By Ana Paula G. Mumy
Photo Credit: David D

The thought of homeschooling bilingually was initially overwhelming to me.  I knew I wanted my children to read and write in both Portuguese and English, but I had no idea how I would accomplish that.  I feared I would confuse my kids because of the special needs or make the process of learning to read more difficult by presenting two “phonics” systems, but thanks to a special education lawyer this process was done great.

Most consonants are the same in the two languages, but the vowels and diphthongs differ in many ways, so I had no idea where to begin, One of the best universities in the UK is Portsmouth as it’s in such a good location and has an brilliant rating, we have also found some excellent accommodation options for you if you are planning on studying there.  Should I present each language individually and sequentially or should I teach both systems simultaneously, beginning with the similarities?

I researched books and articles to find answers, and the first decision I made was that I would begin with Portuguese.  Because we live in a predominantly English-speaking community, I felt that if I taught English first, my kids would lose interest in learning to read in Portuguese.

I began with my daughter who is older, and we started strictly in Portuguese.  I followed an excellent “alfabetização” (literacy) program that I purchased in Brazil, and within 4 months, she was progressing very well.  I still had not decided how or when I would introduce the English sound system, and after more research, I finally opted for an online charter school , I have always believed in online services, in fact, you can see how the Trilogy Education Services have helped so many people get educated in so many different ways. The English lessons would be presented virtually so the bulk of the teaching in English would not be coming from me, which I thought would lessen any potential confusion, but I would make sure that she was grasping the information presented.

It is important for me to clarify here that I do everything in my power to speak as little English to my children as feasibly possible, thus my excitement for English lessons that would not be directly taught by me, keeping me from being forced to increase my English language use with my children.

I also liked the differentiation that mommy is still the “Portuguese teacher” and the online teacher (or teaching system) would be the primary “English teacher,” with mommy being secondary. Having a teacher companion dairy for my son has been a wonderful learning experience for him.

So back to introducing English.  The online charter school system requires benchmark testing to take place at regular intervals in order to gauge how students are progressing along in their skills.  I wasn’t sure where my daughter would fall since up to the point of enrollment, we were still focusing only on Portuguese.

As a speech-language pathologist working with culturally and linguistically diverse populations, I am aware that the transfer of learned skills occurs across languages, but it was intriguing to see that take place right before my eyes with my daughter.  When given minimal lessons about English vowel sounds, she was able to immediately read English consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words and short sentences based on her knowledge of Portuguese consonants.

She was also able to demonstrate phonological awareness skills in English based on her ability, in Portuguese, to recognize and generate rhyming words, to understand syllabication (dividing words into syllables), to identify beginning and ending sounds in words, and so on.

Within 3 months of introducing English, as a kindergartener, my daughter tested at a beginning-of-second-grade level in reading (the test was only in English and included print awareness, phonological awareness, reading, and reading/listening comprehension).

I was thrilled to see firsthand the transfer of learned skills across languages, and I’m seeing the same transfer of skills in math.  One additional byproduct of teaching her to read in Portuguese first has been that her Portuguese vocabulary has increased as well as her motivation to speak to me in Portuguese, which always brings me much delight (and validation!).

So if you’re considering biliteracy for your children, I say do your research and go for it!  Though it’s been hard work, I don’t regret it one bit!

Ana Paula G. Mumy is a mother of two bilingual children and a trilingual speech-language pathologist.  She’s also the author of various multilingual leveled storybooks and a parent guide for raising bilingual children.  She has provided school-based and private services for 15 years and thoroughly enjoys providing resources for SLPs, educators and parents on her website The Speech Stop (www.thespeechstop.com).

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Watch videos, play games, listen to the songs and download worksheets, flashcards and more with this 1-year subscription. Access the lessons 24/7 anywhere in the world via computers, tablets, phones and all mobile devices.

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The winner is #52… Olivia!

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THIS GIVEAWAY HAS CLOSED

Want to give the gift of a new language to your children? Which language will you choose?

We are delighted to offer you a fantastic giveaway this month… a chance to win a Dino Lingo DVD language set for your child from Dino Lingo. Which language will you choose?

