Bilingual Education

[mom2bee]

I'm interested in reading more from those of us who are providing their children with a bilingual or multilingual education. For those of us who are teaching our children in multiple languages, how are you doing it? I don't mean we're teaching our kids a language, like French or Arabic as a subject, but those among us who are able to teach IN a different language? As in teaching Math, Reading, and other subjects in 2+ languages...

[veronikasjinkarenko]

Hi!

We teach Daniel in English and in Dutch. I am a native Dutch speaker and my husband is a native English speaker. Our two year old understands both languages perfectly, but shows preference in some words. For example... Please is easier to say then Alstublieft.
It helps that my husband understands Dutch. When Daniel was born I spoke Russian to him. I would really like to teach him proper Russian, but sadly my Russian is not as fluent as Dutch AND my husband does not understand it. I find that more difficult to parent.
Me and my husband speak English to each other, sometimes I will ask him something in Dutch.

How are you doing it?

[Scruff]

Hello there

My situation is similar to veronikasjinkkarenko's.  I speak English to my daughter and my husband speaks Afrikaans to her.  She is 4 months old now, so I am only doing Little Reader in English at the moment.  I will introduce it to her in Afrikaans in the next few months.  Otherwise, my husband may do a few lessons with her in Afrikaans over the weekends.  I haven't had time to translate the whole curriculum, so will most likely use downloaded lessons in Afrikaans for now.  I only speak English to my daughter and my husband probably speaks Afrikaans to her 95% of the time.  Sometimes he may say a few words in English because we speak English to each other.

@veronikasjinkkarenko's.  Seeing as though you mentioned "Please", I thought you may enjoy my friend's little daughter's language use.  "Please" in Afrikaans is similar to Dutch (Asseblief).  Her Mom speaks Afrikaans to her and her Dad English and she thinks it is "AssePLEASE" :-) So cute.

@mom2bee How many languages do you speak and how many would you like to teach your children?

[Krista G]

I just finished reading The Bilingual Edge.  It was a very good book.  I have a review of it posted on my blog.

[Scruff]

Hello Krista G

Thanks very much.  I have just read your review.

How many languages are you teaching your children and how are you going about it?  What aids are you using?

[MamaOfWill]

I'm teaching Zulu and Chinese as foreign languages with only hopes of my child understanding these languages, but we are treating English and Afrikaans both as first languages (similar to scruff and veronikasjinkerenko.)

I'm not planning on doing all my teachings double, but will be teaching reading and counting in all 4 languages (eventually)   Other than that, I'm teaching Chess, Art and Math as Afrikaans subjects, and EK and Music as English subjects.

@scruff, I'm almost done translating Afrikaans Semester 1, I just want to add some childrens' voices (my niece and nefue) I'll be uploading them within a months time. (The recordings don't come out as nicely as the Brill Kids stuff, but I'm doing my best to crop and remove noise, it just all takes so much time!)  But there's allready some nice old Afrikaans stuff (don't know if you saw - Eendjies eendjies, bak 'n koek, etc)

[Krista G]

Hi Scruff,

I am using some books to teach body parts and common words.  We are reading books from the library and we just started to use Speekee TV.  The kids really like it and ask for it each day.  What really opened my eyes according to The Bilingual Edge is that if you want your child to speak a second or third language well, they need interaction and good quantities of it.  The authors suggest doing a language audit to determine how much of each day is being spent doing what in what languages.  This can help parents determine what is really quality interaction with the language and what is just passive.

Young children are amazing though.  If they have a need to use a language, they learn it quickly.  I had a client with a 3 year old son who only spoke Arabic.  He didn't understand a word of English.  I did not see him for a 3 month period and when I saw him again, he was speaking English.  It amazed me.  I asked her how he learned and she said he wanted to play with the kids and that is how he learned.

I regret that even though I have a bilingual husband my children are not bilingual.  I have decided that if it is to be, it is up to me and I can do what I can do.  So that is what I am doing.  I am trying to arrange a Spanish story hour at my library.  The children's librarian is speaks Spanish and expressed an interest in hosting it, so that we be an hour one day a week besides what I am doing daily.

