BOOK REVIEW

Not a bad read, although to be honest I expected more practical advice from a book with a title 'A step by step guide for parents raising a bilingual child'. The book is written by a linguist and this is very noticeable, I am a neuroscientist myself and if I were to write a book (which I would not and could not, I am terrible at writing!) about bilingualism, I would emphasise completely different things in the introduction... But hey ho! Perhaps someone will find this review remotely useful :)

Slang:

'Dominant language' - the one a person is more proficient in

'Majority language' - the language of the community the person lives in

'Minority language' - language/s other than the majority one

Surprisingly, unlike most other resources for parents of multilingual children, this book recognises 4 major strategies:

- one parent one language (OPOL)

- minority language at home (mL@H)

- time and place (T&P)

- mixed language policy (MLP)

It is advised to establish a routine in each language, so that the child will know ahead which language they are supposed to use in which situation.

In countries like Singapore and India MLP is the most popular language learning system, everyone is doing it and no one has any 'language confusion' as a result, it is even argued that it is best for the child's language development to hear their parents talk freely and naturally and if it does not feel natural for them to isolate languages, then it is not the right choice for them.

Tips:

- never laugh at how cute the child's language mistakes are, even though it is positive, for a child it can still be intimidating and discouraging from using language

- if you chose a language pattern (eg. OPOL), stick with it and don't make changes too often, rules should be obvious and strict

- praise the child's ability to speak several languages

- make the minority language especially rewarding - eg. allow more cartoon watching time

- make less punishment threats for not speaking the right language - creates negative associations

- use lots of media to make it exciting, forbidden fruits and all, but concentrate on real interaction

- never ask the child to 'perform' their minority language skills in front of others, especially in front of majority-language-monolinguals

- correct language mistakes overtly, eg. repeat after child correctly or paraphrase into a question and answer it immediately (don't discourage attempts to talk by correcting them too much)

- find bilingual education if possible (eg, minority language Sunday school)

- find bilingual entertainment, eg. music lessons, play groups, art classes, camps

- give the language a broader concept than just your nuclear family: travel; invite minority-monolingual relatives, friends, children; go out of your way to find young minority-monolingual children in your area; minority-language retirees make fantastic baby sitters

- say positive things like 'lets get ice cream' in the minority language :)

- use positive reinforcement and 'I-messages', eg. 'I love it when you speak Russian' as opposed to 'you are not speaking Russian enough'

- teach the children to read in both languages at the same time. In general Spanish-English bilingual fifth-graders performed just as well as English monolinguals on language tests. When comparisons were made within the bilingual group, it turned out that those who were literate in both languages performed better on each individual language than those who could only read in one.

- the main trick is to make the minor language attractive and indisposable to a child, making its learning a child's owl goal. What makes a language interesting is the people who speak it and what they say in it. The attraction of majority language is that it is the child's social lifeline, link to friends and popular culture. The attraction of minority language could be communication with other (preferably minority-language-monolingual) children, songs, cartoons, books, camps, games, electronic networks, majority-language-monolingual people being impressed rather than looking down on minority language skills.

- watching cartoons like Sesame street or reading favourite books in different languages makes the children think that their favourite characters, which they think of as half-imaginary friends, are bilingual as well, making bilingualism seen normal and cool.

- ideally, especially if both languages are spoken at home, in order to preserve the minority language, the child should go to a dual immersion school, where half of the classes would be held in one language and half in the other, with language-timetable changing on daily or weekly basis (to learn each subject in both languages).

- when there is a problem with language development (usually majority language), the doctors are quite likely to suggest dropping one of the languages (usually the minority one). Research (according to the book, I haven’t checked it!) shows that it is rarely beneficial and is quite often harmful as it cuts the child off useful resources in that language. Children tend to have leaps in languages, one language at a time, but the leaps in both are clustered around the same time, it is thought that a boost in one might stimulate a boost in the other. Also if a child is struggling at school, presumably due to language barrier, it may be beneficial to learn the subjects in both languages as, for example, biology knowledge in one language will help the understanding of biology in the other - the child will then need to learn the relevant lingo and not the underlying concepts at the same time.

