Raising Multilingual Children

A few days ago Fulfilled Husband and I attended a conference on the topic of “Raising Multilingual Children”, held by world renowned linguist Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa. Mrs Tokuhama-Espinosa has three children and has herself been a trailing spouse in Geneva a few years ago, which made her the ideal person to give us all perplexed parents some reassuring advice.
One of the greatest perks of living in Switzerland it's the unique opportunity you can offer your children to become multilingual, or at least acquire a good grounding of French (or German or Italian). This is no mean feat if you consider how highly painful it can be to learn a new language as adults - I surely am still sweating blood with my French and not making great progress.
The workshop was great fun and gave us some important practical tips. Here's a brief summary:

1) Don't be frightened by the prospect of 'confusing' your children by trying to introduce a new language in their daily life. According to recent studies there is no risk to 'over fill' the brain with languages, as the retrieval of information will be allocated to different areas of the brain if necessary.



2) Decide a strategy and be consistent with it. This is what prevents children from being confused (not the number of languages learnt). So, no matter how complicated your family linguistic situation, it will work as long as you decide which languages will be spoken at home and which at school/playgroups etc. and stick to it. For instance, there might be families where the mother speaks Serbian to the children, the father Dutch but both parents agree to use English as their common language within the family when they are all gathered together. The children can also learn French at the local school. This can all be possible because there is a clear distinction over who and where each language is spoken. (This wasn't even the most complicated case study we looked at, in various others the above situation also involved German speaking grandmothers and Spanish speaking nannies!).

3) Try not to turn it into an imposition or something unpleasant. The children will rebel if they do not enjoy the learning process. The best way for them to learn is by playing and having fun, so through music classes, sport, play dates with children who speak the language etc.

4) Children's minds work according to a very clever principle of 'maximum energy saving': if they don't need to use the language then they won't and will keep reverting to their mother tongue. Therefore, if they know the adult can speak the various languages involved, then they might wait for them to translate, or simply reply in the language which is easiest for them. Again, play dates with children who speak the target language are a great solution because fun is the best motivator ! (I have just realised Fulfilled Husband also operates according to the same principle).

5) Be patient ! Studies reveal that it can take on average 2 years to reach native language equivalent in their oral skills (but every child is different so in some cases it can take up to three years). For their literacy skills, the timing will be between 5 and 7 years.

For further information please visit Mrs Tokuhama-Espinosa's website at www.multifaceta.com, where you will also be able to buy copies of her books.