bilingual education

[openoceans]

Hello mums! I'm new to mumsnet, so bare with me if I stumble along the way.

I'm a Canadian living in South Korea and trying to encourage Korean moms to speak English to their children from birth. I've developed a program that allows them to mimic dialogues directly to their babies. I am not encouraging them to use only English, but rather to speak two languages to their babies.

I'm also not encouraging them to diverge from the dialogues. There are strict guidelines and rules in place with this program to ensure that the mothers mimic only what they hear and not ad lib on their own.

I'm looking for your opinions on this issue. Do you think it's plausible to build a strong foundation in a language by having it spoken to you at home by your mom when that language isn't native to her?
I appreciate all of your comments in advance.

If the mothers are only allowed to mimic your dialogues, then they're not speaking another language at all; they're being robots.

Language is about communication, interaction and spontaneity. Particularly where young babies are concerned. I can't see anyone taking anything worthwhile from this. They'd be far better off letting their babies learn English when they get to school and in the meantime to concentrate on good natural mum-and-baby interactions.

This is passive language exposure- just a voice repeating something it's been told to, it's not really very different from plonking them in front of English-speaking television. And all research shows that children do not become bilingual through passive language exposure.

We do have posters who bring their children up bilingual in a language that is not their (the parent's own). But they do it by speaking to them, by interacting with them, not by parroting somebody else's dialogues. All even an older child would learn from this would be repeating certain dialogues- do you really call that being bilingual?

it sounds insane

Hi openoceans.
Are you yourself bilingual, or have you raised any bilingual children yourself?

My Swedish nephew had a dinosaur toy that did exactly what you are asking those mums to do: it repeated certain phrases in English. And no, it didn't make him grow up bilingual

But personally, I would have thought bonding with my baby was far too important for me to be content with the role of that dinosaur.

Besides, you mention dialogues. Does that mean the babies have to speak too? And how do you ensure they stick to the script?

I would go as far as asking, have you raised any children yourself? Do you actually know what mothers and fathers do when their children learn to speak?

My polish inlaws have sent our kids films, music cds and audio book in polish. It has not made them trilingual. (They are bilingual already, English / Norwegian.)

I have bilingual children - English/Gaelic.

They are bilingual because they speak Gaelic all day every day at school, in a fully interactive environment and they also speak to their friends/each other in Gaelic.

I don't think that people repeating dialogues that they don't themselves understand and cannot diverge from is useful. There needs to be freedom to express oneself and to improvise and try - just as when children are learning to speak in their native language.

I don't know a huge amount about language education but I do know one of the big things in bilingual learning is that each parent speaks only their own language to the child. I don't try to speak Gaelic to my kids as I can't. I let their fluent teachers do that.

They may learn to parrot English phrases but as far as I am aware they won't learn to "speak" it.

Sorry.

Sounds like a recipe for disaster. Ideally the 2nd language should be acquired from a native speaker.

Doesn't have to be a native speaker, sowhatsit; there are success stories involving non-native but highly competent speakers. But it has to be somebody who is prepared to actually speak to the child, rather than repeating set phrases.

and weegiemum, you don't have to follow the one-parent-one-language approach; we never have, and my children are fluent

OK, firstly let me say that I am no expert at all re:languages. I can barely 'do' conversational French but I am a mother (OK Cory?). I truly think that if I had been given expert guidance on what to say (and how to say it) in French, to my DC when they were babies, that they would stand a much better chance of mastering the language than just being exposed to it at school. Would/could they then become bilingual? Maybe.

I assume this is just the beginning phase on the road to such DCs becoming bilingual. Presumably when the children are older there will opportunities for overseas travel and exposure to native speakers.

But the OP didn't speak of giving expert guidance, dolly, but of providing dialogues that you had to follow and weren't allowed to deviate from. I can't imagine anything less like normal mother-baby interaction.

I really do not believe that a few dialogues will make any difference to your child's later chances of becoming bilingual, they can equally well pick up the passion from a committed school teacher.

If you are really talking about raising them bilingual from the start, then you need a lot of input from a confident speaker and (as all us bilingual mums will testify) masses of commitment.

openocean, I assume, as you have not returned to this thread, that you have very little linguistic training, and know very little about how children aquire language(s).