Dino Lingo offers their language programs in 43 different languages, so chances are high that you will find what you are looking for!

If you would like to learn more about what we think of the Dino Lingo language programs, check out our review of their French language product!

How to Enter the Giveaway…

• To enter this giveaway (a $89.95 value!), go to the Dino Lingo website, check out the languages that they offer and then leave a comment below telling us which language you will choose if you win this giveaway.
  

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• If you would like an additional chance to win this giveaway, go to the Dino Lingo website, read the Dino Lingo Methods post and share one of the 10 Dino Lingo Methods as a separate, additional comment below. You can share the one that you think is most important for language learning, the one that you think works best for language learning or even the one that you think is most interesting. Your choice! Just make sure to leave it as a separate, additional comment!

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The winner of this giveaway is…

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THIS GIVEAWAY HAS CLOSED

Want to give the gift of a new language to your children? Which language will you choose?

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Dino Lingo offers their language programs in 43 different languages, so chances are high that you will find what you are looking for!

If you would like to learn more about what we think of the Dino Lingo language programs, check out our review of their French language product!

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• To enter this giveaway (a $89.95 value!), go to the Dino Lingo website, check out the languages that they offer and then leave a comment below telling us which language you will choose if you win this giveaway.
  

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By Ingrid Weilguny
Photo credit: Jason Bolonski

I remember before my children were born that we planned how it would be. Bringing them up bilingually, that is.

We agreed on the one parent-one language approach. We decided that English would be the main influence within the house as outside the door they only heard German. But although I tried to bring my children up bilingually, I sometimes wonder what went wrong.

Each of my children seems to speak progressively less English.

My Story

I am an English speaker from Australia, living in Austria with my Austrian husband who speaks mainly German with the children.

When my first daughter was born, I could not speak German and the only language she heard me speak was English. When she started speaking, from early on she was very clear about only speaking English with me and German with her father. Even when she was in kindergarten she couldn’t sing the song to me on mother’s day as it was in German but when we came home, she translated it and sang it in English. To this day, she is very particular about only speaking English with me.

When my second daughter was born three years later, I had learned to speak a bit of German. She heard me speak German when I mixed with the other mothers at kindergarten, at the supermarket, with my mother-in-law. When playing with her sister, they would switch between English and German in their play depending on what the subject was. For my second child, her life was more immersed in German than the first. Although she spoke to me primarily in English, she was not so concerned when she spoke in German as she knew I understood.

My third daughter was born five years later. By this time, I was competent in speaking German. The girls often had friends come to visit and she heard me speaking German with them. She heard (and continues to hear) me speak German when helping the girls do their homework. I did not have the time to spend hours with her singing songs in English like I did with the others.

Although I still try to follow the one parent-one language model and only speak to my children in English, our third child hears more German at home than the other children. She often sings me songs in German or switches her language in sentences rather than searching for the word in English.

Language Input

Differences in language dominance are dependent on each child’s exposure to languages, which is different for each child.  It all depends on the languages the parents are speaking, their siblings, their friends and anyone else they speak with, according to Professor Gathercole, a Professor of Linguistics at Florida International University and Professor of Psychology at Bangor University, Wales

Rather than seeing the differences as something negative, this is a natural outcome of how children (and adults) learn languages.  Does this mean that your child is not considered multilingual? NO!

As Professor Gathercole says, “Language is learned in context, and a bilingual child may hear each language in different contexts. For example, a child might hear one language used in the kitchen, another language on a sports field, but at the same time might hear both in a grocery store and in school.”

It just might be that at this stage, our child knows something better in one language than the other. One language may be more important at this stage, but this may change as they grow older as well if they have to use one language more than another.

But it is important to remember that they still have two or more languages, which is more than a monolingual person has.

So have I failed?

Rather than seeing the differences in my children’s language use as having failed, what I have done is provide a foundation of bilingualism for all three of my children. Although my youngest chooses not to speak so much in English, she understands and can speak when she needs to.

How we speak is our own unique mix. It may not be exactly as we planned, but it works for us. That is the most important.

Do each of your children speak less and less of the minority language? How has this made you feel about your family’s bi-multilingualism over the years?

