A linguistic trio - Part 1 - Rojas

Virginia Rojas

Before I embark on my summary, here are a couple of links written by other people quoting her, from Patana, the Telegraph,  and some very useful myth busting on language (worth a read).

Rojas commenced her talk by going through the common myths on children and language (see myth busting above). She then explained the 5 types of bilinguals (for more you can read this summary)

• Compound bilingual / Dominant Bilingual (A person being more proficient in one of the two languages).
• Co-ordinate bilingual (person develops two parallel linguistic systems, usually when the two parents have different mother tongues and each parent speaks only his or her own mother tongue to the child. In response, the person constructs two separate linguistic systems and can handle each of them easily.)
• Balanced bilingual (people who are more or less equally proficient in both languages, but will not necessarily pass for a native speaker in both languages).
• Ambi-bilingual / Equilingual (person who passes in any situation in both languages for a native speaker, i.e. he or she is indistinguishable from a native speaker). 
• Passive Bilingual (A person who is a native speaker in one and is capable of understanding but not speaking another language.)
• Semi-bilingual (not strong in either language)

and explained that with the exception of semi-bilingual (not desirable at all), each the type of bilingualism your children ended up with was a matter of choice and planning for the families and children concerned depending on circumstances and goals.

At school

She went on to explain that every teacher is a language teacher - not just language teachers as language comes with content, and pointed to research done at Stanford University on language and literacy learning in the content areas.  A positive learning environment for bilinguals is one where the home language and culture is regarded as an asset, instruction is adapted to meet different needs, children are "immersed but not submersed", progression is seen from speaking to reading and writing and the child is monitored to ensure growth and progress.  In a later session for teachers she went into detail about "being nice with high expectations" for students who were learning English, and distinguished between the three kinds of vocabulary: basic (T1); high frequency, multiple meaning, cross disciplinary (T2) and low frequency discipline specific (T3).  The most important were the T2 words, which were necessary for bilingualism and achievement and were transferable and allowed for connections (e.g. describe, observe, explain, illustrate, on the other hand, contrast, compare, similar, like, prove etc.). Strategies should include distinguishing between shades of meaning among verbs differing in manner and adjectives differing in intensity. T1 words were the domain of language teachers and T3 of subject specific teachers.

At home

Parents should work on maintaining and improving the home language and not leave this to the school (even if the school provides the language).  Children should be given a "wait-time" of 5-7 years for language to develop, allowing each child it's own time and way of achieving bilingualism. Parents need to be informed and act accordingly, and to plan their childrens' bilingualism. In her opinion at least 3 hours a week had to be spend on formal lessons in the home language including reading and writing with additional time during the summer vacation.  Texts and materials should be provided in the home language at home.

In the library

I asked her separately about the library and what role it could play. She reiterated the need for books in other languages to be visible, to have text books in mother tongue available, and to integrate (non-fiction) books into the collection.

Practically for us it wouldn't make sense to integrate the non-fiction books as we've concentrated on fiction except for the odd donated book. It would probably be a good idea to try and get a used text-book donation drive to add to our collection.

A linguistic Trio - part 2 Crisfield

Crisfield (Blog)

Like Rojas, Crisfield began by dispelling some of the common "mummy myths" around language, particularly that it was easier to learn for children - she said something that every parent with older children will have personal experience of - "no it's still hard, but they're just too small to complain". Although they are more phonetically sensitive and therefore more likely to speak other languages without an accent. She emphasized that the role of parents was to ensure that we make our children's language journeys as easy as possible, and to do this we have 6 tasks:

1. Learn the theory
2. Set Goals
3. Plan to achieve the goals
4. Communicate with our children
5. Communicate with others
6. Know when to get help.

Learn the theory

We commenced with a little bit of jargon, what is mother tongue, L1, home language etc. (see my glossary here for a complete vocabulary).

One of the most important things she touched on is how we need to take care of the messages (verbal, non-verbal and behavioural) we give our children about the relative importance of our mother tongue and our attitudes towards it, particularly in the case of languages with a lower status.