Try google Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa, she has written many very good books on the subject. I read "raising multilingual children" when pregnant with my oldest son.

tbh unless you are prepared and able to follow it through with age-apropriate speech when they are toddlers and pre-school children and school children, then I really don't think it will make any difference to their later opportunities of speaking the language. They won't remember what they heard as babies.

My db was actually fluent in Korean at age 2, was never exposed to the language after this, and doesn't remember a single word; even attempts to expose himself to the language has not triggered any memories. So this suggests that a baby who heard a few dialogues but didn't have that built on in a more advanced way later on, would be at no particular advantage.

To put it another way- if you only have bare conversational French, that is all you are going to be able to give your dcs. They are not going to become native speakers through you. And you can equally well teach them what you know when they are 7: a bright child can pick up bare conversational abilities in a language very quickly through tuition. But a baby needs a different approach.

Not saying you cannot become bilingual if you don't start before a certain age. I count myself as pretty well bilingual and I was taught English as an older child. But I don't think I would have been better at it if my Mum had been repeating the phrase book to me on the changing table.

The Welsh organisation Twf has loads of resources to encourage people to bring up bilingual children in Wales. Their advice:

Homes where nobody speaks Welsh

If parents are eager for their children to become bilingual, there are successful ways of achieving this goal in Wales even when there is no Welsh spoken in the home or the family. Young children can pick up Welsh at a nursery, at a playgroup/Cylch Meithrin and with a childminder before attending Welsh-medium school.

Parents' attitudes, encouragement and interest are vital to a child?s second language development. Praising the child when they hear the child speaking Welsh is a simple way of showing encouragement. Welsh language support may also be provided by English speaking parents in the form of CD's, books, posters and games.

All of you bilingual mums are in the fortunate position of being able to provide opportunities for your DC that the rest of us cannot being as neither DH nor I have any other language.

Is there a difference in raising them bilingual from the start and them picking it up later, in terms of their command of the language? I realise that being truly bilingual is about more than just command of the language, but maybe the OP is not aiming for 'true' bilingualism.

I can't see that it is very much different than teaching a child to read 'early'. There must be a middle ground between sticking to the dialogue and being a robot/automaton.

That sounds quite frankly ludicrous. I don't think it will help children to become bilingual any more than a tape recorder would, because that's all these mothers would be acting as - human tape recorders.

As other people have pointed out language acquisition is not a passive process and set dialogues will not improve mother/baby communication, in fact I'd go as far as to say it would actually harm it. What happens when the baby tries to 'communicate' back with the mother in a new and innovative way? And is this going to produce older children who are only going to know what to say as a formulaic repsonse if someone asks them a specific question? It's a form of linguistic programming and mental conditioning, not langauge acquisition! I'd also like to add that children don't learn language out of context the way that adults do. They need to be asked the question "Do you want a drink?" and see the visual cue and experience giving the right or wrong response to see whether they get the drink or not. Adults can translate what a drink is and the point of the question in their head because they already have that point of reference. They can learn language from vocab lists and conjugate verbs because they can translate it back to their own language in their heads.

Cat = mental picture of cat
Cat = un chat
un chat = mental picture of a cat

If you don't know what a cat is for starters then you can't complete that process. So if this were to stand any chance of working you would also need to use realia alongside the dialogue.

The native speaker/non-native speaker point you've raised is an issue if the person speaking the langauge does not have a firm grasp of the language - both vocabulary and underlying grammar - and at least a reasonable accent! I very much doubt that these mothers have near native competency and a good accent although you probably could train them to have a passable accent which could be understood by an English speaker, but to develop strong foundations in a language that's not enough and you'd actually be harming the children's chances of acquiring good accents in the future because you would have to undo any inadvertent mispronunciations drilled into them by their mothers.

The best you can hope for in my view with this approach is that children will gain some familiarity with grammatical structure and english phonemes but they can get that from audio and audio-visual input where it IS spoken by native speakers without harming their relationship with their mother.

[not yet a mother, fluent in two other languages, qualified EFL teacher and childcare professional, studying applied linguistics]

Whether I spoke English or Norwegian to my children when they were babies, I did not just say phrases at them.

