『複言語・多言語教育研究』 日本外国語教育推進機構会誌 No.7 (2019) pp.21-24

Raising multilingual children:
The simultaneous multilingual modelLÁSZLÓ Tony
1. Need assessment
Which families should use multiple languages at home? The answer for most is:
those that need to do so, that is, those in which the parents have the desire andfinancial means to pass on to the children their language and the associated culture rather than abandon them 1 . In the case of my family, where my wife and I are native
speakers of Japanese and English, respectively, each of us felt a need- emotional if
not practical- for our son to speak both of these languages. That is, both parents
strongly desired that the child could communicate them in their respective nativetongues. Concerning emotions, however, it sh ould be mentioned here thatmultilingual children do not necessarily express their emotions better in their native
tongues 2 .
After confirming that the necessity and the will to raise children multilinguallyexist, families need to consider strategies. If one chooses to raise the child to be a
so-called “simultaneous multilingual”, that is, a child who acquires multiples
languages at the same time, the first model commonly considered is OPOL, shortfor “one person, one language”. This means simply that each caregiver in the family
speaks one and only one language with the child, when communicating one -on-one.
In my case, I spoke only English with my son from his birth, while my wife spoke
only Japanese with him.
In his early childhood years in Japan, my son ’s exposure to Japanese far
exceeded his exposure to English. The cause for this was two -fold: his daily
attendance in a nursery school where only Japanese was spoken, and the inter spousal Japanese communication in our home. This imbalance reflected itsel f in his
ラズロ・小栗（2011:60）「ラズロ家（著者の実家のこと）の「言語放棄」には、経 済状況も絡んでいたかもしれない。子どもに民族語を覚えさせるのはお金がかかり過ぎる。」
2 Grosjean. “It is too simplistic to suggest that late bilinguals have emotional ties only with
their first language and no ties with their other language(s).”1- 21 -

early language competence- although his listening comprehension was at a similarlevel in Japanese and English, he chose to speak only in the former, until age three 3 .
2. Additional Languages
In some families there is an additional caregiver who speaks another language,i.e., one that is different from those employed by the primary caregivers in their
OPOL strategy. If that caregiver, typically a grandparent or live -in babysitter, uses
this other language exclusively with the child, the child wou ld be raised tocommunicate in that language, as well. In this way, the one -person, one-language
method can be extended to induce the acquisition of more than two languages.
If the society in which the family lives uses a language that is different fromthose used at home, the child will be exposed to such an additional language whenoutside the home, e.g., at school or in playgrounds. For my family, this occurred
when we moved from Tokyo, Japan, to Berlin, Germany, with our son, then six yearsof age. During our seven years there, the s ocietal language for my son was German;
it became his third language. It should be noted that there is relatively good support
for multilingual families in Germany: for example, as of 2014, there were 1035
bilingual nursery schools, covering twenty languag es, with 41 percent of them
supporting English and German 4 .
Additional languages can be introduced societally, as well, if the local
community is multilingual. This can take place, for example, in Catalunya in Spainor Quebec in Canada, where more than one language is commonly spoken (Spanishand Catalan in the former, French and English in the latter). In our case, the fourth
language for my son was Esperanto, the international auxiliary language. This
language acquisition was the result of occasional usage at home (thus, technically,
小栗・ラズロ（2008:108）「周りの人もほとんど日本語でしゃべっている。実際のところ、息子の耳に入るのは、7：3 あるいは 8：2 くらいの割合で日本語が多い。」
4 Kita.de “Bilingualer Kindergarten: Alles Zur Zweisprachige Kinderbetreuung,” “LautErhebungen des FMKS gab es im Jahr 2014 bereits 1035 bilinguale Kitas. Vor allem Englischist zur wichtigsten Sprache der Welt geworden. Sie ermöglicht, dass sich die Menschen allerNationen miteinander verständigen können. Insgesamt können Eltern in Deutschland zwischen
mehr als 20 Sprachen wählen.”3- 22 -in violation of OPOL) combined with intermittent exposure in Berlin society, whereEsperanto speakers are relatively numerous. Via monthly

gatherings, my son

acquired the language through interaction with other speakers.
3. Switching Models
OPOL is only one strategy, which may not work well for all families, and not at
all times. Another popular strategy is when the non -societal (i.e., minority)
language is spoken at home by all caregivers. Some refer to this as "Minority
Language at Home", or ML@H. In our case, my wife maintained her OPOL role asa Japanese speaker, while I switched to a hybrid system (Japanese/English) when
my son reached age ten. This included my reading aloud to him in Ja panese, rather
than in my native language 5 . As such, my family migrated from OPOL to partial
ML@H. We did this in order to boost my son's Japanese skills, as they weremaintained only in the home, whereas his English skills were being maintained
sufficiently at school and otherwise societally 6 .
4. Benefits
When the need exists and the strategies can be implemented, the obvious andarguably

mostimportantadvantageof

multilingual

child -rearing

istheaforementioned one: the family is able to communicate via the caregivers' native
languages, a matter that can be both practical and emotionally satisfying.
Additionally, it has been shown that children raised this way have a better
understanding of language structure and function than their peers. These child renalso tend to have better “selective attention”, a skill that can help them to filter out
irrelevant information 7 .
小栗・ラズロ（2014:119）「電車で登校中の間は、パパが読み聞かせをするという習慣を続けているが、最近、日本語の本にすることもある。そして「英語のわかる人が多いから」を理由に、町の 中では「秘密言語日本語」で会話するときもある。」
6 Linguistic Society of America. “Children need to hear both languages often and in a varietyof circumstances. If they never hear the "less important" language except from one parent, they
may not get enough exposure for that lang uage to develop naturally.”
7 Alvarez. “Older bilingual children show greater aptitude for thinking about and analyzing
5- 23 -

（作家）Bibliography
小栗左多里，ラズロ・トニー他（2008）『ダーリンは外国人 with BABY』メディアファクトリー.
小栗左多里，ラズロ・トニー他（2014）『ダーリンは外国人 ベルリンにお引越し』メディアファクトリー.
ラズロ・トニー，小栗左多里（2011）『英語にあきたら多言語を！～ポリグロットの真実～』アルク.
Alvarez, Grace M. Libardo “A Child's Journey to Bilingualism - Simultaneous Dual
Language Development”
https://web.archive.org/web/20110905203410/http://www.biculturalfamily.org/may06/achildsjourney.html [Accessed December 20, 2019]
Grosjean, Francois “Emotions in More than One Language ”
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/life -bilingual/201108/emotions-in-moreone-language [Accessed December 20, 2019]
Kita.de “Bilingualer Kindergarten: Alles Zur Zweisprachige Kinderbetreuung ”
https://www.kita.de/wissen/bilingualer-kindergarten/ [Accessed December 20,2019]
Linguistic Society of America. “FAQ: Raising Bilingual Children ”
https://www.linguisticsociety.org/resource/faq -raising-bilingual-children[Accessed December 20, 2019]

language when compared to monolingual peers. They demonstrate the use of more cognitive
strategies and flexibility in the use of these strategies in problem solving tasks (Pearl andLambet, 1962; Bialystok, 2001; Cummins, 1976, Hakuta, 1986). This ability to reflect on andmanipulate the elements of language correlates with later success in literacy (Adams, 1990). In
addition, bilingual children have better selective atten tion, a skill important in situations where
it is necessary to filter out irrelevant information (Bialystok, 2001).”- 24 -