[AshleyIcy]

Hello, I have a girl whom is slightly over 16 months old. Im teaching her mainly English and Chinese, with third language Spanish. English and Chinese are her main languages while my husband and I knows abit of Spanish and so would like our daughter to get a feel of it from young.

I mainly use flashcards to teach her English and Chinese vocabularies. Whereas for Spanish, I actually use WinktoLearn Speak & Read Spanish DVDs, because we adults aint very good at it, so we thought it would be good to have some proper channel to expose her to. It may sound tough for a young child to get expose to many languages at a young age, but research have shown that the younger they're exposed to, the better and faster they learn. I'm not stressing my gal thou. Just taking it at a slow pace for Spanish. =)

Can go to www.winktolearn.com. They have many languages available, English, Chinese, Spanish, German, French, Thai etc. and with the curriculums free for all to print. All the words taught in the DVDs are available for us to print with translation. Check it out!

[mom2bee]

Right now I'm fluent only in English but my Spanish is improving steadily but slowly. Fortunately I've stopped regressing in my spanish abilities. I don't have kids yet, (hence the name, Mom to be=mom2bee) but I would like to raise my kids with non-native Spanish whether we do EL or not and because we're Muslims its important to me that my kids speak Arabic also, so its my dream for my kids to grow up trilingual in Spanish, English and Arabic. I follow several blogs about multilingual families raising multilingual children and am studying their methods

Its my intention to spend a year in a Latin American country teaching in a school. (In English or Spanish) and I'd like to teach in an ESOL class here in the US for a while also, but I have to finish my degree first so I can get my credential.

I have found a couple of math programs in English and Spanish (MEP and Math Mammoth) and intend to teach reading in Spanish and English from early on. I have a bunch of Spanish resources and have started collecting childrens books in Spanish that I want to share with my future kids.

IF my kids are being raised in a trilingual household then we will probably study 3 languages as a part of our homeschool education. French, Japanese and ASL. When they are middle school age I'll require that they study Esperanto for the ability and experience and because I love the humanitarian message and history of the language.

But I'd love to see the blogs of someone who is raising and homeschooling multilingually. I guess we can do things like Science and history in multiple languages, but how would it be done, what would it look like? Thats the bigger question?

I'm not quite as worried about the early years. All I feel I will need to do is speak and read and interact with my children in the Spanish language and they will pick it up, get them Spanish speaking friends and media and take them to a Spanish speaking environment from time to time, cool.

But what about as their education becomes more advanced, when you go broader and deeper? How do you balance that?

[veronikasjinkarenko]

So far all the research I have found on raising children in multiple languages says that the extra language to be learned needs to have a purpose. Also, the language of the country will often be the most dominant one.

Mom2be, when you hit the point where you want to teach your child more advanced Spanish then you can teach him.... maybe get a tutor? or a language camp? dvds in Spanish?

What are you studying for btw? I love your idea of teaching for a year!!

[mom2bee]

So far all the research I have found on raising children in multiple languages says that the extra language to be learned needs to have a purpose. Also, the language of the country will often be the most dominant one.Yes, this is what worries me a little. I will simply speak to my children from early on in Spanish, like the mother of this blog uses exclusively non-native French with her kids. They'll be homeschooled quite a bit so I'm not too worried about them losing Spanish as soon as they start school.


Mom2be, when you hit the point where you want to teach your child more advanced Spanish then you can teach him.... maybe get a tutor? or a language camp? dvds in Spanish? My goal is for me to be fairly fluent in Spanish by the time my kids are toddling around. But I know that there is a massive work load that goes into Maintaining the language. I hope to live somewhere in a community that is mulitlingual. Muslim communities are great for this because there can be many international families living in one spot and usually a large number of speakers of one or two languages. If the dad of my kids isn't an Arabic speaker, then that will be the one that we just learn as a family all their lives. I may raise the kids in Latin or Central America for a few years to let their Spanish cement.Who knows, all my thoughts are mostly wispy-dreams of the future.

What are you studying for btw? I love your idea of teaching for a year!!
I'm a college student. I'm studying for my 4 year degree.[\b]

[Dr Miles R Jones]

Mom2bee,

I spent a lifetime working in bilingual education.  Only about half the people teaching ESL overseas are credentialed but it helps.  Good luck with your education.

