From: nola@cats.ucsc.edu (Nola Van Vugt)
Newsgroups: misc.kids
Subject: Teaching your child to be bilingual
Date: 21 Nov 1992 18:18:15 GMT
Organization: University of California; Santa Cruz
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: am.ucsc.edu
Summary: Excerpt from Penelope Leach's _Babyhood_
Keywords: Approach with caution!


From time to time I'll read a posting here from someone who has decided
to "teach their child a second language".  This isn't an issue that
ever came up with our kids because my husband and I, while being
functional in a couple of other languages, are far from fluent in
anything but English.  However, as with most issues on the net, I do
have an opinion on the subject (surprise!) so I finally dug out my old
copy of _Babyhood_ by Penelope Leach (Knopf, 1983) and looked up what
she has to say about language development.  She has quite a bit to say
about it actually--social learning is probably this book's strongest
section.  So herewith is the excerpt on bilingualism:

"Infants are clearly able to distinguish the speech sounds of all
languages at least until the have discovered that certain sounds
communicate and that others do not.  If follows that any sounds, from
any language-group, which *do* communicate, can be used by the child.
An infant's language-learning is principally facilitated by the
experience of effective communication in shared play with loved
adults.  Therefore if he experiences this kind of comunication in two
languages, from the beginning of his life he will come to use them
both.....[Leach describes how a child learns language in a truly
bi-lingual situation]
Complications sometimes set in, however, where the family is not
"truly bilingual".  If both languages are to be equally learned, both
must give the child equal feedback and reward.  For this to come
about, parents usually need not only be to be equally competent in
both languages but to use both with equal spontaneity.  Often this is
not the case.  As an example, consider an Italian family, long
resident in America and long accustomed to conducting their lives and
realtionships in English.  Both parents had retained total fluency in
Italian and used it spontaneously on rare visits to their families in
Naples.  At such times both maintained that they "thought in Italian"
but for the rest of the year only an Italian visitor or newspaper
disturbed them from thinking in Englush.  When their child was born
the decided to giver her the benefit of their mother tongue.  They
decided, as a matter of policy to talk to her in Italian some of the
time and to encourage her to learn Italian as well as English words.
Policy turned out to be the enemy of fluency.  The parents stayed
alert to Italian-sounding early words and fed these back to the baby
in that language, but most of the time they spoke to her in English
and, of course, that was the language she heard used between them and
form other people.  Around her first birthday, the parents began to
insist that she produce Italian from time to time.  She would comment
excitedly to her mother about a bus that was passing.  Instead of
responding to her interest and enlarging on what she had said--by
saying "yes, isn't it a big bus?" or words to that effect--her mother
would ignore the content of the message of excitement and tell her to
say "autobus".  Over a period of months, the little girl became
extremely confused.  By the time she was two she was saying very
little in any language except screaming tantrums.  Language evolves
under the stimulus of pleasurably shared communication.  Attempts to
teach it rather than simply encourage and respond to it, usually, as
in this case, involve more rejection than the infant can easily stand.
[Leach goes on to describe other situations where the parents do not
share a common language but struggle to communicate in an acquired
third language, or where one parents native language becomes a
"private second language between that parent and child, closely linked
with affectionate situations such as nighttime lullabies" but where
the child does not actually learn to speak that langage until much
later.]
At this stage of our knowledge it seems clear that a child will
acquire whatever language brings him the rewards of effective
communication with people he cares about, and that these rewards come
from being readily understood and richly responded to.  Truly
bilingual parents who spontaneously interact with the infant in
interchangeable languages certainly do not need to be concerned lest
they muddle him.  But all parents, single-language speakers as well as
multi-linguists, who concern themselves with forms of speech rather
than its content, with how the child talks rather than with what he is
trying to say, should be concerned lest they spoil for their child
what should be a joyous business:  talking with someone."
Newsgroups: misc.kids