Non-native bilingualism

[ManIFeelLikeAWoman]

I am a native English speaker and so is my partner, but we are bringing our daughter (11 mth) up bilingual - I speak to her exclusively in French, her mum speaks to her exclusively in English, my partner and I speak English to each other. I know this is not a common set up but it is not without precedent and I know I am not alone on Mumsnet. So I wanted to see how many of us there are and how it's going, and to swap notes.

I'm NOT asking for anyone's opinion whether this is the "right" thing to do, especially from people who don't do this themselves; and I'm NOT talking about people who speak their own language with their children but take them to foreign-language classes. That's very interesting too, but it's another thread.

So - who's out there and how are you finding it?

Xposts with differing views, but there you go. There is no right and wrong, just what is best for your family.

X posts, yes - but we do seeme to agree that OPOL is a good route to go and that you don't need to speak Spanish to the children, so you have no immediate worries about that.

just go for it - what's the worst that can happen?

Alibean, as others have said, I would let your husband speak Spanish while you speak to your children in English (OPOL), possibly supplemented by trips to Spain, Spanish books, dvds etc. Good luck!

Thanks everyone for your input.

Yes we are in the UK and I think the suggestion that DH speaks Spanish and I speak English makes sense. At least until my Spanish is much more fluent. Potentially I see my knowledge of the language increasing alongside that of my child as we utilise stories, DVDs, songs etc and as such it should be a pleasure rather than an effort!

Thanks again!

Nearly cracked the other day - started to say, while in grumpy mood, "leave it alone!" but remembered myself halfway through "leave" and reverted to French.

This is the first time this has happened in nearly a year so am not beating myself up about it, but does anyone have any tips for not slipping up in the heat of the moment? Also, how do you as language models keep your language fresh and up-to-date? Is it just passive in the sense that you let it happen via reading, TV and as it comes in conversation? Or do you make notes, make an effort to use an "out-of-the-ordinary" word a day, seek out different demographics of natives to get a broad spread ...?

Count to 10 before you speak! Or at least 5. In the target language.

As previously posted I am a total failure in the 'up-to-date' stakes but if you get to know of anything then let me know! FWIW I don't find that the passive approach works - I live in France, I understand the slang/'modern way' but I don't use it.

Thanks frannikin for tip - and thanks for confirming what I suspected about the "passive" approach.

What I often do is try to use synonyms in close succession. - "Tu es fatiguee, hein? Oui, tu dois etre epuisee. Tu veux dormir? Tu veux faire dodo?"

Short-term, this seems counter-intuitive for both of us - surely she will learn better if I drum a single expression into her? But that feels too much like teaching, and strategies like this are strongly recommended in a monolingual seeting, so I'm hoping the long-term benefits outweigh the short-term "vagueness".

Another thing I try to do is use, not so much vocab, but idiomatic structures I pick up from films, songs and books - eg "pour pas que" + subjunctive.

As well as hopefully helping my daughter, I hope that these strategies will save my French collapsing in on itself till I can only quote the dialogues from Tricolore and ask for a ham baguette and a Coke.

By Racingsnake on Mon 26-Jan-09 08:30:30

"Recently at the swimming pool I got talking to a mum who, on finding that I was English and not French as she had supposed, claimed that I am doing considerable harm to dd's development and that I would be establishing 'disfunctional bilingualism' according to research she had studied."

Racingsnake, you can be easy on this subject. There is NO research that shows that children come to harm from being spoken to by a non-native speaker.

You can trust me, I have spent the last 3 years in research libraries, reading what there is on multilingualism for my own research project, and there is not even any genuine research that shows that OPOL is superior.

What you have is lots of anecdotal evidence: parents who have been practising OPOL themselves and it's worked, so they write a book to say this is the way to go. Since several parents have written such books, they fill a sizeable part of the multilingualism shelf of the library.

This is NOT what any academic would recognise as research.

Though some of the books are excellent examples of research on other questions, i.e. code-switching or early language formation. But any research means answering a defined question: none of the books answers the question of what is best in a way that can be counted as research.

Your friend is talking about anecdotal evidence from a handful of people. We have relatively little research on how the majority of multilinguals learnt their multilingualism, no research on constraints in the sense that this-approach-cannot-work.