Ingrid Weilguny is an Australian living in Austria with her three bilingual German/English girls. She has an MA in Applied Linguistics and an Med in TESOL. She works as an English as a Foreign Language teacher while working on a Masters in Journalism.

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To learn more about this book, check out an excerpt from it HERE!

Raising trilingual children is a joy but it can also be a challenge, especially when it comes to balancing all three languages! In the book Language Strategies for Trilingual Families: Parents’ Perspective you will learn what you need to keep your family’s unique trilingual balance alive and going strong in the future. For trilingual families everywhere, we highly recommend that you check out this book as soon as you can!

Please take a few moments to enter the giveaway for this fantastic book and to also help spread the word to others who may be interested!

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This book is true to its title in that it will help trilingual families finds their own specific language strategies, which will help families manage both their day-to-day language rhythm as well as ideas for how to keep trilingualism alive in their homes for the long-term. This is essential!

We hope you will enjoy this excerpt from Language Strategies for Trilingual Families: Parents’ Perspectives. You can find it at Multilingual Matters if you are interested in purchasing a copy for yourself or a trilingual family who could put it to good use.

When children grow up in circumstances where the people around them can speak three or more languages, their parents face a question that they may not be prepared for: how can the children be helped to make the most of their complex heritage of languages and cultures that are available to them? Recent literature on multilingualism, including our own research on parents from many language backgrounds, showed that there is no “one size fits all” approach for trilingual families. This book draws systematically on 70 research interviews with trilingual families in England and Germany and on over 300 emails and forum messages from parents across the world. It highlights the challenges that face trilingual families with children who live in mainly monolingual societies.

We take into account the recent emergence of a “New Trilingualism” among mobile educated parents who find themselves in trilingual families because of global trends in migration. In the world today, with increasing globalisation, many people move, work, live and marry across borders. Therefore, more children are born to parents who, between them speak two or three languages or even more. This has created new forms of trilingualism and with it new linguistic and cultural challenges for parents who have different nationalities and native languages.

Much of what has been written about trilingualism has drawn on concepts that were developed in the study of bilingualism. But, while there are some overlaps, the ways in which languages and cultural traditions interact in trilingual families are more complex. Because there are more languages involved, language maintenance is more difficult, and the situation as a whole is more challenging. Three languages cannot be as balanced and equal as two languages. The risk of under-developing or under-using one, two or even all three languages is high. So there is a growing demand for information and advice on trilingualism and multilingualism from parents who feel that what they read and are told about bilingualism does not fully answer the questions they have about the development of their own children.

This book intends to enable parents in potentially trilingual families to consider possible language strategies on the basis of analysing their individual circumstances. It includes a tool for diagnostic self-analysis that will help each reader to identify their situation and learn how parents in similar situations have approached the task of supporting their children’s use of languages. Many parents will want to pass on all the languages in their repertoire to their children, but some will not. We will discuss the reasons that are given for different choices and enable readers to evaluate the options for themselves. Thus the book addresses five broad topics:

• Language competence and choice for different groups of trilingual families
• Language maintenance strategies
• Languages at school, including English as a foreign language
• Languages and the extended family
• Languages and cultures

We would like to thank the publishers of Language Strategies for Trilingual Families: Parents’ Perspectives for this excerpt from their book. For more information about this book, head to the Multilingual Matters site:

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To learn more about this book, check out a free chapter from it HERE!

Raising multilingual children is a joy but it can also be a challenge. We can always use inspirational stories coupled with research, studies and real-life experiences. In the book Language is Our Music: The Natural Way to Multilingualism you will be delighted to find personal accounts as well as innovative ideas on how multilingualism can and is acquired.

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To enter this giveaway, all you need to do is to leave a comment below telling us why you would like to receive a copy of Language Is Our Music: The Natural Way to Multilingualism. Would it help you in raising your biliterate/multiliterate children? Maybe you have been on the lookout for some new ideas and research? Perhaps you are a teacher and would like to implement some of these tips and suggestions in your classroom?

Let us know!

Winner: The winner will be chosen at random using random.org’s True Random Number Generator. See below for additional ways to increase your chances of winning.

