7 Steps to Raising a Bilingual Child

Authors: Naomi Steiner, M.D., with Susan L. Hayes
Publisher: AMACOM
Release Date: November 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8144-0046-3

Naomi Steiner, M.D., is a developmental-behavioral pediatrician at Tufts Medical Center Boston. Dr. Steiner is an expert in the methods that are used to teach children more than one language, and she works closely with many bilingual and multilingual families. She is raising her own two children multilingual and lives in Boston.

Susan L. Hayes is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in Parent & Child, Parenting, Woman’s Day, and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn.

Introduction

I first began considering the possibility of raising my children to be bilingual when I was pregnant with my oldest child. Although I was born in England, I grew up speaking four languages. My Swiss husband spoke five. How many languages, I wondered, could our baby learn?

However, I soon realized that there were enormously conflicting opinions. While some experts were certainly encouraging about raising bilingual children, others cautioned me “not to confuse my child.”

As a result, I decided to explore the topic of raising bilingual children more fully. I have spent the past decade conducting my own research on the subject, as my children are growing and are learning multiple languages and as I have continued working with many families who are on the same journey.

In this book I will share with you the information I began gathering from professionals and research studies when I was an expectant mother and that I continue to gather today, many years later. Out of this information and my own experience, I have developed a step-by-step approach that will take you from thinking about raising a bilingual child to developing and carrying out a plan for making it happen to overcoming the challenges that can accompany raising a bilingual child. There are a total of seven steps, and each step is one chapter in this book.

My hope in writing this concise, pragmatic, step-by-step book is that you will use it as a guide for offering your children the gift of speaking more than one language.

Step 1—Building the Foundation for Your Child’s Bilingualism

For the purposes of this book, we’re going to use the most inclusive definition of bilingualism possible: the ability to speak, read, write or even understand more than one language.  However, chances are, you’ll want your child to have a more in-depth knowledge of his second language than simply being able to understand a few words.

The bottom line is that the degree of success you have in raising your child to be bilingual will be directly related to your own family’s definition of bilingualism and to your conviction that pursuing that level of language proficiency is the right thing to do. For those reasons, I’ve presented the seven most common negative myths about bilingualism here—along with scientifically based facts to contradict those myths—followed by a discussion of the many advantages enjoyed by bilingual children and their families.

Myth 1: Only really intelligent children can be bilingual.

Fact: Every child can learn multiple languages from birth.

Myth 2: Bilingualism leads to confusion, causing children to mix languages and never become proficient in either.

Fact: It is normal for children to mix languages as they learn them.

Myth 3: If a child doesn’t speak English by the time she enters kindergarten, she will have trouble learning to read and have difficulty in school.

Fact: A child’s brain adapts to her language environment, and a child can learn a language well beyond 5 years of age.

Myth 4: Bilingualism leads to language delay.

Fact: Children learning two languages sometimes start talking a little later, but no research has shown that bilingualism typically leads to anything more than a temporary language delay.

Myth 5: Parents must be fluent in more than one language before raising a bilingual child.

Fact: Monolingual parents can raise a bilingual child.

Myth 6: Children absorb a language passively, like a sponge.

Fact: A child’s brain is wired to learn different languages, but adequate language stimulation is a must. A poor language environment can lead to a child becoming a “passive” bilingual.

Myth 7: The English language is losing ground in the United States and elsewhere.

Fact: English is far from disappearing. In fact, the English language is expanding rapidly throughout the world.

Learning another language gets the brain machinery going. The tasks of learning two sets of vocabulary and grammar, then learning how to shift from one language to another, provide terrific brain stimulation.

From an academic perspective, your bilingual child will reap many advantages. Around the world, research shows that bilinguals are more creative and detailed when answering exam questions, perhaps because knowing words in different languages offers them more elasticity and flexibility in their thinking.

But beyond conferring language, academic, cognitive, and even economic advantages, being able to speak a second language opens up new avenues of cultural understanding and connection for your child within your family, your community, and our world.

Step 2—Making It Happen: Defining Your Goals

Bilingualism is not as complicated or as overwhelming as it may seem. In fact, on many levels, it’s really about one word after another. That’s what ultimately leads to the mastery of any language. So don’t feel daunted, and don’t delay starting. Clearly, planning and effort will be required, but I can guarantee you that hearing your child speak her first words in a second language will give you the confidence that you are doing the right thing and encourage you to stick with it.

