I just read Eowyn Crisfield’s post „The Importance of Monolingual Situations for Bilinguals“ about how to get children use the minority language. The most effective way is to build a social environment that shares the language(s). But this is not always possible.
Maybe you’ll find families who share the same language, but they don’t have children in the appropriate yeargroup, or these children don’t share the same interests with your children. In this case there are other solutions. DVD’s and TV aside, we found it very useful to read books, listen to audio books and Cd’s with nursery rhymes or songs.
If we read to our children right after birth and have the habit to read every day in a passionate way, this will not only help them with brain development, speech skills etc. but most probably they will be turning into passionate readers as well.
Especially if your children grow up in a multilingual environment, it’s vital to „feed“ them with books. In early years, reading aloud helps to develop vocabulary and „builds a strong emotional bond between parents and children“ and the language you’re reading to them. Even if they are big enough to read by themselves, if they’re not exposed regularly to the language, reading them aloud can be an important help for them to grasp the variances in phonics.
Reading is still the best way to build up a linguistic competence, not only it builds up vocabulary but it also helps to give our children an immediate and natural access to the grammar. Obviously it’s important that you, as parents, read a lot too or that their peers love reading. Children need a good example. Sometimes we are the role models, sometimes their peers are.
Obviously you can also rely on child appropriate TV channels in the minority language(s), to give the children a „language shower“. But TV is not a substitute for books. If you are looking for shows for your children, try to choose wisely. Choose some where your children are stimulated to think, whose topics can be shared afterwards in a discussion with you or within the family or friends. Some shows for children are also accessible via internet. You can also decide to buy or rent DVD’s in the minority language(s). We have several films in one to three of the languages our children are exposed to. Lately, while watching one of these films, my son (9) noticed that in the translated version some of the sentences weren’t translated in a very accurate way and came up with very good alternatives …
Related articles
- Building Strong Readers (piplustutors.wordpress.com)
- Over 80 Films Dubbed In Minority Languages in Gansu Province (chinaheritagewatch.wordpress.com)
- Students Learn about the Importance of Reading (wtok.com)
- The Best Websites For English Language Learner Students In 2012 – So Far (larryferlazzo.edublogs.org)
- http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.nl/2011/03/learning-to-read-in-multilingual.html
- http://learnanylanguage.wikia.com/wiki/Word_lists
- Please check this later post about reading aloud to children: http://viviankirkfield.wordpress.com/2013/03/06/world-read-aloud-day-tips-on-reading-aloud-to-young-children/
Categories: Being multilingual, Multilingual children, Parenting
Tags: audio books, child, Education, languages, Life with children, linguistic competence, Linguistics, minority language, Reading, reading aloud, social environment
About your inner language eagle and how you shouldn’t allow anyone to break your egg… 
OPOL among multilingual siblings? 
This is great! When I was more actively engaging in teaching my kids Russian, we read one story in Russian and one in English every night. It actually worked well. The unfortunate part was, I started decreasing the amount of time I engaged them in Russian otherwise. So their vocabulary was developing more slowly than their brains. They became bored with the little kids books, but weren’t capable of following more complicated books. We got stuck!
Thank you very much for sharing! What you experienced with your kids can easily happen. I remember that I started to like to talk german, when I spent four weeks in Germany one summer and made friends with peers. I observe the same with my children: they need to have a pleasant social context where to use the language and it is very important that peers are involved… How is it going with your kids’ Russian?