Raising Bilingual Children - Links and Blogs

As we all know, the internet is a big maze and if there is a topic dear to your heart, most likely somebody else has written about it already. Same is true for blogs about raising bilingual children. I have put together a short overview of sites I found helpful and informative, most of them have even more links for you to follow and spend endless hours reading and stepping further into the net…

First of all, a good collection of bilingual family blogs can be found on the homepage of the Bilingual/ Bicultural Family Network. They also have a link to the Multilingual Family Magazine, daily bilingual tips, and a resource page with playgroups, publications, organizations as well as general support links and a monthly newsletter.

For a good overview with links to articles and blogs, UK based, click here.

A review of English books about raising bilingual children can be found in this blog.

There is also a publication called the bilingual family newsletter, to which you can subscribe with PayPal.

If you want to read a blog about the academic side and current research about Bilingualism, try this blog by a group of US researchers or Claudia Rinaldi’s site.

Finally, there is a You Tube channel devoted to raising bilingual children with lots of videos.

Enjoy your browsing!

Dominant Language

If you are raising your children bilingually, sooner or later, a dominant language will emerge. While they might be able to communicate in both, there will be a language they prefer and a language they default to. It will most likely be the language they are more exposed to, that their friends speak and that they experience most of life in.

Even adults, who speak more than one language fluently, are not equally fluent it both, they will have times or topics in which they prefer one over the other. When I was pregnant with my first child, I sometimes struggled to tell my parents about it on the phone in German, since all Doctors visits and exams where in English and I had not been exposed to much of that topic while I lived in Germany. German-Greek friends of mine always go to Greece in the summer and thus the kids learned how to sail – and all sailing vocabulary that goes along with it – in Greek and would be hard-pressed to talk about it in another language. If you live in a country that speaks another language you are fluent in, it is only natural that you will expand your vocabulary exponentially there. To this day my specialized seafood and kitchen prep vocabulary is (only) in French, after working in a restaurant in Corsica for 2 summers. Certain feelings will also be dominated by what language you experienced it in. A Russian colleague that lived in France for his teenage years always thought about falling in love in French terms! Friends of mine, to whom I felt like an adopted daughter, would sometimes address me in Romanian in a very emotional moment, because that was their language of family connection.

Finally, I could always tell I had assimilated to a point and started living in the other languages, when I started to dream in it…

When you have children, they will decide at some point, which language they communicate in to each other. If you have a mono-lingual household and a different-speaking environment, they will most likely stick with the inside-outside division of language. In the case of one-parent-one language, they might continue to switch, but more likely will eventually choose one - often the dominant language of the country they live in. (Thus my children by now communicate in English and only rarely switch to German, when I enter the room - they will, however, still always address me in German).

If your children start to show preference for a language that is not yours, it does not mean that they love you less. Of course you want them to experience the important parts of life in the language you grew up with, but that is sometimes impossible. So instead of looking at the loss - can’t recite the poems I grew up with, don’t read all the children's books I identified with, don’t hum songs from my culture when drawing, don’t have joyous outbursts in my language, don’t identify with my country’s team at the Olympics - try to focus on the gains – broader cultural understanding and being bilingual. I know it can be hard at times. If your child is asked whether they prefer to speak X or Y (which some well-meaning, interested strangers do), and they pick *the other* language, it can be like a stab in the back. But they don’t know that, they just say what they feel. If you move countries, the tables might turn to your favor. All you can do for now, is hang on to you language and connect it to as many positive experiences as you possibly can.

Tricks to keep the kids bilingual!

Here is a brief list of ways to incorporate a foreign language into you household:

The best way to teach your kids is, of course, speaking to them a lot and only in the target language. But our lives are busy, we have to work and do chores, so we are not constantly able to shower our children with speech.

However, if you have the time, make it count. As tempted as I am by the beautiful English books in our house and at the library, I ONLY read German ones to the kids. (It has the added benefit that I can reread my childhood favorites and make a connection to “When Mama was a little girl…”) If the kids want a specific English book or brought a book home from school, they have to wait for their Dad to come home and read with them. This division of books has been there from the very beginning and when we got a new one, the first question often was “Is this a Mama book or a Papa book?”.

When they got older, I also purchased some books on CD for them to listen to and 80% of the time we listen to German children’s songs in the car - especially around Christmas time! If this is the only entertainment available, they tend not to complain and I often get rewarded by hearing them sing the songs in their rooms later!

