How to raise a bilingual child?
In my previous post I explored if bilingual upbringing of children is beneficial to them both in the short and long term. The conclusion of that topic was that bilingual upbringing actually has a multitude of developmental benefits both in the short and long run. These benefits include higher creativity, increased multitasking skills, better memory, better social awareness, adaptive skills and of course knowing more languages than one.
Now that we can conclude that bringing up kids in a bilingual environment is beneficial, the more pressing questions still stands, how do we do it in the most effective way for the linguistic and cognitive development of the child?
Whether you are raising a child as a bilingual caregiver or not, the same set of tools and possibilities apply. This is because monolingual, but aware caregivers can give their kids a well curated bilingual learning experience that will yield more effective linguistic results as well as long term developmental results, compared to unaware bilingual caregivers that lack in the strategising of multiple language acquisition. Therefore, just like any skill it takes a proper learning technique to master, which is getting further research as you are reading this, but we can already explore the tools known and available to us.
Strategy as well as timing is very important. There are cases where caregivers worry they have embarked on the bilingual journey too late, if they themselves were not able to provide that linguistic teaching organically at home. However, more studied show that language acquisition skills might not differ among ages as much as the way we teach. When we are taught as young children we get teaching that is a lot more simplistic, repetitive and personal. As we grow up, teaching methods ‘mature’ and we get material that seems more suitable for older age groups, but this might not be the most effective way of learning a language. In fact, if we implement similar methods we introduce to young kids when learning languages, we could get very similar results, therefore, I would recommend not worrying about the age you would want to assimilate your child into bilingualism as they may still grow up mastering both languages natively. The more important factor is how the language is taught to that individual.
A lot of caretakers who have different languages spoken among the family members will often implement the one person, one language method, which is where each person who interacts with the child always sticks to the same language when doing so, thus exposing the child to multiple languages simultaneously. This method is good in theory, if the kid gets exposed to each language for the same amount of time i.e gets spoken with by all caretakers for a similar amount of time. This insures that all languages are developing at the same pace.
The big flaw with his method is keeping the communication rate equal among all caregivers and by extension, languages. Most often than not one caregiver is more present with the child and therefore will expose them more with their language, which creates a misbalance and an uneven learning curve for the languages. It is therefore more important to concentrate on exposing the child to each language for the same amount, instead of concentrating who communicates with which language.
Due to the fact that caregivers can seldom dedicate the same amount of time to the child, the second language has to be taught by teachers who also possess better assessment skills of how kids learn best.
Therefore, in order to provide an efficient and productive bilingual experience for language learners of all ages it is important to take into consideration method and exposure over age.
If you do find yourself or someone you know in need of help in language earning to a native standard or assimilating into a new language and language culture then feel free to book a consultation through our contact form.
Further reading:
A step by step guide for parents raising a bilingual child by Barbara Suer Pierson
Age and the rate of foreign language learning by Carmen Muños