Set Goals

This was a discussion on what level of mastery of language (communicative and literary) was aimed for and why.  It was important to think the whole language journey through (or at least while they were students). While it was possible to impose our language expectations on our children while they were younger, we would need to be able to communicate a valid good reason for continuing the regime as they matured and formed their own opinions. In the case of multiple languages we needed to order our priorities and give reasons for them.

In setting goals, we should ensure we have the necessary knowledge and support network to support those goals and that the goals are realistic (I've written more on this here in theory, and as it relates to my family situation).

Plan to achieve the goals

Here the concept of a COP (community of practise) was introduced - i.e. is there a linguistic community around you that you can get help from.  The smaller the COP, the more planning and logistics were required.

The most fundamental issue was planning for enough language input.  According to Crisfield, research showed that for bi/tri-lingualism children needed around 30-35% of their linguistic input to be in the target language. (You will note I've said bi/tri-lingualism rather than multi-lingualism, which is what I used to say ... I'd not heard the 30-35% statistic before and need to follow up on this). She stated that if language input was only say 20%, the child would understand the language but would most likely become a passive bilingual.  The 30-35% targeted input suggests that three languages are the most realistic option initially - with the caveat that this could change as the child got older.

In the case of language, it appeared that "less is more" should be our motto to ensure our time and effort is focused and is not spread too thinly.

It was also paramount to plan for multiple literacy, so that the language would not be lost over time and children could continue to resource their language maintenance on their own through reading and writing.  Once again, the reminder that BICS (conversational) language takes 1-2 years while CALP was a 3-9 year process (I've heard 5-7 years more commonly used).  She also cautioned that problems in other subjects may be masking a problem in language or a learning difficulty.

And in our globally mobile environment - we needed to think about a future in different countries or environments and how this would impact our plan and resourcing.  Language acquisition and sustainability was a long term process that couldn't rely on one school or community if this was not likely to be permanent.

Communicate with our children

As mentioned earlier, at a certain point we will need to justify our choices to our children and to ensure that they are part of the discussion / conversation around language, and who speaks what and why in the family.  Choices are valid, but they should be properly communicated.

Communicate with others

One should communicate language goals, expectations and intentions with people around you. Like grandparents and other family, babysitters and others in the community to ensure their actions and language they speak are aligned. School teachers and administrators need to be kept in the loop about what is happening linguistically at home.

Know when to get help

If children are exhibiting delays in speech and language, or learning issues it's important to look at all languages globally and not just at the dominant language. Any therapist, professional or doctor needs to understand the developmental and educational issues around bilingualism so that a proper assessment can be made. It is not good practise for a professional to suggest that one language should be stopped (e.g. to stop the home language to encourage the school language).

5 further issues were also discussed, literacy, content, cognitive development, confidence and social development.

Literacy

Children were learning to read and write in two or more languages.  In doing so, they could use translanguaging, which is where one language is used to help or scaffold the other, languages are used together and used strategically. This did not imply mixing languages or inserting words or sentences of one language into conversations randomly, but rather a strategic use in order to bridge gaps.

In order to become literate, children needed to go beyond merely being able to read in both languages to comprehending and understanding the content. Parents needed to check for understanding after reading to children or when children read to them.  This may require the reading of a story in both languages to ensure that meaning is conveyed, or reading the story more than once.  Reading to children in all languages was fundamental.  And, ironically children could often write before they could read, if they know letter formation and are left to creative phonetic spelling without correction.  Experience rather than accuracy should be emphasized.

Literacy in both languages could be simultaneous (at the same time) or sequential (where reading and writing of one language is started with and then the next added). In the case of a third language it is usually advisable to give children a mental break before adding the literacy of a third language.

Talk about the second language in the MT, compare and contrast and mediate in order to clarify similarities and differences.

Content

If the school language is different to the home language, one should support content at home using the home language with the help of websites or textbooks (in the home language). Conversations at home should include what is being learnt at school so that children gain vocabulary in the home language and make links between the school language and home language. This will enhance the quality of conversation in the home language as well.