TV in our house is quite restricted. We avoided commercial television from the beginning and when we started to introduce DVDs, we did so only in German! The combination of kids occupied + learning another language + defined end of TV time was priceless for us! For a while they didn’t realize some movies could have different language tracks. I remember my youngest coming home from the dentist (who had a TV in the waiting room) telling me incredulously: “Mama, Nemo spoke ENGLISH!” By now, we also own English DVDs – mainly given as presents – but I still make a point to alternate languages when it comes to TV. I just feel that, if they are already watching TV at least they can broaden their vocabulary at the same time.

The kids have learned quite a bit of German from watching movies – just think of the fish and ocean words in “Finding Nemo” or the car and repair vocabulary in “Cars”. Plus the characters quite often use expression I would never use! Too funny when you hear your child express his frustration like a pirate! This brings me to an important point: Your child will only have the breadth of language that YOU speak – and your active vocabulary is much smaller that your passive one, especially when talking to a child! So make sure you expose your child to a broad variety of language – fairy tales, science books, TV, classic and modern children’s stories. And explain and rephrase often with your own words. In addition let them hear a variety of accents – books on tape read by actors or authors as well as family and friends from different parts of your country. These days, it is easier than ever to stay connected - we talk to grandparents and relatives on Skye, once a week on the phone and recently our oldest started typing emails in German to his Opapa! 

Finally, if your children start to find it tedious to communicate in your language, there is one thing that will get them asking in whatever language necessary: candy. Yes, it’s bribery, but in my house, gummibears have to be asked for in German! And in a friend’s house, where the children are in their teens and rarely still speak French, the afternoon snack is a special treat – French Madeleines or pastry and café au lait. While this is served, there are only French expressions of delight heard!

School age – realizing, most other families are monolingual!

While my children had realized that some of our friends spoke only one language with their parents, we lived a suburb of Chicago where we attended a Moms&Tots group with international families and I had organized a German play group. They regularly played with other children, who switched between German and English and visited other houses where the children addressed their parents in a different language (Greek and French). In the Montessori preschool, some Chinese and Russian children did not speak English in the beginning, but the children would always find a way of communicating, and French was taught by a native speaker.

It wasn’t until my oldest started Kindergarten at 5 (the equivalent of the UK Reception or the German Vorschule), that the majority of the children around him spoke English, and only English. It was that year, my oldest in Kindergarten and the younger one in preschool, when the kids picked English as their main language of communication amoung them. I fought if for a while, but it was a lost battle. It was already hard enough for them to come home and tell me what happened at school in German, when they experienced it in English. (This sort of translation work is a challenge even for adults!) So when they relaxed, reenacted and played, they switched to English, unless it was a German board game or I was playing with them. Now, 3 years later, English is basically the only language they speak to each other, while still addressing me in German. It pains me sometimes, but there is not much I can do without forcing them. I console myself with the fact, that when they visit my family in Germany, for a couple of weeks a year, German becomes dominant again.

With the fact that practically every other child in school speaks a certain language, which is also the language of instruction, the national language becomes overwhelming. Not only in simple vocabulary and exposure, but socially and emotionally. A big part of the children’s life will be in one specific language and carry with it feelings and impressions, that are untranslatable.

Sooner or later, there will come a time, when children want to be like their peers. Speaking something different will become “uncool”. At this point, you might have to decide between your children telling you their feelings in the other language, because they are easily accessible there, or having them struggle to tell you or tell you less translated into your language. It is not something I am looking forward to!

So far, in our house, we have reached the following compromise: When we have a dinner conversation about the day, we will jump between languages. Depending on which parent asks the question, the kids will answer in that language and if the other parent wants details, he/she will ask in their language. This gives me the chance to rephrase some things they have told their dad in English and ask for more information. It’s a constant back and forth and has caused quite some headaches for our guests (even or especially if they could speak both languages), but the kids are used to it by now. This of course is only possible, because my husband has learned enough German (first through a college class, then by simply listening and growing with the kids) to keep the conversation flowing.

A funny side effect from the strict division of me only speaking German and my husband only English has been that my oldest son now insists that I only speak German to him and complains, if I address him in English. This causes some difficulties, when I try to do homework with him. So he reads the math problem in English, but we talk about the solution and calculate in German and then he retranslates his answer into English to write it down. At least for English spelling sentences, there is no translation anymore – that was close to ridiculous in the beginning! (Though one advantage of being bilingual with spelling exercises is that similar sounding words - like “there”, “their” and “they’re” – are easy to tell apart, since they translate as completely different words). I am not sure whether this approach of homework is sustainable, most other bilingual families I know do their homework in the school language! But for now, we are sticking with our method (and reading homework is done with their dad in English every night).