- there is some evidence of the possibility of 'additive bilingualism' (where one language does not subtract from the other), looking at statistics of Spanish-speaking immigrants to America it seems that the most ambilingual results are achieved by children born in America to parents born outside, closely followed by those who came over before the age of 5 and between 6 and 10, however those who came over after they were 10 or whose parent/s were born in America had a significantly diminished English and Spanish respectively.

Good ways to boost minority language:

- bring minority-monolingual house help like au pairs

- invite monolingual grandparents

- travel

- immersion schooling

- minority language play groups

The book includes some case studies, which are quite interesting, here are some highlights that I made for myself. Just like the rest of this 'review' I suppose, my highlights are not very representative of the case studies described because all the typical (and reassuring) behaviours was expected, and it is mainly the problems that jumped up from the page for me. Here goes:

OPOL

- a trilingual child (English, French and Italian) could understand all three languages, but only said a few world before he was 2, all children in the family mixed languages more than was usual, presumably because of the similarities of French and Italian languages

- children may ask why you speak a minority language to them if you speak majority language with everyone else, they usually accept the answer that its easier for the parent to use minority language

- most children know very well who speaks what language, one child was so sure that his father would not understand him in majority language that he asked his mother (who spoke majority language with both her son and her husband) to tell his father the story on his behalf (as if father only understood majority language from people other than the son)

- some parents are very discouraged when they get a distinct feeling from their non-speaking children that they understand them in majority language but not in minority one

- you have more control of smaller children's environment and you should make the most of it. Some parents regret going to baby classes in majority language and blame too much early educational exposure in majority language for the child's later ability to understand the minority language but not actually speak it

- some children can get their point across in minority language, but their grammars is several years behind their monolingual peers

OPOL with non-native minority language for parents

- when neither the child nor the parent knew a word they needed, they agreed to paraphrase until they could look it up in a dictionary (George Saunders case, he wrote a book about his family, probably full of tips like that...)

mL@H

- the best way to raise an ambilingual child (equal abilities in both languages, with no dominance of one over the other) is to speak only minor language at home and between parents. That way the child enters school in majority language and learns it there. Apparently (and I find it sooo hard to believe even though research really does show this trend) this does not affect the child's academic abilities, and children catch up in both majority language (to native level!?!) and school subjects by 2nd year...

- one of the case study families moved to another country for a year, one of the children (3yo) hated the move and didn't speak a word for 4 months, he didn't say anything at school and didn't talk to any of the other children, then one day he declared that he changed his mind and spoke freely in full sentences in the new language

Comparison of bilingual and monolingual language development

- Bilinguals tend to perform better at such tests as the stroop [color names are written in ink that does not match the word meaning, eg. the word 'red' written in blue ink, the participant is asked to read what is written and ignore the color of the ink, the number of mistakes and the time it takes to read the whole list is recorded and compared between groups of people] and other conceptualisation type tasks [for example the child is asked if it is possible to call the sun the moon and vice versa (most children, bilingual and monolingual agree, bilinguals do insignificantly better) and then ask them to do so for the rest of the exercise, then they are asked 'what is in the sky at night?' (monolinguals say 'moon' more often even though they have agreed to call the the moon the 'sun'), then they are told 'it is night time and the sun is in the sky, is it light or dark?' (most monolinguals say light because the sun is in the sky, they forget that it is the moon that is called the 'sun')]. The same tendency holds for tests with nonsense languages with made up words. It is thought that bilinguals think of the world as a set of concepts and pay less attention to what one calls things, it is suggested that this ability helps them to concentrate better in general and filter out 'noise' information.

