Raising Bilingual Children - A Minority of One
“Your son/daughter must speak perfect English!” You cringe. “Well... it’s a bit more complicated than that... besides, they’re shy.” As a native English speaking parent, you are presumed to have produced magically bilingual offspring just like Kellogs produces magically healthy and happy blond darlings in sunkissed kitchens... As the little louts emit Spanglish mumbles and grunts, you wonder where you went wrong.
How on earth did you wind up in Ml@h? In what? In Majority Language at Home: speaking the language of the community in which you live, for our purposes Spanish (and/or Catalan, Gallego, etc) as your family language.
The two main approaches to bringing up bilingual children are OPOL (One Parent/Person One Language), and Ml@h, (minority language at home: i.e. everyone speaks English). The idea is that you choose a system and stick to it, and give the kids lots of reinforcement and extra input in the m-language - videos, tapes, stories, trips home, possibly English school, etc. That’s the theory.
In practice, however, lots of problems and challenges arise, particularly in OPOL families where the m-language speaking parent is a minority of one. While OPOL works well in one-to-one parent-child situations, in whole-family interactions it easily gets mixed up with Ml@h. With non-m-speaking friends, relations and carers, Ml@h may be essential. Like mine, many OPOL families slide into speaking the M-language.
Not everyone has the discipline of Andrew, a South African in Barcelona, who has never spoken to his daughter Laura, now 11, in anything but English, even though his wife misses out on a fair amount. Andrew speaks Spanish to his wife, and she speaks Catalan to Laura. How about three-way interactions? They codeswitch (ie. switch back and forth between languages) although Andrew, “very occasionally", resorts to Spanish when addressing the family, to avoid saying something twice (in Spanish and English), but there is no overall ‘family language.’ ” Laura also goes to a school where English is given prominence and all her English skills are way ahead.
For optimum results, a key issue to consider is politeness. Do you insist on English even when this means excluding or being rude to non-English speaking inlaws or friends?
“Yes!” says Andrew. “Among friends or strangers, I’d say we stick to the monolingual channel even more, and switch constantly between English and Spanish-or-Catalan, depending on whether we are addressing the group or each other. People might take this to be rude or exotic, but the fact is that English functions almost as a ‘secret’ language between us, which helped my daughter to internalise the language as a mother tongue from an early age.”
“No!” says Debbie, an American in Sevilla using Ml@h. “I tried this and sensed that it upset the Spanish grandparents just mildly. Now we speak Spanish mostly with them and I use English when no one is paying attention to us. The kids follow along just fine.”
Nor are all situations as dramatic as Christopher’s, a well-integrated Brit in Barcelona. When his daughter was born, he spoke to her in English. His wife spoke very little English and felt excluded from the father-daughter dyad, so Christopher “put family harmony and communication over and above imposing English” and shifted to Spanish.
When his wife died, Christopher and Julia continued to speak Spanish. Julia, now 18, knows less English than she ‘should’ and feels hampered by the expectations aroused by her surname, although she is increasingly able to communicate with British relatives.
Between these extremes are combinations of every hue. Families are complex webs within even more complex social systems. Factors that play a part include what language the parents speak together, how integrated they are, how well they understand each other’s language, who looks after the children for how long, the arrival of siblings, divorce, remarriage... personality and ability. Or even just how knackered parents are. Like when the only way you can get the kid to sleep is by reading the Catalan storybook Uncle Jordi gave her for Christmas rather than the latest politically correct offering from Amazon. The variables are too complex and, well, variable even for professional linguists to get a handle on.
But there are some fairly clearly defined stages in the process. In OPOL families, the first dominant language will be the one spoken by the person who spends the most time with the child. In the early stages, a lot of mixing will occur, a natural process that happens even in the best m-lang families, like Judy and Mike, Brits in Barcelona, parents of Luke and Eve. At the vet, Luke (6) asked why their dog was‘tremulandoing’, a wonderful three-language mix that will abide in the family annals alongside Eve’s ‘sillipollas’. “We’re not purists,” says Judy, “and sometimes we speak a mixture, full of Spanglish. It’s almost like a secret family language.”
“Environment, peer group, school etc. definitely dominate over the language the mother speaks and more and more so as child grows,” says Marion, a New Zealander in Barcelona, married to a Catalan. Marion has worked very hard on her son’s English, using OPOL, “as a terribly flexible general rule.” Now they are using Catalan more and more as a family language “for the simple reason that as general conversation is more and more three-sided a mixture interferes with natural flow when the three of us are together.”
Linda in Valencia has an 11-year-old son. When he was small she and her Spanish husband talked to him in English, knowing he would pick up Spanish naturally. “Then his English got better than my husband’s so he started to use Spanish.”
Of course, it’s easy to feel you have failed if you are not clear about the goal in the first place. Well, the goal is bilingualism, isn’t it? But what exactly do we mean by that? ‘Knowing’ a language consists of a series of skills: understanding, speaking, reading, writing, as well as pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary and what linguists call pragmatics, that is, the social rules that govern the way we speak. So true bilingualism would mean perfect mastery of all skills in two languages. But the vast majority of bilinguals, linguists tell us, do not have an equal command of their two languages. It’s more helpful to think of bilingualism as a continuum with native-like mastery of two languages at one end and minimal competence in a second language at the other.
Our children will be at different points on the continuum at different times in their lives. With this concept, our expectations can be more realistic. We can reinforce different skills at different times - or not. Linda’s main concern was, “that English should not be a chore or a big issue.” She reads to her son in English, but has never actually taught him to read or write it. He reads Harry Potter, she tells me, while an email to his British grandad looked, “rather phonetic.”
For Marion, “communication itself is more important than the language we communicate in.” She feels her initial goal has been reached: her son “speaks and understands English very well considering he has not grown up in an English-speaking country.”
The acid test is whether the children can cope with English monolinguals. And they can. Rest assured that unless their environment is seriously dysfunctional (in which case they may have learning difficulties with a single language) the kids will sort it all out to their own satisfaction, if not yours. A passive knowledge of English can always be activated when the need to communicate holds sway. Perfect English perhaps not, but all the children in my little survey cope perfectly well with visiting friends and relatives and trips home. In fact my own younger son now speaks eight languages... but that’s another story.
Copyright 2008 Valerie Collins
 Valerie Collins is a British writer who has lived in Barcelona since 1973.
She is co-author, with Theresa O'Shea, of "In The Garlic: Your
Informative, Fun Guide to Spain", published by Santana Books. ISBN-13:
978-84-89954-59-5 www.inthegarlic.com
See Extracts from "In the Garlic" and purchase online here .
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