I am perfectly happy to believe that OPOL is a very good way, and that people speaking their native language is also a very good way, but that's not the same as saying it's been proved to be the only ways of doing these things. Nothing has been proved because this type of research has not been done (and would indeed be tremendously difficult to do, if you had to isolate all the other factors which might make some children more proficient than others).

My children have heard me speak a lot of English over the years (their Dad cannot read aloud to save his life: he was absolutely massacring the poor Hound of the Baskervilles last night).

They are certainly not dysfunctional in any way. Dd speaks Swedish well enough to be taken for a Swede and spends her evenings (when allowed) on a Swedish chat forum: she is also getting very high marks for literacy at her English school. Even at the age of two, she knew which words were Swedish and which were English, regardless of who was speaking them, and would happily translate words from one language to another if asked to do so.

ManIFeelLikeAWoman on Thu 29-Jan-09 22:50:28
"Thanks frannikin for tip - and thanks for confirming what I suspected about the "passive" approach.

What I often do is try to use synonyms in close succession. - "Tu es fatiguee, hein? Oui, tu dois etre epuisee. Tu veux dormir? Tu veux faire dodo?""

That sounds like a brilliant approach and very native-like, if I may say so

Thanks, Cory - all enocuragement gratefully received.

Message withdrawn

I need to find French forums (but not text speak ones) to practice in....

Man that's a good approach - I talk like that anyway to the children I look after who are only French speaking and they don't seem to mind it. It works fairly well. That's where I worked out the counting in the target language too - otherwise they look at me blankly because they don't understand English/Italian (whichever comes to mind first!).

Frannikin

I have joined (but have yet to actually use) magicmaman.com which looks about as close to mumsnet as the adorably technophobe French can get . Worth a look? Obviously, by its nature, it's for grown-ups, so should be low on text-speak.

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One more bump for luck

Hi
My situation is different because my dd is not learning her second language at home but at school. We live in Canada and she is in a French Immersion program, so all her schooling is in French.
DH and I are both native Anglos (as they say here) but I speak French.

DD and I often speak French together when she's telling me about things that happen at school, or when she doesn't know the English words. (eg. maths/ science concepts she is learning)

It's going really well and she is reading and writing in French at a good level.

I think your speaking French to your dd can work, but only if you are really 100% consistent. I would also worry about what others have mentioned, that my relationship would suffer because it's being conducted in a non-native language. I suppose you must be very near native standard to even attempt this.

Really interesting thread. I am English but have a French degree and have spent a long time in France (now living in UK) and although quite clearly not a native would be interested in how this approach works.

My friend's aunt was doing this with her daughter when I was young. Her daughter was around 6 when I met them and seemed to get on fine. They both spoke French to each other despite the mother being Engilsh and them both living in Britain. It did not seem to have caused any harm.

I think if you have mastered a language it's a gift and it would be great to pass it onto your DC.

Dhreadmythread - yes, I am 100% consistent and I am of a very high standard, though obviously the bits of language I most need - how to talk to children - were initially missing and had to be learnt at speed. I would say that, far from suffering, my relationship has improved - I make to spend time with her and engage her interest because I am her language model, whereas if I spoke English to her I'd probably be more passive because the community at large would be helping me. I also hope that, the longer it goes on, the more this will be "our thing" and "our special time".

Branflake - how it works is I pretend to be French (or rather, non-specifically Francophone - we watch as much Canadian TV as we do French, we're not proud ...) and speak to her accordingly, all the while making an effort to supplement myself with the TV as mentioned, DVDs, 60s pop (she's a big fan of Joe Dassin), Francophone play group on Saturdays, and endless story books. One day she'll twig I'm not French at all, of course, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

A risk we all run, Califrau.

Still, no doubt her daughter will still crap from a height on her monolingual classmates when she gets to English lessons at school so the effort's not entirely wasted, eh?

Hi, I am Emglish and speak English to dcs and to dh. Dh is Duthc and (mostly) speaks Dutch to dcs, we live in a Russian speaking environment, so they get that when outside/with friends and ds (aged 6) is now at Russian school.

I am also a teacher who has taught in several settings with high non native English speakers, and done several courses on supporting ESL kids. When I got marries dh and I spent a lot of time researching bilingualism, to see what we should do.

All of that is just to say that the following is backed up by a bit more that just experience.

