lot of our food vocabulary is Italian, and we use this even when we’re speaking English (and when English words are available). So we’ll talk about pollo instead of chicken and sugo instead of sauce. Yet in speaking to monolinguals, bilingual children are careful to use only the relevant language.
The main thing to keep in mind is that parents don’t really ‘teach’ children to speak, any more than they teach them to walk or smile. The most important things in language development are exposure and need. If children are exposed to a language in a variety of circumstances with many different people from the time they are born, and if they feel they need the language to interact with the world around them, they will learn it. If they are exposed to two languages in varied circumstances with different people from the moment they are born, and if they need both languages to communicate with the people around them, they will learn both.
No, but children can do this with no difficulty, and it doesn’t do them any harm. The hard part is making sure they have enough natural exposure to both languages. Most of the time, one of the two languages you want them to learn will be “more important” somehow, and the trick is to provide enough opportunities for them to use the “less important” one in a way that isn’t forced or artificial. The best way, if you can manage it, is to put children in situations where only the “less important” language is used so that there is no temptation to mix languages or revert to the “more important” language.
One language is likely to seem more important to children when that language is needed more frequently than the other. For example, suppose the American woman and Turkish man in the bilingual home speak English with each other. The children will notice that English is used in cases where Turkish isn’t and think that English is “more important”. But if the same family moves to Turkey, the children will notice that Turkish is used in lots of cases where English isn’t, and may decide Turkish is “more important”. Some children are very sensitive to these differences and may be reluctant to use the “less important” language—especially if other children don’t use it. Others don’t seem to mind.
When we talk about one language being “more important” here, we’re only talking about the children’s point of view! Nonetheless, many adult bilinguals are “dominant” in one of their languages. Even if the differences between their two languages are subtle, most bilinguals feel slightly more at home in one language than the other in certain settings or for talking about certain topics.
No, definitely not, especially in the bilingual home situation where the second language is likely to seem “less important” to the children anyway. Introducing the second language later is just about guaranteed to make them think it’s less important and not worth the effort.
On the other hand, in the bilingual setting situation (say, the Korean couple living in the United States), there isn’t any harm in letting children’s exposure to English begin naturally and gradually. As long as the family stays in the US and the children go to American schools, there is no risk that they will fail to learn English. Actually, the more common problem with the bilingual setting situation is that the children sometimes reject their home language in favor of the outside language.
Many experts recommend the “one-parent-one-language” method for a bilingual home. The idea is that Mommy (or Mamma, or Mutti) always speaks her own language with the children, and Daddy (or Papa, or Vati) always speaks his own language with them. This is a good basis for a successful bilingual home, but it’s not the only one, and even one-parent-one-language can go wrong.
One problem can be balance. Children need to hear both languages often and in a variety of circumstances. If they never hear the ‘less important’ language except from one parent, they may not get enough exposure for that language to develop naturally. It is especially true that when both parents understand the ‘more important’ language, the children don’t feel they need the ‘less important’ one.
In these cases it is essential to find other sources of exposure and other ways of creating the sense of need. Monolingual grandparents can be especially helpful! Can you enlist a cousin or grandmother or a paid babysitter who speaks the other language to look after the children? Is there a daycare or playgroup where they can hear the other language? Can you get videos and story tapes in the other language? All of these can make a big difference; especially exposure that involves interaction with other people, not just watching TV. When our children were small, we did things like this to reinforce Italian in a largely English-speaking setting.
Another problem is keeping the situation natural. If children feel that they are being forced to do something weird or embarrassing, they will probably resist it. Explicit rules say, speaking one language on some days and the other on others can be very hard to enforce and can help create a negative attitude.
Still another problem is exclusion. If one of the parents doesn’t speak the other’s language (in our example, suppose the American woman doesn’t speak Turkish), the children will know that every time they say something in Turkish to their father they are excluding their mother from the conversation. This may make children reluctant to speak one of the parents’ languages when both parents are present. In our experience, a bilingual home is more likely to succeed if both parents at least understand both languages. That way, nobody is ever excluded from a family conversation.
The arrival of a second child can upset the language balance in a bilingual home, and it’s common for a second child to be less fully bilingual than the first. Usually the first child speaks to the second in the ‘more important’ language, increasing the exposure the second child gets to that language and decreasing the sense of need for the ‘less important’ one. Think about what you want to do about this in advance. Come up with a strategy that fits your own situation, but it’s probably worthwhile to try to enlist the older child or children to promote the ‘less important’ language in your home situation.
Relax. Language mixing is normal where everyone speaks both languages. It doesn’t mean that the children will forget one language, and it doesn’t mean that they can’t tell the difference any more between two languages. If you scold them for speaking English it may create a negative attitude about the home language and actually make things worse. Instead, create natural situations where the children really need the home language: like calling on those monolingual grandparents again!
You can understand this kind of language mixing if you keep in mind that simple exposure is an important ingredient of children’s language development. When your children were small, they were probably more exposed to your home language – say Korean – than they were to English. Now that they are going to school, they are exposed only to English for hours a day, and they are learning all kinds of new words and new ways of using language, but only in English. They probably don’t know the Korean word for ‘notebook’ or ‘social studies’ or ‘principal’. When they use an English word in a Korean sentence, tell them what it’s called in Korean rather than worrying that they’re losing their home language. Remember, even if they end up with English as their dominant language, they can still be perfectly competent Korean speakers as well.
Baker, Colin. 1995. A Parents’ and Teachers’ Guide to Bilingualism. Multilingual Matters.
Grosjean, François. 1982. Life with Two Languages. Harvard University Press.
Harding-Esch, Edith, and Philip Riley. 2003. The Bilingual Family: A Handbook for Parents. 2nd edition. Cambridge University Press.
This video gives parents and caregivers information on what to expect when children are raised speaking more than one language and provides information on language delay versus language difference.
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