• Decide which languages are important to you and why. For one person, it may be French, because she studied it in school, for another, Russian, because he heard his babushka, or grandmother, speak it.
• Identify your motivations for—and your reservations about—bilingualism. Sometimes it seems as though bilingual parents can give me as many reasons for not wanting their children to speak their native language as monolingual parents can for wanting their children to speak a second language!
• Choose which language(s) you and your partner are going to speak to your child. Monolingual parents might have different languages in mind that they feel would work for their family. But as difficult as the decision may be, try not to become paralyzed by it.
• Set a start date. There are two major ways that a child can become bilingual. The first is when a child is exposed simultaneously during his first three years or so to two languages. The second is when a child learns one language first, and then later, learns a second language.
• Determine how proficient you hope your child will be in a second language. Determining the proficiency level you want your children to achieve in each language is very important because it will directly affect the decisions that you make and the actions that you take. Linguists describe levels of bilingual proficiency in many different ways. But here is a quick guide:
  • Level 1: Being able to understand a second language.
  • Level 2: Being able to speak a second language, more or less fluently.
  • Level 3: Being able to speak, read, and write in two languages.
• Do a reality check. Are your proficiency goals realistic for your family? Keep in mind that the level of proficiency your child achieves is going to be directly tied to the amount of time he spends speaking and studying the language. Therefore, it is very important to match your bilingual goal with the amount of time and effort you and your child can devote to the second language.
• Take into account that one language will be dominant. When parents set out to raise their child bilingual, they sometimes believe that the child will speak both languages with exactly the same degree of fluency. But the truth is in the reality of everyday life, bilingual people usually use one language more than the other and that language becomes the stronger, or dominant, language.

A second language does take years to learn. But try not to be daunted by that fact. Remember that time is on your side. You and your child have years ahead of you. All you have to do is start with one word, and then build on it. Right now, starting is the most important thing to do.

Step 3—Becoming a Bilingual Coach

Now that you understand how bilingualism works and you’ve defined you bilingual goals, you may be thinking, “I know I want to do this, but how do I do it? Or “Where on Earth do I begin?” In this Step, which is divided into two parts, I will walk you through the process of becoming what I call a bilingual coach.

Part One: Taking Charge

To achieve you bilingual goals for your child, you’ll need to take on the role of planner and coach. That may sound overwhelming, but it’s actually a role that you, as a parent, already play every day.

Your major tasks as a bilingual planner and coach will be:

• Making bilingualism a priority for you and your child. If you express ambivalence about your decision to teach your child a second language, your child will pick up on that ambivalence right away. And in most cases, he’ll be less likely to want to put forth the effort that it takes to achieve bilingualism. As in so many parenting situations, consistency is key when it comes to raising you child to be bilingual.
• Ensuring the correct amount of language input. As I mentioned at the beginning of Step 2, bilingualism—indeed the mastery of any language—really comes down to one word building on another. So, it’s imperative to come up with concrete ways (and a schedule!) to ensure that your child gets the proper amount of language input today, this week, and this month to achieve the level of bilingualism you’re aiming for years down the road.
• Teaching, or arranging for, language instruction. You want your child to feel motivated to learn the language because it’s important to you, but you also need to feed that motivation by making the process enjoyable, interesting, and relevant to your child’s life.

Part Two: Who Speaks Which Language When?

There are many strategies for teaching you child your language, but I’ll begin with what is arguably one of the most effective and the most straightforward to execute: One-Parent-One-Language, or OPOL. As the name suggests, one parent speaks one language to the child, and the other parent speaks another—always.

One-Parent-One-Language is the easiest way to provide consistent language input. With OPOL, you don’t have to carve out time to sit down and formally instruct your child—or remember whether it’s French-speaking-Sunday-morning-brunch or homework-in-Armenian-Tuesday. Your child simply learns the language by being spoken to and speaking it back—the same way that a monolingual child learns a language from his parent.

OPOL allows each parent to speak a different language to the child, regardless of whether the other parent understands the other language or not. Furthermore to keep things orderly, and boost language input, each of the parent’s extended family members can speak to the child in the same language the parent does.

If One-Parent-One-Language or a variation is not feasible for your family, another way is to speak the language in specific, predetermined situations, such as at mealtimes or on weekends. To put it another way, you draw the language boundaries around situations rather than people.