I think there are some important issues here

First there are loads of types of bilingualism, eg passive bilinguals who understand a language but don't speak it, bilinguals with major and minor languages, bilingual one language at home the other the community, where 2 languages at home and so on. The point is, that it is ok not to end up with 2 perfect languages, there are still many advantages, and there are lots of ways of going about it, none of which are right or wrong, but I think there ARE some situations you should avoid.

I have come across families where there are 3 , 4 or 5 languages being used and the child is not actually proficient in any of them. (one child aged 7 was speaking to me in pretty incorrect heavily accented English. I asked her mum which language of the 4 was her strongest, and what did they speak at home (Mums English was pretty hard to understand) and she told me English was her strongest and they spoke English at home) This was also something highlighted in London where they were finding that Bengali kids (especially girls) were leaving school with good school English, but with vocabulary limited to the things needed at school, but also were not really proficient in Bangali eg they could not read and write Bengali, and had vocabulary limited to their home sphere. It is really important for our kids that they have one (or even 2 or 3) languages where they can properly and fully express themselves. That is why One parent one language is popular, because they are getting lots of consistent correct input from that language, so hopefully they will end up being properly proficient in it. I think it is also good to remember that there can be too many languages.
One thing we discovered when we researched it was that the families where both parents understood both languages ended up continuing with the bilingualism for longer and were generally more successful. When one parent didn't understand one langauge, it became too hard. Because of that we went to Holland for 6 months so I could learn Dutch when we were first married.

The other thing is that our kids are not all good sponges and not all natural linguists, but we shouldn't give up just because of that. My ds had always understood Dutch well, but he always replied in English until he did 3 weeks in Dutch school aged 5. Then he finally started talking Dutch. dd1 is already using 3 languages aged 4. She does it naturally and instinctively knows which language is which and which she should use for which person. Ds refused to speak Russian at all, even though he has been hearing it since he was a baby. Finally we got someone to come and do 40 mins conversation class (basically playing games) with him every morning for a month. That broke the damn and he started to speak (aged 5.5) and then his Russian took off. Until this point he had been quite isolated, he wouldn't play with any of the other kids outside because he couldn't communicate with them. Once he started speaking he made friends and now is well settled into our community, and then started scholl, and his Russian took off. dd on the other hand plays with everyone outside and uses whatever words in whatever language she can get away with!

I do know people here whose first language is English but the kids are with a Russian speaking nanny all day. They basically speak poor English and poor Russian (nanny is sweet, but she doesn't really sit down and talk and play with the kids.)

My kids all spoke early and well, but I have heard that bilingual kids sometimes appear to be late speakers, with smaller vocabs. The thing is, if you have a vocab of 20 words in English, but you are bilingual, then actually you have a vocab of 40 words, and that is often overlooked when kids are assessed.

We do opol, but when in England the whole family speaks English, and when in Holland we all speak Dutch, when at a friends house I speak Russian to my kids followed by the same thing in English. When my dh is tired and he keeps forgetting to talk Dutch, I speak Dutch to the kids to get us going again.

I think it is terribly sad when a parent feels they have to give in and speak the majority language. Knowing another langauge gives a window into that parent's culture that you only get with language. There are things about my dh I only understand because I speak Dutch.

obviously my written English is not as good as my spoken
I blame the computer keyboard - it's sticky

Round the world there are more bilingual kids than monolingual - think of India, and chinese kids with 2 dialects etc. Most kids here are bilingual Kazakh/Russian, they just do it, without all the angst that we go through!

Oh, and dh conducts his relationship in English, to no disadvantage. He is native speaker level, but still has a strong accent at time (it really shows now that ds is into chapter books, it is harder for him to read aloud well in English). In fact his Dutch friends and family complain that he uses English grammarstructure in his Dutch now

Steppemum makes several good points. A lot of writers on the subject distinguish between reductive bilingualism (where a new language is at the expense of a native language) and additive bilingualism (where a new language is no threat to the home language). In general, families where the kids don't speak either language properly are reductive bilingualism set-ups (eg immigrants give up on or limit their native language in front of the children and try to teach them English instead, without really speaking it themselves.) I sense that most families here are in additive set ups, which normally produces positive results.

Heard of smaller vocabulary misconception, but as for late speakers, I think research shows that bilinguals, on average, are around the same time or even marginally earlier than comparable monolinguals.