Cognitive Development

Research has show that achievement in the school language is dependant on keeping up literacy in the mother tongue, and that if children are incapable of doing things in the mother tongue, they may struggle to do it in any language. It is the mother tongue that pulls all other languages up and if MT is not maintained there will be gaps in cognitive development and difficulties in conceptual thought and conversation.

Confidence

The use of MT encourages confidence in self and in one's cultural identity.  It encourages cognitive growth and learning and allows children to experience competence at home and at school.  Children are not as resilient as we'd like to think they are, and we need to help them in their language journeys so it is not a case of sink or swim. 

Social development

Encourage using the MT socially, during holidays and with family.

In conclusion this was a talk with a lot of very practical advice and tips for families around bringing up children in a bilingual environment, whether the result of two parents speaking different languages, or a child going to school with a non-home language, or even where three languages (mother, father and school) were involved.

The myth of "reluctance"?

I went to a professional development session the other day on motivating secondary students to read. It was a pretty good session with lots of interaction and ideas.  But it did give me pause for thought. About the premise. Yes I agree that reading is important - fundamental in fact to any kind of academic life at any level above primary school. I love an applaud meditations such as those of Alain de Botton on what literature is for (see below).  I think it interesting and noteworthy that numeric goals are being given to just how many books a student should read (20-25) in order to benefit from all these wonderful things.  And yet ...

All through the discussions I kept hearing the term "reluctant readers" - they were to be shaken up and motivated and enticed and if we just found the right "entry drug" book, the right set of incentives, the right way to monitor it all, if we showed them how important it was, how much we valued it, then hey presto! They'd go from reading 2 books to 20 books and voila!

The first thing that got me thinking was a name.  Not an idea.  The name "Lars" - a success story in this battle against reluctance.  I have a nephew called Lars.  He's Dutch. I know a couple of people called Lars who are Danish and Swedish.  And then I wondered.  Could it be that Lars was not reading 25 books in English in his English class because he was perhaps reading them in his mother tongue?  Had anyone asked him about his reading in other languages?  Did anyone care?  Because caring is important.  I know, I have two children reading in their chosen tongues, Dutch and Chinese respectively.  And it's a balancing act.  One in which you're teetering on a beam of approval - that of your English teacher on the one hand and your family and / or language tutor/teacher on the other.  And that language teacher / tutor may not even be part of your school community, so if you're too shy or to nervous or just plain don't understand that reading is reading and that all reading counts in whatever language you're reading in - well you're not going to get credit for that reading.  NOT ONCE in the entire PD session did anyone at any point mention mother tongue reading (except me to my learning partner - but she knows me, and she's one of us bilingual and multicultural types).  I looked around the room at the pretty homogenous bunch of language teachers around me and it wasn't surprising. I wonder how many of them were bilingual? Of course that is not what they'd be selected on, but, their class demographic is built up of at least 50% bi- or multi-lingual students. Why are we not talking about this? I suspect because we are not even thinking about this.

Research shows, if you're interested in it and if you want to acknowledge it, that languages at a CALP (Cognitive academic language proficiency level) scaffold and complement each other.  And if we've been doing our job correctly as parents and educators, by the time kids are in secondary school they should have a CALP level in at least one of their languages so it shouldn't matter too much which language is being read most.   But are we even thinking about this? Is it even on our teaching horizon?  

Dr Jim Cummins explains the differences between BICS and CALP. from Teach Away Inc. on Vimeo.