Remember when you were changing your babys nappy, you would talk all the time, referring to what you were doing, you did not expect a response, but you knew that you were describing accurately what you were doing. "Hello baby, I can smell you have done a stinky, lets change your nappy now. Let me clean your bottom, up with your legs, there, clean, lets find the cream, here is your nappy cream, and where is that new nappy, oh here is your nappy, look clean nappy, oh look at you now, all nice and clean, yes nice and clan baby. You hungry? Lets go find a snack"

and so it continues. Streams of language learning throughout the day, describing every activity, every object, bathing the child in language!

I fail to see how a few stilted phrases in a foreign language by a non native speaker would encourage bilingualism.
It would be like me in the middle of the above should suddenly say "voulez vous coucher avec moi ce soir" (the only phrase of french I remember, from a song I heard as a teenager) or some other irrelevant phrase with no bearing on the activity we do.

dolly there can be but my DH is completely trilingual and only started learning English at the age of 11 and Dutch at 15.

I am, apparently, well on my way to becoming bilingual and I didn't start the language I am aiming to be bilingual in until I was 22.

But think about how you would usually interact with a baby, dolly. You say the same sentence, but you change it, you make up little terms of endearment, you respond to what they are doing by saying something else.

-Come on then, poppet, up on the changing table This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed at home... let's see what's in the nappy after all, oh no it wasn't a poo, just a bit of wind, ooh that's a big burp, let's just clean you up a bit.....

And when you speak to a toddler, you are constantly shifting what you're saying:

-Look what's in there, look what's in the cage.
-Mousies.
-Yes, they're pretty mice, aren't they? What does the mouse say?
-MOOO.
-You silly moomoo, he doesn't, does he? The mouse says Squeak.

And so on ad infinitum. That is what normal mother-toddler interaction sounds like. But the OP specifically tells the mothers to stick to preset dialogues. (and I still don't get dialogues- surely that means two people speaking?)

Nothing wrong with teaching a child to read early. But wouldn't you be a bit about a programme designed to teach a baby to read early.

To my mind there are two ways with bilingualism:

You can interact with a baby but you can't formally teach them, in the sense that you teach a language to an adult. So it's interaction or nothing.

With an older child, you can either interact or teach (that is, explain things).

SO you can either start in babyhood and maybe modify your approach as the child grows, or if you insist on starting in babyhood, then you need to use age-appropriate measures.

To interact, you need far more knowledge of the language than you do to teach. I used to teach Spanish to adults and think I did a pretty good job of it, just explaining the principles. But I do not have enough Spanish to give it to a baby or toddler.

I think there is a risk of the OPs approach of stressing out the mums without actually achieving more than could have been achieved by waiting a few years and doing it in a different way.

Funny how Quint and I both ended up on the changing table.

yes, but you did it a lot better than me!

I don't think the two things, teaching and interacting, have to be mutually exclusive. There will be certain stock phrases that every parent uses and with a bit of training, mothers may, I think, be able to use them 'spontaneously'.

I have always made an effort to speak to my DCs using 'correct' vocabulary/phrases - not 'baby' language. As far as I can see, this has not damaged them in any way. I have also corrected (in the nicest possible way ) their grammar and pronunciation from the time they began to speak. Some may argue that my approach was less than conducive to a positive baby/child interaction. However, I am very happy with how it has all worked out for my DCs.

Presumably the OP's approach will suit the philosophy of the mums who sign up for this. I agree that there may be other ways of achieving the desired result but I also think that this way may work for certain individuals.

But correcting grammar (in a nice way) is usually considered part of motherese, dolly. As in my example (-Mousies.-Yes, pretty mice). I can't see anyone arguing against that.

dolly, you have just explained with your example, why it is so important that language is taught by somebody who actually knows the language! You can do all that, including correcting grammar (in the nicest possible way) because you know the language you are speaking in!

The parents in the OPs case, dont know the language, and will just say prelearned phrases, maybe without knowing what it even means! That is not interaction. So how will the child know what it means?

And I am sure, dolly, that when your children were learning to speak that you were not communicating with them exclusively through a small selection of ready-prepared lines. Stock phrases- yes, we all use them. But we use them in conjunction with other, more varied language, and we use them creatively: change them around and play with them and do different things with them. All of which requires a high level of linguistic ability.