Monolingual Parents Raising Bilingual Or Multilingual Children – Is That Possible?
Of course and absolutely! To successfully raise a bilingual child you might need to put more effort in than mixed-language couples, but this really depends on the language of your environment:
A. Does your environment provide the same language you and your partner speak ? This will mean you will have to invest a lot of effort to expose your child to another language.
B. Or is the dominant language of your environment (language of the country/school/nursery) different from yours ? In that case you will be faced with relatively low effort. Below is a summary of key challenges and recommendations for the high effort scenario.
Monolingual parents in a same-language environment (e.g. English speaking parents in an English speaking country)
You are speaking your native language to your child(ren) and the environment you live in surrounds your children with that same language as well. Your environment does not help you with your goal to bring your children up bi-lingually, all the effort will have to come from you.
Parental Effort Required for Bilingual Children: High Effort
Special Challenges: Enough second language exposure in your children’s life.
Special Advice: Find others in the same boat and tackle the project together.
Parental Effort:
Your children are spending all their time in one language, be it in the environment (school/friends) or at home. In order to give your children the gift of bilingualism you have to “adopt” a new language into your DAILY life. For your children to eventually become fluent in a language, they need to have regular, continuous exposure to it – a 1 hour/week language club alone is not enough (although this would be a start and could be the basis for a later increase in exposure). If you aim for bilingualism, i.e. sophisticated language skills – as opposed to basic skills – your children should be exposed to the language for at least 1 hour a day. As the environment does not help you, all the effort will have to come from you – but it will be worth it ! You need to find enough language opportunities for your children which they can enjoy (personal interactions and media), plan trips to the country, show an interest/respect in the people from the country and maybe learn the language yourself. A good idea is to join or start a support group to surround yourself by others in a similar situation who can encourage you along the way.
Special Challenges:
You need to be very organised and maybe also creative to keep enough exposure to the 2nd language in your life, as all language input will come from third parties. Your children might already have a full calendar of after-school activities and you might have budget restrictions which don’t allow you to add more classes/courses or tutors.
From a motivational perspective your challenge is to make the exposure to the new language fun and enjoyable for your children rather than a chore. This can be done by choosing the right quality with the help of a good support network and by varying the type of language resource you choose.
Special Advice:
1. Get support: Join a support network and find other families in the same situation. Teaming up with others in the same situation makes your job much easier. Not only do you have others to share your experiences and challenges with, you can also bring together enough children to start new clubs/courses. You can swap materials to keep the language input new and interesting without spending more money. Your children might also find it more fun and less daunting to see other children with similar background in the same situation. A support network can get you in touch with equally committed families and save you the job of having to find new language opportunities by phoning around.
2. Build your own resource library. Start collecting ideas and sources for language resources which can help you create extra exposure of your children to the second language, e.g. media (TV, DVD, books, music, and interactive computer games). You can find a selection of resources online at the Multilingual Network.
3. If you can, read to your children in the second language. You can read books in a second language to your child – provided your language skills are good enough. This is a great way to extend vocabulary.
4. Nourish and build your children’s pride in making the effort to learn another language. Mono-lingual peers (and their parents) might not understand your motivation to exposing your child to a foreign language. Their comments might make you/your children unsure of whether it is all worth it. General advice: never take advice from someone on something, unless they have done it successfully themselves ! Surround yourself with people who are positive and supportive rather than holding you back. As your children’s school/peers might not reward/recognise your child’s new skills, you should praise your child lots and highlight to your children regularly how wonderful they are being able to speak in two languages, keeping friendships with children from different countries etc. Don’t take it for granted, talk about it!
Silke Rehman is a co-active life coach specializing in helping powerful women, who dream of making a real difference in this world. She coaches because she loves seeing her clients grow and achieve things they did not think were possible. Silke shares her thoughts and expertise with the world at http://www.developandgrow.com and you can buy her book “Make Your Child Multilingual!” here Raising Bilingual & Multilingual Children
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Silke_Rehman
Related posts
Tags: child, children, money, online, parent, parents, school