But then again, how many of our students are not at a CALP level when they enter secondary school? Even if they're mono-lingual.  With the best intentions and the best resources and all the rest, some students just don't get there. And no amount of monitoring or encouragement will get them there. It requires more.  Kids don't wake up one morning and along with acne and hormones decide to be reluctant readers. It's something that probably creeps up on them.  Mel Levine in his book "The Myth of Laziness" attempts to look behind why students do not succeed in an academic environment.  He finds labels of learning problems and then he tries to look behind those labels and to break down very specific issues that then can be worked on.  So too I think when we are confronted with a reluctant reader we need to look underneath that big label and work out where the reluctance stems from.  Is there an underling difficulty with reading? It is said that if a child is not a competent reader by Grade 3, s/he will struggle for the rest of school.  So what about our children in the expatriate environment who are snatched from their native language environment with the assumption that "they're young, they'll pick up xxx language easily" and who don't establish the competencies early on, and then may or may not get help, or may get language help when the problem is learning or learning help when the problem is language.  Who are more or less forced to drop and ignore their mother tongue at great cost in order to fit into a new environment.

Students don't just lose a language. They may shed bits of their identity along the way.  One student I spoke to was a success story by all accounts.  Rapidly rising from an EAL (English Additional language) to the mainstream English class in a year.  The picture of diligence.  But who felt in the process she'd lost her self and her voice.  And that wasn't the worst of it, the worst is that no one around her would acknowledge that her success had come at a cost and that the cost disturbed her.  As an educator one may rather be concerned when a student does not notice or express this frustration and anxiety at the apparent ease of substitution of self.

Back to reading.  I've become somewhat enamoured of late of the potential of digital storytelling as a way to allow students to reclaim their identities and voices.   How about we take the immensely successful Lizzie Bennett diaries? Celebrated as having taken the themes of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and translated them to modern time North America.  Why should we not in our schools have those themes expressed from a Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Indian, African view point? And why just vlogging? It can be vlogging, or twitterature, or multi-media film and text and picture.   We like our "World Literature" we do.  But too often our world literature is a voice that suits a western audience.  We like our stories of China to involve the cultural revolution, of Vietnam the escape to the non-communist west, of Afghanistan something to do with boats and difficulties at the Australian border.  But what about the stories of our students who are a little like us, part of that global cosmopolitan elite, but then not quite. Where the mirror by which they reflect themselves distorts ever so slightly that it is not always perceptible. That is what we should want to hear and what as educators we have a role in eliciting.  And perhaps when that takes place our literature and our world views will be enriched.

I recently suffered through "To rise again at a decent hour" - the self-absorbed rantings of a middle aged white baseball loving north american male tinged with crazed religious passages was more than I could bear. And yet supposedly it was literature having been on the man booker long list. And had I been a student, I would be first in the "reluctant reader" line.  So a lack of identification and interest may foster reluctance.

How about time?  As an idealistic mother I so totally bought into that half hour of reading in bed before lights out.  Easy when you're doing the reading and setting the bedtime and there is no homework or after school activities that eat into the late afternoon and then munch past dinner time and gulp up the hours past the absolute latest time that you know a child should be asleep. There are always deliverables. 

There are some good things going on.   I'm really gratified to see that some teachers are setting time aside in class for reading. I hope that's working.  I hope students can read on demand.  I really like the concept of class libraries, the easy availability of books at the point of demand. I also hope we have dedicated enough budget to have that in all our language classrooms as well and to think about how we are meeting the needs of our multi-linguals.  For now just even thinking about them. Just mentioning them in a seminar or workshop would be a huge step forward.

Mother Tongue - How to assess your likelihood of success

One of the things I did as part of my research was to summarise the factors that contributed to a family being able to teach and maintain their mother tongue in their children while living / being educated in an English dominant environment.

First I present the table of factors, and then I present myself filling in this table as an exercise in my own home.

Analysis: The theories of MT acquisition and maintenance versus the reality of our situation