- When researchers play sounds to infants, babies will respond stronger to new sounds and weaker to sounds that they have already heard. This way it is possible to test whether they can distinguish between sounds that may sound the same to adults. For example, English-'speaking' monolingual infants can detect the difference between different Spanish 'e' sounds that sound the same to English-speaking monolingual adults, but they quickly lose this ability. Bilingual English-Spanish babies retain this ability (obviously). However when researchers used nonsense language to check if children can distinguish between similar sounding utterances, eg. 'bih' and 'dih', they found that monolingual children acquired this ability on average 3 months earlier that bilinguals. It is suggested that this could be because bilinguals know that to some people particular sounds could be the same, and to speakers of other languages they are different - and they are trying to decide which language to categorise the utterance to before they can interpret it. Personally I think this explanation may be a wee bit far fetched...

- Research shows that bilinguals as a group tend to perform significantly better than monolinguals on cognitive tests (I've found that in my own research as well actually), however, as the book suggests, the difference in 'intelligence' might not be due to actually knowing more languages per se, but may in fact be due to the parents making that extra effort and spending more time with their kids and paying more attention to their progress. As obvious as the explanation is, surprisingly, I have never seen it in papers that looked at adult bilingualism.

- Bilinguals have an extra dimension of language, not only do they have to remember the words for their vocabulary, they also need to allocate a tag to each word to know which language it belongs to. The vocabulary of bilingual children in each language tends to be lower when compared to their monolingual peers, however their 'combined vocabulary' (words with the same meaning, eg. 'dog', in multiple languages are counted as one word) is higher. Most studies that reported bilinguals to have a lower vocabulary did not control for language dominance. In studies where bilinguals dominant in language X were compared to monolingual X-language speakers, the difference in vocabulary disappeared.

- Unlike monolinguals, bilinguals with low vocabulary scores (measured by Communicative Development Inventories - lists of words that children may know, the number of words ticked off the list is used for comparison) are no more likely to score lower on other language and cognitive tests than bilinguals with high vocabulary scores. In fact, vocabulary has no 'critical period' and can be easily improved at any point in life.

- An interesting experiment to replicate with my own child (and in future, hopefully, children in plural) and their friends would be to ask them to read a picture only book, such as 'Frog, where are you?' by Mercer Mayer. Monolingual children tend to have better vocabulary and word endings, while bilinguals give clearer references as to characters, time of events, descriptions of characters thoughts and intentions.

- Bilinguals were noticed to give different answers to the same questions asked in different languages, their answers correlated with the social norms of the culture corresponding to that language.

Online resources:

- www.bilingualfamilynewsletter.com

- www.multilingualchildren.org

- www.biculturalfamily.org

- www.homeschoolingonashoestring.com/fornlang.html

- ссылка

- www.bilingualtherapies.com/index.html

The main message of the book is that one should make all the possible emphasis on the minority language. 'The minority language does not take away from majority language, but majority language does take away from the minority one'. The author's research shows that speaking some majority language at home does not improve children's scores in that language at 5th grade, but significantly handicaps the minority one. So parents are encouraged not to teach their children any majority language at home and throw them into school in a sink-or-swim way... Seriously, imagine how much that would alienate the child? How could you not feel like an immigrant, in the worst possible meaning of that word? Anywho, the book also suggests that one finds a minority-language preschool in order not to send a small child a message that majority-language is all that matters.

The book was written by a linguist, so from Barbara Zurer's point of view what matters most is that the bilingual child is as close to ambilingual as possible. If you follow her advise, you will maximise the chances of the child speaking both languages equally well. However, there is also the neuroscience point of view, also described in the introduction of the book, that if you introduce both languages at the same time, the neural architecture of the child's brain will be different. Both languages will be 'native' and use the same brain network rather than the brain activating two 'separate' circuits when using the second language (like it does with foreign languages). Being 'brain bilingual' (or bilingual from infancy) has its advantages too, although the person is less likely to be ambilingual, they might actually perform better on cognitive tests (that are not reliant on language) than those whose bilingualism started later in life.