 I too was an early advocate of Esperanto.  The movement itself basically caved when they decided to hold their international conference in Esperanto and discovered to their chagrin that no speaks Esperanto.  Yes, I do know the other reasons, because it combines the basic root vocabulary of the European languages and simplifies the grammar.  However, English does this just about as well.  We have half our wordstock from Germanic roots (via Old English) and half from Latin roots (via French).   You might note that Esperanto has more endings for verbs than English does. 

English is a great language to start with because you can so easily move to learning Germanic languages or Romance languages because of our wordstock.  My first recommendation is that if one or more parents are bilingual don't waste it.  By all means, teach that language to your child.  Second, all kids should at some point do some serious study of Latin and Greek roots which are used to formulate all new scientific terminology which are universally used in every country in the world.  Finally, numberswise, English, Spanish and French were the great colonial powers and each language is spoken in more than 40 countries in the world.  Therefore, with only three languages you can speak the official language of half the 240 some odd countries in the world.  Not bad.

The most important element one can gain from a language in early childhood is the music of it.  I mean the sounds and pronunciation.  Grammar and vocabulary are actually learned better at a latter age because of our better mastery of our native language.  But pronunciation is better learned young.   Learn lots of songs, along with what they mean of course, but learn to memorize and sing as many songs in the foreign language as you can.  Theoretically a whole method could be developed to learn a language solely by learning and singing songs.  With the internet this is so much easier today and you do not have to be a fluent speaker yourself just be willing to sing.

[Dr Miles R Jones]

Mom2bee,

By the way I did teach my daughter French and Spanish at a very early age and she now speaks both languages fluently.  So I know this is a really valuable effort.  Just be regular.  Do some every day.  I wish you fabulous success.  Good luck!

[Rivka]

We are a bilingual family (French - I am a native speaker, and English - my husband, who doesn't speak French) and we are in the US, so English is the dominant language. I make a huge effort to speak French to my son almost all of the time, and I also get French books from Amazon France, which he loves (it is expensive because of shipping). We are doing Little Pim in French (without the subtitles) and Mon Bebe Lit (the equivalent on Your Baby Can Read in France), as well as a French program equivalent to Little Reader. I got a multizone DVD player, so we could play French DVDs (not a lot). Nowadays my son gets a French tutor once a week who reads in French with him but also teaches him other things while speaking French. And this summer, my son will go in a French immersion school camp. My point is that it is a lot of work and a lot of money, but I think that it is important that the child hears the language from people other than the parent (not at first, but as they get older). Right now, my son at two years old speaks better French than English, even though he spends all day with an English-speaking nanny, so if you put in the effort, it will work.

[lois1]

Hi mom2bee
Quote "I don't mean we're teaching our kids a language, like French or Arabic as a subject, but those among us who are able to teach IN a different language? As in teaching Math, Reading, and other subjects in 2+ languages."

My little boy is only 16 months so we're not that far advanced in EL as a whole.. English is our first language & I plan to teach maths, EK, music etc in English. Apart from anything else there are just so many good quality English resources out there. I couldn't imagine starting to trawl the WWW looking for good quality materials in X language.

That being said my husband & I also speak Spanish fluently so English is for home & Spanish is for out about. If we have a learning opportunity, I should say when we have a learning opportunity, then I "teach" him in Spanish. I don't think the child would be advantaged or disadvantaged all that much as long as you were pretty fluent in the language you decided to teach him in. We are learning to speak a little Kuna.. they don't even have words for certain things, so it would be useless to try and teach him geography in Kuna. That's a bit of a drastic example but you get my gist. I think the most important thing is that they have the other language(s) & if they are well grounded in it then the knowledge they have acquired in whichever field will show itself regardless of the language they are speaking in at that particular moment.

Someone mentioned in another thread that numbers make more sense in Chinese than they do in English so if you were able to speak Chinese then it would be advantageous to teach maths in Chinese. Thirty five is three ten five... or something to that effect so a child can visualise the quantity better. Unfortunately I can't speak Chinese & doubt I ever will... 

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