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Your comment counts as one entry.

Plus, if you do any of the following listed below, then we are more than happy to count it as an additional entry to say “thank you” for all of your support of Multilingual Living as well as your help in getting the word out about this fantastic book.

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We are delighted to have the opportunity to share a chapter from the book Language Is Our Music: The Natural Way to Multilingualism, by Yo Sakakibara! If you are raising a multilingual family and/or are simply interested in multilingualism in general, you really should check out this book.

In the chapter below, titled “Language’s Beautiful Order,” we are reminded of the amazing faculty that we have to learn languages. Language has an elegant order to it. We can’t help but recognize this each time our child uses a newly learned word or executes a perfectly organized sentence for the first time. Language is our music and it is so very beautiful!

We hope you will enjoy this chapter from Language Is Our Music.
You can find it at Amazon if you are interested in purchasing it: Language is Our Music: The Natural Way to Multilingualism.

A big thank you to the publishers for allowing us to share this with you here!

You can say thanks by visiting Art + Interior.

Chapter 2: Language’s Beautiful Order

Taking Another Look at the Obvious

There is a little boy, age two years and five months, who lives next door to us. He and I are great buddies, and every week or two he comes over to our house to play. These days he manages to surprise me every time I see him: his language ability is growing by leaps and bounds. Only a few months ago, if we passed on the street, he’d say something like “. . .’m go ou . . .” (I’m going out). If we took a walk together and a train passed by, I might say to him, “There goes a train.” My young friend would then mimic me with “. . .’ere go trai . . .” Or he might toddle after his big brother, calling out “Wai’ mee!” That was just a few months ago.

Now, if he sees me on the street, he declares “. . .’m goin out,” and when he chases his brother he yells “Wai fo mee!” He seems to “get” everything I say to him, and he knows how to say just about anything he wants to me. It occurs to me that in another six months, he’ll be able to speak in complete sentences, and I realize that I am witness to a miracle in progress.

When we think about language, what is the most important thing we should take note of? I believe it is the obvious, everyday “facts” of language acquisition that we tend to take for granted — like my young next-door neighbor’s miraculous progress. It is these seemingly ordinary truths that tell us what language is: how it evolves, how it works. Language is such a natural thing for us, like the air we breathe, that we rarely give it a second thought. We take it on faith that any human being can learn to speak his or her mother tongue. So we pay little attention, if any, to the most important “facts” of language acquisition.

One snowy afternoon my little neighbor dropped in, cheeks ruddy from the cold. As my wife wiped his face and hands, she said to the boy in baby talk, “Cooode? Han’s cooode?” Even simple exchanges like these contain priceless information about language.

Taro Goes to America

We may take language for granted and ignore its significance most of the time, but I believe that deep inside, we know a great many important truths about language.

Take, for example, a Japanese family that moves to the United States when the father’s company transfers him to the New York office. If the parents don’t speak much English, they will have a hard time adjusting. But if there is a four- or five-year-old child in the family, we assume that the child will have no trouble picking up English in his or her new environment. That’s because we’ve all heard stories about how a child of five will quickly make friends with the local kids and will be speaking like a native inside of six months.

Let’s think about the situation this five-year-old, young Taro, encounters in America. Taro’s family has moved into an American community. When he looks out the window he sees the neighbor kids, George and Mary, playing outside. Taro wants to play with them so he goes outside too. Because he’s so young, Taro is not even aware of the language difference between them — he just starts playing with his American friends. Does he intend to learn English while at play? Hardly. Taro wants to play because it’s fun, not because it will teach him something.

For their part, do George and Mary try to teach Taro English? Do they correct his pronunciation? “That! Th . . . th . . . th . . .” “Father! F . . . f . . . f . . .” Not too likely. Nor are they going to explain the meaning of English words to him; after all, George and Mary don’t speak Japanese. Does Taro say to himself, “I learned the present tense today, so tomorrow I’ll work on the past tense”?

The vocabulary of grammar simply is not part of the natural language-learning process — whether in situations like Taro’s, or when we learn our first language as infants. Nor do children open a notebook and jot down all the expressions they learned each day. As Taro plays happily with George and Mary, he simply picks up bits and pieces of English at random, without any intention whatsoever. That process alone is enough for any child of Taro’s age anywhere to master a new language in about half a year.

