Teaching our Children their Native Tongue:
An Educator Discusses the Benefits and Best Practices
Bilingual means different things to different people.
To some, it is the equal ability to communicate in 2 languages. To
others, it means the ability to communicate in 2 languages with greater
skills in one language.
For many immigrants who are now living in the US,
being bilingual is very critical since it is a ways and means of connecting
your child to their ethnicity and maintaining their cultural identity.
As an educator, I cannot emphasize the importance of teaching your
child their mother tongue right from the day they are born. Many of
us feel that it is important that our child learn to speak English
and in the process, forget to focus on our own cultural roots. In
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| countries such as the USA and England
where English is the spoken language, all children will eventually
learn to speak English--be it at preschool or formal school, however,
their own mother tongue can only be learned from home, from the parent.
According to the 1990 United States Census, one in
seven or 31.8 million people speak a language other than English in
their home. In the past, second generation children were encouraged
to adopt the customs, culture, and language of what was identified
as the majority culture. The pattern and focus has now changed and
knowledge of a second language is an asset in our rapidly changing
society.
There are different theories on the "best"
way to teach a child to use two languages. It is a known fact among
most researchers that a child who is exposed to two languages at an
early age, simultaneously, will naturally learn to use both languages.
The child's brain is different from the adult brain in that it is
a very dynamic, evolving structure. A two-year-old child has twice
as many synapses, or connections, in the brain as an adult. The young
brain must use these connections or lose them entirely. Thus, failure
to learn a skill during a critical or sensitive period in development
is very important. Dr. Patricia Kuhl, a Speech Scientist at the University
of Washington, reports that babies are born "citizens of the
world" in that they can distinguish differences in sounds from
all languages. This means that they are ready to learn any language
they hear, but by six months of age, they start to specialize in their
native language. When children wait until high school to start studying
a foreign language, the job is much harder. The task now involves
learning the rules of grammar, translating, reading, and trying to
develop language learning strategies. The task is a different one
than it was for the young child in the sensitive period for language
learning. |