Step 4—Creating Your Bilingual Action Plan

Your Bilingual Action Plan is a roadmap for turning your bilingual goals for your child into reality. While it’s true that families who live in urban areas, with their multiethnic neighborhoods and easier access to bilingual resources, might seem to have greater opportunities for outside support, don’t get discouraged if it seems as though your area is homogenous and monolingual. This Step is designed to inform you and excite you about the bilingual enrichment opportunities that are available to you no matter where you live.

• Maximizing Language Input at Home. Kids learn better and retain more of what they learn when they’re interested and engaged. So when it comes to kids and language input, the attractiveness of the activities is every bit as important as the sheer number of them. What’s the easiest way to create language input activities that will be attractive to your child? Use technology! Technology increases language input and can get a child excited about language learning.
  • the Internet
  • educational computer games and high-tech toys
  • television
  • radio
  • videos and DVDs
• Making the Most of Community and Family Resources. Most parents who are raising their children bilingual (myself included!) are reassured to find out that achieving bilingualism does not have to be (and in all truth, probably cannot be) solely an “in-home activity.” Discussions with other parents, your child’s teachers, your friends, neighbors, and colleagues, regardless of whether they are monolingual or bilingual (or even whether they could imagine speaking another language other than English to their own children), can sometimes be surprisingly helpful toward finding new ideas to add to your Bilingual Action Plan.
• Finding School Support. Many families start out thinking that raising their children bilingual will require enrolling them in a full-time bilingual school, but the truth is that most private bilingual schools are prohibitively expensive. Below are some alternate solutions that can be a great compromise and successfully support your bilingual goals.
  • public schools
  • Saturday or Sunday language schools
  • at-home tutoring
  • “do-it-yourself” programs
  • foreign-language summer camps
• Create Your Own Bilingual Action Plan. Life coaches and productivity experts will tell you that one of the most effective ways to accomplish a major goal (and raising a child to be bilingual is a good example of a major goal) is to break it down into small, specific, and, perhaps most important, manageable tasks or activities that you can do on a daily or weekly basis. These experts also say that writing down these tasks and activities and actually scheduling them on our calendars makes it more likely that we will actually do them.
  • Write in the activities, who will do them, and what materials will be needed.
  • Try to space the activities evenly throughout the day and the week (if possible with at least one activity every day).

Step 5—Leaping over Predictable Obstacles

As you progress along the road of raising your child bilingual, you may run into what I call “predictable obstacles.” The goal of this Step is to let you know that they are there, so that you don’t become discouraged if and when you encounter them, and instead, view them as expected challenges that can be surmounted.

1. I’m not sure that I’m speaking to my child in a way that will help him become bilingual. While you don’t want to force your child to talk (remember that some children, like adults, are simply less talkative than others), you do want to be on the lookout for and seize every opportunity to converse naturally with your child in your language. A good rule of thumb is to do what’s needed to keep the conversation flowing naturally and your child talking. In other words, don’t stop your child midsentence to correct her. And, if she is stuck on a word and you know what she wants to say, do go ahead and supply the word to help her along.
2. My child does not want to speak my language anymore—she only wants to speak English. The road to bilingualism is going to have some bumps in it in the form of disagreements between you and your child. The best thing you can do is to continue to talk with your children about why your language is important to you and why you want to share it with them.
3. My child keeps mixing languages. When a child mixes languages, parents sometimes wonder if their child is just being lazy. But in fact, the opposite is true. In mixing, the dominant language is used to support expression in the less-fluent languages, so the child is actually being quite efficient. He is using whatever way is necessary to make himself understood as quickly as possible. In this way, the child is no different from a tourist visiting another country who generally makes a valiant effort to speak the language of that country, but is occasionally stumped as to what the word for something is.
4. I’m self-conscious about speaking my language to my child in public. You are the one who gets to decide when, where, and whether to speak your language or English, and you should make the choice that feels best for you and your family.
5. Because I’m the one who speaks a second language, I feel I’m the one doing all the work to raise our child bilingual. If you haven’t fully involved your partner in devising your Bilingual Action Plan, he or she can end up undermining it unintentionally. It is crucial to have your partner’s support when you encourage your child to speak to you in your language and when you talk with her about why learning your language is important to you. As every parent learns, children naturally try to play off one parent against the other to get what they want, so if your child senses that your partner is ambivalent about this whole bilingual business, she will definitely try to take advantage of it.
6. My work schedule has become really hectic, and there’s little time for my child’s bilingualism. When your work schedule gets even more hectic than usual, it’s easy to feel that there is simply not enough time in the day or week for your child bilingualism and that it is one activity that can be put on hold. Instead, draw on the tips in the previous Steps to help you formulate or modify your Bilingual Action Plan so that it can continue to work even when you’re at work. Because when it comes to bilingualism, something is always better than nothing!