At some point, you will also have to decide if & when you want to teach your children to read and write in the other language. For us, since German and English share an alphabet, it was not that hard. I imagine if you want to teach Russian, Greek, Arabic or especially idiomatic languages like Japanese or Chinese, the efforts must be enormous.

When I taught my oldest son to read German, we used the long summer holiday when he had turned 5. At the time we lived in the US and had 3 months to work with. We started with the alphabet - how some letters are pronounced differently - and then moved on to whole words. The next summer, we read beginners’ books, which I had ordered from Germany. For my second son, the process was a bit faster, since he could already read English and understood the concept of letter-sound-word contraction. But it also meant he made more mistakes but having the default English sound of a letter stuck in his head. This summer, we will move on to books with him.

If you can’t imagine teaching you child how to read at home, have a look on the internet. Many areas have foreign language schools, often coupled with a religion (for Greek or Arabic) or Saturday schools (Korean school in the US and Turkish school in Germany come to mind), or as a parents’ initiative!

Bilingual Baby Steps - Just do it!

WHY would you want your child to speak with you in a language that is not the language of the country you live in and/or that your partner does not understand? Especially if this language is NOT one of the major world languages, not commonly used for trade or communication, shared with few people in the global world?

BECAUSE: Language is so much more than a means of communication. Languages is a maker of cultural and personal identity, it is part of you, if you grew up speaking it and will provide a deep emotional connection.

Along with language come worldviews, philosophies and identities, expressed for example in common sayings or metaphors. Certain cultural concepts only make sense in that language and are lost in translation. For example, “blue” has a different connotation in English (moody, sad) than in German (drunk), so even if it gets perfectly translated, the metalanguage is different.

If you want to transfer some of the values that you grew up with to you child, I am sure there are certain expressions that your parents used – would they have the same ring in the new language? Maybe, but more likely not. So if you want to share you childhood with your child (never mind your life philosophy), the best way would be with (and in) your childhood language, regardless of the “commercial usefulness” of your mother tongue.

So when should you start? Right away!

If you want to raise your child bi-lingually / bi-culturally, you should start at birth (if not earlier by communicating to you child in the womb). I spoke and sang only German to my children from the start. When we looked at picture books, I said the German word. Reading the same book with their dad, meant hearing that word in English.

If your child starts to speak, encourage it, even if it is the “other” language. Always be positive - but stick with your language! Thus my answer to a child saying “dog” would be “Ja, HUND!”, and not “Nein, Hund”. Acknowledge that they identified correctly, but make sure to provide the word you want it to use with YOU. At some point, if the child knows both words, but the other language is said first, you could ask “What does Mommy call it?”.

There is a common misconception that teaching two languages will delay your child’s speech development and often it is said that especially boys should learn one language first, since their linguistic abilities lag behind the girls. I can not stress enough how WRONG this is. I have two boys (one with a disability) and both developed their language skills at the same speed than other children. When my oldest had a problem with answering “Why?” he figured it out in German and English within 2 days – it was a cognitive problem, not a linguistic one! A Hungarian friend of mine in Germany has a handicapped child and was told from every professional she ever saw NOT to confuse the boy with two languages. She didn’t listen and now, even though he might never be able to read, the child understands and speaks German and Hungarian. (It also enabled her to connect with her child on a deeper emotional level while she was struggeling to come to terms with the diagnosis).

If you think you want to be on the safe side, not jeopardize language development and wait with the introduction of a second language until the children are older, consider this:

Most likely, if children are older, they will not speak the new language as a mother tongue, and, depending on their musicality, they might develop an accent. After the age of 6 months, children start to hear sounds selectively and shut out words with different sound patterns than their parents’ language. The ability to hear and therefore produce nuances (like the German Umlauts, the African clicks or the Chinese tonal heights) rapidly declines thereafter.

Starting to speak in a different language all of a sudden at a certain age will also probably be a shock to the child. It would be hard for them to understand why one parent will not speak ‘their’ common language anymore and the child might therefore refuse speaking the new words at all. In order to rationally understand the reasoning that you want them to learn a second language, the child would have to be quite a bit older (at least 7, I would assume) at the same time this is when window of ideal language acquisition is almost over.