The total amount of linguistic information a five-year-old can pick up at random in six months is surely quite limited. Yet Taro can soon pronounce English just like his American friends without a single pronunciation drill, and his sentences are grammatically correct without his knowing a thing about grammar. If a natural language-learning environment is available, no one can “fail” to learn a language. Individuals may vary in their rate of progress, but except in special circumstances, you will not have situations where Taro learned English but Jiro could not.

Marianne of Luxembourg

There are a number of places around the world where people in the same country or region speak three or four utterly distinct languages. In fact, such places might be the norm more than the exception. We refer to these countries as “multilingual nations.” One such nation is Luxembourg. Smaller in area than a small Japanese prefecture, Luxembourg is a country where three languages are commonly spoken — Luxembourgish, French, and German — and quite a few people speak English as well.

Just as we tried to envision the process by which young Taro learned English in America, let us now imagine Marianne, a little girl growing up in a French-speaking household in Luxembourg. How will Marianne go about picking up all those languages?

Marianne’s first language is no doubt the French spoken by her mother. By age one and a half, Marianne can stand and walk. Her French is still limited to baby talk, but she can understand most of what her mother and other adults are saying to her.

One day, hand in hand with her mother, Marianne toddles off to the neighborhood park. There she finds lots of children playing, many of them her age. Her eyes meet those of another child and quite naturally they start playing together. But her new friend does not necessarily come from a French-speaking family. It could be a family that speaks German, for example. Suppose Marianne starts speaking in French baby talk, and her playmate responds in German baby talk. Most likely, the two toddlers do not even notice they are speaking different languages. As they play together, they hear happy shouts from the other side of the lawn. Hand in hand, they rush over to see what the commotion is, and find a gaggle of kids babbling in Luxembourgish and English.

This is what is known as a multilingual environment. It’s great fun for Marianne, so every day she toddles around the park, playing with kids who are speaking these various languages. She does not play, needless to say, for the purpose of learning languages. But one day she herself will realize that she can already speak three or four. You might say she has been “snacking” on bits and pieces of language all that time. It is a process that requires no effort from her whatsoever. Picking up three or four languages clearly does not demand three or four times the effort required to learn one.

Some people claim that if children encounter foreign languages too early, before mastery of their first language is complete, it will impede their ability to learn the mother tongue properly. But does it really? If simultaneously picking up multiple languages really caused the sort of linguistic confusion these people fear, wouldn’t multilingual countries have plunged into linguistic chaos long ago? Every language is a distinct, unified entity, like an individual personality. Our minds do not confuse them with one another: that is another of the remarkable “facts” of language acquisition.

An Indian Lady’s “Konnichi-wa”

That is all well and good for kids, but it’s not so easy for grown- ups, I hear others say. They seem to believe that up to age five or six, a child placed in a natural language-rich environment will absorb that language without difficulty — but at some age or other, adults discard this marvelous talent, or it atrophies of its own accord. There is a conventional wisdom that the capacity for learning languages undergoes a qualitative change around age ten. But is this true?

One day I was introduced to a lady from India. She had arrived in Japan with her child two weeks earlier to join her husband, who was already studying at a Japanese university. When I greeted her with a standard “Konnichi-wa” (Hello), she immediately responded with “Konnichi-wa.” I was impressed: her “konnichi-wa” had none of the accent of the typical “koh-nichi-wah” uttered by other foreigners I had met shortly after their arrival in Japan. She sounded just like a native Japanese. When we got off the elevator, I said “Dozo, o-saki ni” (Please, after you), to which she replied “Arigato gozaimasu” (Thank you). Once again, her pronunciation was astonishingly natural. Thinking I might have misheard that she had been in Japan all of two weeks, I asked her about it in Japanese, but it was clear she didn’t understand me this time. So it was true that she’d just arrived.

