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Noha,
I agree with Maddy. Children very naturally blend words from various languages that they are exposed to. I don't feel there is any harm (to the contrary, several benefits) to hearing more than one language presented at a time. In fact, if a child hears a novel word (from another language) embedded in a sentence containing words from a more familiar language, he or she can learn from the context of the familiar sentence to gain meaning about the novel word. For example, "le chien is barking a lot!" would allow a child who is a native speaker of English to draw from his or her knowledge base and he/she would be able to correctly infer that "le chien" is another way to label a dog. (sorry to disagree with you, KL!)
Another thought: I feel that it is very important for children in a bilingual family to hear
their parents speak in the language that is most familiar to them. Too often I work with parents who felt they had to only speak English to their children - unfortunately, their knowledge of English was fairly limited at that time. What happens in that situation is that the child is not exposed to underlying components of a language - semantics (word meanings and how words are related), syntax (information about word order), and pragmatics (how language is used to convey different intents). If the parent was speaking the native language, the child would be more able to "pick up" this information, which would then allow him or her to apply it to the second language being learned. By the way, although kiddos often initially combine both languages, eventually they are able to speak both languages separately (as you said you were hoping would happen).
Just my two cents! Thanks for reading. Good luck with everything!
I agree with Maddy. Children very naturally blend words from various languages that they are exposed to. I don't feel there is any harm (to the contrary, several benefits) to hearing more than one language presented at a time. In fact, if a child hears a novel word (from another language) embedded in a sentence containing words from a more familiar language, he or she can learn from the context of the familiar sentence to gain meaning about the novel word. For example, "le chien is barking a lot!" would allow a child who is a native speaker of English to draw from his or her knowledge base and he/she would be able to correctly infer that "le chien" is another way to label a dog. (sorry to disagree with you, KL!)
Another thought: I feel that it is very important for children in a bilingual family to hear
their parents speak in the language that is most familiar to them. Too often I work with parents who felt they had to only speak English to their children - unfortunately, their knowledge of English was fairly limited at that time. What happens in that situation is that the child is not exposed to underlying components of a language - semantics (word meanings and how words are related), syntax (information about word order), and pragmatics (how language is used to convey different intents). If the parent was speaking the native language, the child would be more able to "pick up" this information, which would then allow him or her to apply it to the second language being learned. By the way, although kiddos often initially combine both languages, eventually they are able to speak both languages separately (as you said you were hoping would happen).
Just my two cents! Thanks for reading. Good luck with everything!
Yes, I totally agreed. I am Chinese from Malaysia. I have limited knowledge in english but my hubby can speak english very well. Therefore, I will speak chinese (mandarin) to my baby and my hubby will use english to communicate with him.