Step 6—The “Two Rs”: Reading and Writing in Two Languages

The first question that many parents who want their child to learn to read in their language ask me is, “What is the best, most efficient way for my child to learn to read in two languages?” They want to know if their child should start off learning to read in English and then move toward reading in the other language, or learn to read in both languages simultaneously.

The truth is, it doesn’t really matter. But what does matter—a great deal—is the quality and comprehensiveness of the instruction. To learn to read well in two languages, a child must receive clear and simple instruction in the “reading rules” that apply to each language.

When I tell this to parents, I’m often asked, “If learning to read in my language is really about learning the rules, can’t I just teach my child myself?” My answer is you can, but if you don’t have the support of a tutor or a weekend school that can offer formal reading instruction as a “back up,” I do advise using a home curricula, such as those discussed in Step 4.

In the same way that reading a language requires more complex thinking in that language and high level language skills, so does writing down thoughts.

Keep in mind, too, that your child wasn’t born knowing the particulars of writing in English. He learned them through teaching and practice. He will learn the particulars of writing in your language in the same way.

Let your child know that “it’s okay if you write slowly, because all kids write more slowly in their other language.” Also let kids know that it is fine if they make mistakes.

Step 7—Adapting to School: The Bilingual Child Goes to School

In this seventh and final Step, I will discuss the academic considerations that accompany raising a bilingual child.

1. Know what bilingual education programs your school system offers. I recommend that all parents who are raising their children bilingual become familiar with the bilingual educational opportunities that are available in their public school system. I tell parents that visiting a prospective school and observing classes is one of the most important things they can do.
2. Know that true bilingual programs are relatively rare and extremely popular. Realize that established public bilingual programs and/or schools are so popular that placement is usually determined by lottery or waiting list, and sometimes both!
3. Know that in most school district, rigorous foreign language study happens at the high school level. While children can sometimes take a foreign language in middle school, most “serious” foreign language instruction, with the goal of learning to speak and read and write in the language, is still relegated to high school.
4. Know that language choice is often limited. The array of foreign languages offered in public middle and high schools is increasing, but Spanish and French continue to be the most common.
5. Know that “sequencing” is probably going to be an issue for your bilingual child. Most public foreign language programs, whether in elementary, middle, or high school, assume that children have no prior knowledge of the language and place all students in a Level 1 class accordingly.

Conclusion

We have now reached the end of our journey together. While I hope that this book will serve as your guidebook on your journey of raising your child bilingual and will be well thumbed as a result of your returning to it again and again as specific questions and issues arise, I’d like to leave you with what I believe are the three pieces of advice that I hope you will take most to heart:

1. Help your child identify positively with the language. As we’ve discussed throughout the book, learning a second language can be fun and immensely satisfying, but there’s no getting around the fact that it also requires a lot of effort and energy over a long period of time. But the truth of the matter is that none of us, child or adult, is going to devote the amount of effort, energy, and time it takes to become truly proficient in a language (or at a sport or a musical instrument) unless we identify with it and feel a deep personal connection to it.
2. Adjust your bilingual goals and plan as needed and let your child know you love him just as he is. The last thing you want to do is to send your child the message that his best is not good enough. Not only will that cause your child to truly give up on learning a second language, but it makes it less likely that he’ll want to make the effort to do his best at anything.
3. Trust the process. On the path to bilingualism, there will be many joys as you witness your child’s successful progress. Revel in them, but at the same time, don’t forget about—and more importantly, don’t sweat—the predictable obstacles. Don’t worry! Trust the process; this will pass.

People always point out to me how the forces of globalization are leading to an increased awareness of the importance of bilingualism and multiculturalism. This is true. However, as a parent, raising your child bilingual is about so much more than your child being able to speak, read, and write in two languages. It is a family adventure, a gift that you are passing on to your child, and an opportunity for him to learn about another culture and be proud of his identity.

Good luck on your journey—and enjoy it!

Reprinted by permission of the publisher, from 7 Steps to Raising a Bilingual Child, by Naomi Steiner, M.D., with Susan L. Hayes. © 2007 by Naomi J. Steiner and Susan L. Hayes, AMACOM books, American Management Association, New York, New York. www.amacombooks.org.

224 pages. $14.95. ISBN-10: 0814400469; ISBN-13: 978-0814400463.

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