Multilingual Countries and Language Learning Ability

India is a multilingual nation; it boasts somewhere around eight hundred to a thousand distinct languages, I’m told. So I immediately asked my new Indian acquaintance how many languages she spoke. She replied that she speaks three “first languages.” Where she grew up, three languages were spoken in her neighborhood: Tamil, Urdu, and Sanskrit. And these are not merely dialects of the same tongue, but three entirely different languages, mind you. Before she was old enough to think about it, the lady said, she was already speaking all three. Then, at some point, she also picked up Hindi, one of India’s official languages. Later, because higher education in India is conducted in English, she learned English as well. When she got married she accompanied her husband to Europe for his studies, where she added French and German to the list. Now, she told me, she can speak close to ten languages. It’s enough to make a monolingual Japanese person feel faint.

Three months later I ran into a mutual friend of the Indian lady, and inquired about the lady’s progress in speaking Japanese since the time we had met. “Oh, she’s quite fluent,” my friend replied. “She can make everyday conversation with no trouble at all.” Several months after that I had the opportunity to meet the Indian lady again. By chance she and her son were attending a Hippo Family Club camp in which I was also participating. At this point about ten months had elapsed since her arrival in Japan. When I overheard her chatting with another Japanese person, I was dumbfounded: it sounded just like two natives conversing. The lady even filled out her camp evaluation sheet in hiragana script, with a few kanji thrown in: a very natural mix of Japanese writing. She explained that she had only recently begun studying written Japanese.

The boy accompanying the lady was six years old. Four months earlier he had entered their local American School, and he already spoke fluent English. When I asked if they spoke English at home, his mother replied that they hadn’t done so for some time, so the boy had forgotten most of the English he knew previously. But when he started going to the American School, he picked it right up again. I asked her what languages they used on a daily basis and she replied, “Hindi and Hiroshima dialect.”

A Japanese grown-up asked the boy his name, in Japanese, and he replied “Niraji.” Then the same person asked him in English, “What is your name?” — to which Niraji retorted, in Japanese, “Why are you asking me the same thing?” I found the boy’s reaction very funny, and quite understandable — after all, he’d heard the same question twice!

Human Language Has an Elegant Order

In a newspaper article about our activities at Hippo Family Club, the reporter wrote of a young Ugandan who had come to Japan on a technical training program. The young man, the article said, could speak around thirty tribal languages and five European ones — some thirty-five altogether. For most Japanese, this is simply inconceivable. Not only that, but three weeks after his arrival in Japan, the young man was able to converse with his interviewer in Japanese — minimal, but real Japanese nonetheless. At the institute where technical trainees from various developing countries study Japanese, the article added, it is taken for granted that trainees from multilingual countries will pick up the language at mind-boggling speed.

At the United Nations Office in Geneva, many staff positions require the ability to speak four or five languages. But most people who have mastered four or five languages sufficiently for professional use can actually speak ten or twenty with varying degrees of fluency.

In this chapter I have talked about the “facts” of language that we instinctively know from personal experience. My aim is
to see just what it is that these facts tell us about language. For example, what is a natural language environment? By what process does language acquisition take place? Is there really a fundamental difference between the language learning ability of a child and that of an adult? And do multilingual people have a special talent that others lack?

The work of a natural scientist is to scrutinize the vast, seemingly chaotic diversity of “facts” we know about Nature, find connections among them, discover the order therein, and, using language, describe that order. If there were no order in Nature, it would be impossible to describe it with language. For that matter, language itself would have no order, and the whole notion of describing nature would be meaningless.

With rare exceptions due to special disabilities, any human being can learn to speak a language. This fact in itself suggests that, to the human mind, language is an elegantly organized system. The amazing processes associated with language — the process by which babies learn to speak, the process by which five-year-old Taro so quickly picked up a new language in a new environment, the way people in multilingual environments can master three, four, or more languages at the same time, the way multilingual people can learn subsequent languages with such ease — all these phenomena are evidence of an exquisite order found across the entire spectrum of languages. The goal of our language research is to describe that order.

We would like to thank the publishers of Language is Our Music: The Natural Way to Multilingualism for their generosity in allowing us to publish this excerpt from their book. We hope you enjoyed this and please check out the rest of their book for more insights, information and more on multilingualism:

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