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How to Raise a Bilingual Child
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In the increasingly international environment people meet and fall in love across seas, continents and language barriers. They often marry and have children together. While most parents are keen to ensure that their children benefit from the best of both worlds, they can face difficult decisions about where to live and how to educate their child. Where each parent speaks a different native language, a pressing issue is often ensuring that their child can speak both languages.
Increasingly educational psychologists recognise the ability to speak the languages of both parents and both sides of the family as being vital to a child's sense of identity, and their cultural heritage, wherever they happen to be educated. Research also suggests that bilingual children have a richer and more complex conceptual understanding of the world, which aids their analytical skills in all sorts of subjects later in life. They have also been found to have more acute powers of concentration, and to be more resistant to age-related mental decline. So understandably parents are keen to know how to raise a child bilingual.
While there are different theories about precisely how to do it, parental agreement and commitment to raising a bilingual child is an essential first step. Christina Bosemark of Multilingual Children's Association suggests that a further vital key is predictability ? capitalising on the fact that children feel comfortable with a predictable routine. This gives rise to 'predictable' home teaching models in which children learn languages at home in conversation with their parents. One such model is the widely-used One Person One Language model in which one parent can always be relied upon to speak in 'their' language, while the other parent always uses the other language when interacting with the child. Another possibility is the Minority Language at Home method. This method assumes there is one dominant language in the 'outside world', and then requires everyone in the home to speak 'the other language' to compensate.
To some extent, both of these methods assume a fixed home life in which parents have the time to teach their children their own language. While many parents will strive for that ideal it is not always realistic. For one thing bilingual families often live international lives in which 'home' keeps changing, and children are educated at international boarding schools. Even if this is not the case, parents can feel the need for extra specialist support from trained teachers and linguists to ensure that their children get the best possible technical grounding in a language as well as benefitting from the confidence to speak more than one language.
Language schools like St Georges school of English London are familiar with the issues and offer various courses to support bilingual children who wish to study English in London at home. Popular options to help support parents' efforts are language summer schools involving a package of language teaching and social activities. A typical itinerary in the UK might include English classes in the morning followed by an afternoon programme of excursions, sports and art. Another possibility is flexible all-year round courses in London.
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