Does your child also speak bilingual?

Reality and Ideas Surrounding bilingual education for children.

“Everyone recognises the importance of bilingual education for children, but many parents face practical problems.”

Then what is bilingual education?

• Children’s Brain: Infinite language available
• Bilingual education for infants, virtual imagination of “being able to slow down.”
• Bilingual education, Vocabulary acquisition.
• Social and cognitive advantages of bilingualism.

In countries where English is an official national language, such as Australia, raising children as bilingual speakers can be rugged.

In particular, if parents’ native language is not widely used, persistence and effort are required to maintain their children’s bilingual skills.
The conventional wisdom about bilingual education can be looked at and discussed. What approach is needed for your child’s successful bilingualism?

In the case of immigrants, I think it will be a must-have concern when they have children.

How should we teach our children another language along with English? Learning more than one language has many advantages.

Experts say that speaking bilingual is worth trying because it can bring many social and cognitive advantages to children.

Learning and using bilingual language from an early age requires a lot of effort and various myths and distrust. First of all, I often worry that teaching young children multiple languages simultaneously is not a burden or overload for learning.

According to Dr Roy Leasing, a sociolinguist, children’s brains can distinguish between different languages from the moment they are born. In other words, as long as you learn in the right way, no part will be overloaded at all. Dr Leasing said the study found that the number of languages the brain can use through learning is not fixed and stressed that there is no limit to the number of languages that children can learn if they enter quality and abundant amounts of linguistic content. It is also said that the most important thing for children to learn a language is to make mistakes. It is said that it plays a vital role in language acquisition because you can learn the right content about that part by making mistakes.

A common question asked is those bilingual children often slow down?

Children may speak slowly, but scientific studies have shown that learning bilingualism does not prove that speaking is slow. For bilingual children, it means that when they first start learning to speak, they learn vocabulary through two languages about the same object. In the end, this means that in terms of the total amount of speech a child learns, fewer words are acquired for each language when receiving vocabulary at once than for children who know only one language. Therefore, considering only the children in learning speech, development may be delayed due to these characteristics. Experts say the critical thing is to understand what the child understands rather than the vocabulary the child uses.

Also, over time, bilingual children will have much more word sets than children who learn through only one language system, so in a way, they will have twice as many linguistic assets. For this reason, we have a more decadent expression system in cognitive development or social development, which can eventually serve as an advantage of bilingual speech.

So, from the perspective of parents trying to teach bilingualism, what language would it be helpful to communicate with their children? It seems that there are many problems with going to extremes, such as children trying not to use another language when they come home when they communicate in English outside or being afraid of using English out when parents use another language at home.

Generally, a lot is that one parent speaks one language and the other parent communicates with the child using another language to learn both languages evenly. Experts say this approach is not recommended. From a realistic point of view, it is never easy for two parents to communicate with their children using only different languages. It is not a strategy that can be maintained continuously as conversations increase and deepen as the child grows. According to linguist Dr Aniko Hathos, one in four children who have acquired a language through this single-parent language strategy fails bilingualism.

Does that kind of education confuse children?

It is challenging for children to distinguish between the two parents and the two languages clearly. In particular, the problem is that when English-speaking parents do not adequately understand the culture or traditions of second language-speaking parents, their children grow up and use English outside the house, which can lead to family conflicts or exclusion from family activities.

In countries where English is the official language, parents who communicate with their children in languages other than English will inevitably be alienated from all family activities.

The better way of education recommended by experts is for parents to speak one language but change their language use depending on the situation. For example, when your family is at home, you can use your mother language, but you can use English together when you go to church.

Then, since the family changes the language by situation and place without feeling divided by language, it will be much easier and more flexible for children to understand emotionally. However, in this case, if the child is young, they will have more time to stay at home, so they may be worried because they are not good at English when it is time to go to daycare or school.

Many bilingual families are worried about their children’s English proficiency as they approach school. Experts say you don’t have to worry too much about this. Even if you go to school without speaking English well, you can catch up quickly. In particular, additional support is often provided for students whose English is a second language in many immigrant areas. In addition, many people’s experiences prove that if you go to school and hang out with your friends, your English proficiency will naturally improve accordingly. Therefore, experts point out that it is not a wrong strategy to teach the native language spoken by a smaller population than English.

If you grow up bilingual like this, it will significantly help your children’s overall development.

The research results also support this. Language pathology experts say that they can help their children’s acquisition of English and their parent’s native language at home. They can get the best educational acquisition and social and emotional development when communicating in various languages.

Source: Trinity Tuition College (www.trinitytuitioncollege.com.au)

Written by: Donghyeon Lee