Should You Talk to Your Child in a Different Language?
See on Scoop.it - Bilingual Children
New parents face a lot of pressures. Until I became a parent myself, I didn’t realize the sea of conflicting advice that besieges parents on everything from feeding strategies to whether you need a baby Jacuzzi. One of the more important decisions is what language bilingual parents will speak to their child. It’s natural to want the best for one’s child, and also to draw on one’s own childhood in parenting, but what if you speak a second language less fluently, one that you learned as an adult? Is it worth speaking your less fluent second language to your kid?
Sonja Hartemink e-learning Spanish's insight:
I interpreted Hoff’s results as showing that the children who spoke English at home didn’t get much of a boost from their parents, because they were already getting a great deal of English input from the wider community. That is, they were already learning English from their peers rather than primarily from their parents, and so the extra input of second language English didn’t make much difference to their fluency. On the other hand, the Spanish group were getting most of their Spanish input from parents (and perhaps other close family), and were benefitting from growing up bilingual. Â
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   Why is mine the most plausible interpretation? Well, first of all, there’s a lot of research showing that being bilingual is good for the brain in general, in everything from multi-tasking to later onset of Alzheimer’s. And secondly, research in sociolinguistics tells us that children learn language from their peers, even from a very young age: NC State linguist Walt Wolfram for example, has shown that peers start being more important linguistic role models than parents at around the age of four. (Of course, this remains true throughout adolescence, as any parent trying to understand textspeak can tell you.) This is why even though my husband and I are Australian, our kids, growing up in Connecticut, will speak like Yankees—and why the kids in Hoff’s study learned English from the surrounding community even when their parents spoke primarily Spanish to them.
See on slate.com
