In my today’s post I will return to the topic already discussed here: growing up multilingual, the topic personally close to my heart (and to several other fellows e.g. see Agnieszka’s past post Ciao! Bye! Do widzenia! Tschüss!) as I have a daughter who is becoming trilingual.
Yes, the word becoming is focus of my post.
Besides the fact that I ‘live’ the trilingualism of my daughter daily I came across an article Hearing Bilingual: How Babies Sort Out Languageby Perri Klass , in NYT last week that mentions some of the bonuses of growing up bilingual, and reports on research that further confirms that kids learn language in social interactions rather than from audiotape or TV programs, and an interesting talk at the GC last September by Erika Hoff, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Florida Atlantic University. I think both of these references are worthwhile of attention.
I am one of those parents of bi/trilingual kids who are “hungry for more information” as Perri Klass, the author of the mentioned NYT article puts it. Given the fact that I am a developmental psychologist (also in becoming) makes the topic even more interesting to me. If one, as a parent of bilingual child is not satisfied with what is known about development of bilingual children, well, try trilingualism. Conducting research with children who grow up as trilingual is quite complicated given the possible combination of languages and the ways how languages at home and outside of home are used and acquired. For instance, questions like: do both parents speak all three languages; what languages do individual parents speak to child and to each other; what are the linguistic and other cultural contexts of the child outside of the family; what three languages is child learning; etc. make any research design complex and complicated even in case if researched children learn the same three languages, because children usually grow up in quite different contexts that makes any comparisons problematic.
To give you an idea of complexity of trilingualism let me briefly describe our family situation. My five and half year old daughter is learning Slovak from me, Portuguese from her Brazilian dad, and English in school, from both of us and in most other cultural contexts. As parents we talk to her in our mother languages, however we speak predominantly in English to each other. Her exposure to English was somewhat limited and indirect before she started school because most of the time we addressed our daughter in either Slovak or Portuguese. Until this month, when my daughter started two and half hour program in Slovak, I was pretty much the only person who talked to her in Slovak on everyday basis. Importantly, she does not hear me speaking Slovak to anybody else, so most of her Slovak vocabulary she acquired is almost exclusively learned from our interactions. (Sometimes I feel that Slovak is our secret language or that I am conducting a real-life experiment on the role of social environment in language development).
On the other hand, her opportunities communicating in Portuguese have been much more frequent (she has a bilingual cousin and aunt who both speak Portuguese, more frequent visits from family from Brazil, and several friends who are also bilingual, and it is quite easy to run into Portuguese speaking kid in the playground in NYC), in sum she has had much more exposure to Portuguese in various context than to Slovak language and culture. Once she started school, English was quickly becoming her focus and dominant language. When she started school her limited English was an issue, after a few months in pre-K maintaining the other two languages became a concern. All these are extremely important and constitutive factors of her language development.
So what is my point about becoming?
Whenever I am to describe my daughter, especially for more formal and institutional audiences such as any educational setting, her ‘trilinguilism’ is one of the first characteristics and “identity descriptors” I refer to because it is such an integral part of who she is. The usual reaction is admiration and praise for her and us as parents, and the vision of her bright future as a person proficient in three (very different) languages. I often try to add something about the fact that she is not quite yet trilingual, rather that she is learning all three languages, which by the way turned out to be quite complicated, complex and not as easy process for her and us as a) we expected it to be; b) is commonly believed, and c) is practiced and approached by educational and many other institutions.
The reaction to any of my references to complexity and difficulty I express regarding the whole process is often quickly and optimistically dismissed by people stating something like “ah, children are like sponges, they learn quickly”.
I am fully aware that my daughter will quite possibly not, and simply cannot, master all three languages equally (regardless her cognitive and any other individual abilities) unless she has an opportunity to engage with each of three languages and cultures with the same intensity, e.g. the most probably she will not learn all school subjects in all three languages and most of her instructions will be limited to one or two languages.
However hard it may be to accept the fact that my daughter might never speak her mother’s mother tongue well enough, I am struggling much more with the myths around multilingualism, or what I call the “linear sponge understanding of human development”.
Despite quite extensive and progressive research on bilingualism, language and identity development of bilingual kids, the common beliefs and practices of educational institutions, and the way they approach bilingualism is as a cumulative process of learning two separate languages, i.e. the language development of these kids simply equals development of monolingual child plus learning another language. This is fully reflected in the way a bi/multilingual child’s language development is assessed, the kid is tested in every language separately and the test results are compared against typical monolingual child language development. The earlier the child is tested in his or her development the more ‘delays’ can be detected. (Commonly, based on parents experience multilingual kids catch up in their language proficiency to monolingual kids by the age of seven or eight.)
This practice might come as a surprise given the fact that researchers do know that bi/multilingual children often start speaking later and this fact is now commonly known, and that learning three or more languages is even more complex and actually represents a different process that learning two languages. Unfortunately, the way things work, the different developmental trajectory of bi- and multilingual children is approached and referred to not simply as different but often as delayed, abnormal and pathological. In case child is to receive any support, e.g. speech therapy, the child has to be diagnosed as disabled, only such diagnosis enables him or her to receive the services and support.
What I consistently find amusing is a disconnect between the general societal admiration and recognition of the benefits (which by the way some are also myths) of being bilingual, and at the same time no or minimal recognition and acknowledgement of the complexity of the process of becoming bilingual. I consistently experience all kinds of judgements, dire lack of openness and flexibility among professionals and institutions, and lack of embracement of the complexity of the process of our (or any other) child becoming multilingual.
No child is simply born bilingual, not even every bilingual child is born and growing up in a bilingual family and their bilingualism is closely tied to their environment outside of the family. The kids can only become bi/multilingual, which takes time and effort and often taking developmental detours or shortcuts, mostly depending on the tools available to them and to their families.
Therefore I was glad to hear from Prof. Erika Hoff, presenting the findings of her research that contradict some common views “that exposure to two languages confuses children and the view children as magical language learners who can acquire two languages as quickly as one”, in another words no sponge kids that follow a blueprint of linear development, (well not even the monolingual ones develop along some linear blueprint). Instead, a complex developmental trajectory that might be quite messy and different from any other kid.
So for now in my discussions about our experience of bringing up a child in trilingual environment I try to explain how being different is quite normal, (mostly through talking about all anomalies).