	Theory	Reality - Chinese	Reality - Dutch
Child	Age (start as early as possible with formal MT education)	Both started Chinese immersion in Grade 1 (age 6)	Son started formal Dutch in Grade 5 (age 10)
	Prior & current formal exposure to MT	1 hour per day class in International School	None
	Prior & current informal exposure to MT	Not much – Hong Kong is Cantonese not Mandarin speaking. Daughter did learn characters through observation on the street.	Dutch spoken at home, exposure through paternal grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.
	Interest / Motivation	Daughter – High; Son - Low	Daughter not particularly interested, speaks on holiday and to family Son - High
	Aptitude	Daughter – excellent memory which is necessary for amount of memorization necessary Son – difficulties with working memory due to ADHD doesn’t rely on memory for learning	Son – very good ear and pronunciation, has taken well to spelling and grammar as it’s taught in a formal structured way (unlike English)
	Available time	In HK had ample time (27/28 hours a week in class plus a lot of homework) Daughter: in SG 5x 40 minutes a week class time, 90 minutes a week tutoring, 100 minutes a week required homework plus whatever time she has for self-motivated study and reading	5 x 40 minutes a week class time (1x of which is self-study) 1 x 120 minutes after school tutoring. Homework around 60 minutes Daily reading expected 15-20 minutes (doesn’t always happen)
	Access to language role models	Limited to school and tutor and one family friend who we see irregularly	Parents speak Dutch at home to each other, Father speaks Dutch to him, Mother speaks English unless in Dutch context
	Personality / resilience	Very determined, sees events as challenges rather than setbacks, competitive, responds well to reward systems, perfectionist, introverted and shy	Very sociable, extroverted, not scared of making mistakes. Quite emotional, inclined to give up when things get difficult, or need help to keep going
Family	Anticipated period of time abroad	Indefinite	Indefinite
	Plans for tertiary education	Undecided, probably English medium	Considering studying film or photography in Netherlands (early thoughts)
	Availability of language role models / support at home	Mother studied Chinese but level is not sufficient to support high level language and literacy needs practically, only in abstract	Both Mother and father speak Dutch in the home
	Language level of parent(s)	Mother - Low level Father - none	Mother – Fluent speaking reading, listening, written poor Father – Fluent speaking, reading, listening, writing
	Willingness / ability to finance choice	Yes	Yes
	Culture of reading at home	Yes - but needs prompting and encouragement as slow difficult process and access to the right leveled material is difficult.	Yes – when father is home do co-reading as well
	Help from extended family	None, only moral support	Yes – regular phone calls / FaceTime, visits during vacation and go to school with cousins for a few days
School	Language offered at MT level	Yes in theory.  However in practice the amount of time and level is not adequate, plus not enough leveled reading resources and mentoring	None in curriculum until G9. In G7 & G8 offered after school.  His Dutch classes are an exception and privately arranged and funded
	Language community in the school	Yes, however she is not particularly a part of it.	Yes
	MT support after school or other proviso	Yes, 90 minutes private tutoring after school, school provides walk in clinics 2x a week	Only from G7, however he’s not at the level required yet
	Accommodations for MT (reading or writing in MT, creating identity texts)	Yes, in school (since middle school only) and tutor supplements	Yes, but still limited due to level
	Sufficient BML teachers and administrators as role models	Administration & non-language teachers traditionally English / mono-lingual with some exceptions. This is changing a bit.	Administration & non-language teachers traditionally English / mono-lingual with some exceptions. This is changing a bit.
	Access to parents and older children as role models	In principal – but need to tap into this more. No formal structures.	Yes, cultural events organized by Dutch Teacher.
Community	Existence of language community in country	Yes, large Chinese speaking population, however local families are not part of school	Yes, Dutch club and fair sized community with events
	Accessible MT community on-line or through home visits	Possibly – not investigated yet	Yes
	Community based formal language classes	Many tutoring schools that cater to the Chinese curriculum of local schools	Yes
	Community based fun and cultural activities	Not as many as in Hong Kong	Yes through Dutch club and school
	Community pride in the MT	Many classmates in MT group are not very motivated to learn Chinese, within SG community Mandarin is the formal standard Chinese while most families speak a dialect at home	Generally yes, however many Dutch people speak English well and will switch in mixed groups

This work by Nadine Bailey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Events & Initiatives

As the parent of children who are growing up in a bilingual household I am passionate about languages, bilingualism and supporting mother tongue.

In February 2013, international Mother Tongue Day I organised a forum for parents to share ideas on mother tongue promotion and maintenance.  The following link will take you to a summary of the presentations, suggested readings etc.