For you, the ‘new’ native speaker, the discipline of breaking the habit of speaking to your children in the other language would have to be enormous. You would probably find yourself switching back often, if understanding is too slow or painful. That does not mean that you should not try, if you want to share your language with your child, but – for whatever reason – have not started yet. It just means it would be be a hard 6 months at least for the two of you, until you can converse in the new language and it would require a lot of discipline and patience for both parent and child.

Older children still can achieve native fluencey – they have a better shot at it then adults and obviously most people learn foreign languages when they are older.

Finally, there is never a guarantee that you children will be fluent in your language anyway: Just imagine your previously bi-lingual child hitting the teens and refusing to speak anything else than his/her peers… – but more about this in the next blog,

Raising Bilingual Children - Intro & Research

If you and your partner speak two different mother tongues or you live in a country that speaks another language than your family at home, you could give your children a great gift for life: two fluently spoken languages - BILINGUALISM!

There is plenty of research that suggests, children who learn a second language are more creative and better at solving complex problems. They develop meta-linguistic awareness (natural awareness of how language works), cognitive flexibility (since choosing between languages can develop a flexibility of thinking that can be applied to other problem solving areas) and social sensitivity early on. (Nursery World 07 May 2009) Studies at Goldsmith University in London showed that bilinguals outperform similar monolingual peers on both verbal and nonverbal tests of intelligence and tend to achieve higher scores on standardized tests (in secondary school), if their first language is supported alongside English.

In addition, individuals who speak more than one language have the ability to communicate with more people, read more literature, and benefit more fully from travel abroad and knowing a second language also gives people a competitive advantage in the workforce.

So academic talk aside, how do you raise bilingual children in today’s world?

There are basically two ways of raising bilingual children that almost always work: the one-parent-one-language approach and the home-vs-outside language evironment. Other options - like language 1 in the morning, language 2 in the afternoon or different languages on different days of the week (yes, I’ve met a family with this approach!) – tend to confuse the children more than encourage learning.

In our house, we have used the one-parent-one-language solution ever since the children were babies. I speak only German to the kids, my husband speaks only English. It just so happens that we have also lived in English speaking countries for their childhood so far, which nicely balanced out the fact that my husband is home less – so more German at home and English in the evenings with dad and during the day with others. If mom and environment speak the same language, dad will have a harder time to teach his language, if he is not home during the day.

For the rest of the blog, I will report from this perspective – teaching German in an English speaking environment - in order to avoid the constant “mother tongue or non-environmental language” vs. “local language or main environmental language”…

Raising children bilingually, requires a lot of discipline from the parent that does speak the local tongue – it is sometimes VERY tempting for me to slip into English, even if it is just the occasional word. Here are the main pitfalls I have discovered –

a) Using single English words in a German sentence, because I can’t think of the German quick enough or the English is less complicated (there are some REALLY long words in German, where the English has just a syllable or two)

b) Speaking to a friend / neighbor / colleague in English and inadvertently saying something to the child without switching

c) Being in a playgroup and separating a fight, having to speak English so that the other child (and mother!) understands that my child is being punished and has to apologize. Same goes for having house guests that do not speak German and to be polite speak English – and of course announce plans for the day or meal times in English so that everybody understands.

d) Having a spouse that does not speak your language and insists on his language to be spoken only when home. (Luckily that’s not the case in our household, but I know plenty where it is)

Some solutions that I have found to the above mentioned issues:

You need to really try to never let the other language creep in. Your mother tongue will deteriorate by itself ANYWAY - slowly over time, if you are not practicing with anybody else but your children. If you let foreign words take a hold, the mixing will accelerate and you (and your children) will end up speaking a mish-mash that’s incomprehensible to most people but you. So discipline is key and self-checks are recommended.

I have always made a point to tell friends, playgroups and relatives that I speak only German to my children, that it is not meant to offend, but that it is necessary for their language development. It would never say anything about them behind their back and if it concerns another child, I will say it in English, too. All of my friends have been very understanding of this issue, even though I imagine it must be hard at times, listening to me explaining something complicated in German to my son while they don’t understand a thing and wait patiently! When we have guests, I make sure that all important information is told in both languages, FIRST German, then English. (Even better, I tell the kids in German and they can go tell Grandma & Granddad in English.)

Coming up in the next blogs: Bilingual Baby Years & School Age, Tips and Trick to smuggle the second language into everyday life, how to deal with a doubtful / resistant partner & family!