In June, BLIP Lab took part in Our Bilingual Futures: Achieving Bilingual Outcomes, which was a series of talks followed by a Q&A session. This free seminar was the second installment of Our Bilingual Futures series, this time targeted towards caregivers of a slightly older age group of children than the first one.
Missed out on the talks by our speakers? We have some good news for you! The talks are now available on our YouTube page (to activate English subtitles, activate the CC option).
Talk by Dr Suzy Styles: https://youtu.be/KRjO8ZVugME
Talk by Dr. Beth O’Brien: https://youtu.be/1yABIDcoUoU
Talk by Prof. Annabel Chen: https://youtu.be/Ga8_lxO1yio
Q&A session: https://youtu.be/g0zEWASHOBI
- How do I help my child build up reading habits in more than one language?
- Building resilience in my child during early years – how can parents’ interaction help to foster that and how does language play a role?
- Will children learn a second language faster if we only speak to them in that language instead of a language that they are already comfortable with?
- My kids don’t read and write Chinese, but they can understand and speak the language – can I count it as my kids are bilingual and say that they know English and Chinese?
- How does learning a certain language, for example, Chinese Mandarin aid in learning other subjects, for example, Mathematics and what does current research says about this?
- I believe language is also an important part of culture. I feel that there’s some erosion as my children are growing up now and they choose to use English more and it’s harder for me to try to use their Mother Tongue with them – what are your opinions on that?
- How do children with ASD learn Chinese?
Q1: How do I help my child build up reading habits in more than one language?
Dr Beth: We did some large-scale kindergarten studies in Singapore looking at children who are learning English plus one language, e.g., English-Chinese or English-Malay, and what we found is that early on in K1, when children are between four and five, they tend to transfer a lot of information about print. Once they start learning about the alphabetic principle for English, which is whether they understand that symbols represent speech and that parts of oral language are represented systematically by letters of lettered pairs, that type of understanding is something that can transfer across scripts. For Chinese, there’s a mapping between the spoken syllables and characters and this seems to show up in high correlations between children’s early reading abilities or letter identification abilities across languages.
But as they grow a little bit older and learn the specifics of the script like how the language is represented, that’s where some of the challenges come in. So children will have to differentiate, for example, that the different letters in Malay might represent different sounds than they do in English or that these other scripts have a different way of coding, not just a smaller scale of sounds but also a whole syllable. So naturally, [for] languages like Tamil or Chinese which have many more symbols to learn than just the alphabetic letters, this takes more time for them to acquire reading.
I think it’s just a matter of building on a whole repertoire of information that they know across languages, maybe helping them to compare. Just like you have sounds in English that are represented by these letters, you can identify that there’s other symbols that represent the sounds in Chinese or the sounds in Tamil, but they operate in a different way.
Prof Annabel: Learning language using different languages that they’re exposed to in the environment itself can help us depending on how you define resilience. There’s something about what we call a “productive failure” where we can learn from mistakes. In fact, sometimes mistakes are very useful to help us to learn new things and to have new information stick in what we call brain networks in our brain. So it’s like learning not to be fearful of mistakes, but rather, to have fun with that and then to see it as an opportunity to learn when we are doing all these new languages or new ways of playing with languages. That is a good opportunity to build resilience in that sense and to encourage curiosity in learning.
The period where the kids are starting to learn is what we call a very high plasticity time. That is where brains are changing very very quickly so they can learn very fast. And it’s not true that this specifically stops when we grow up, it still continues with age – it’s just at a slower rate. But in the early years it is the time to really harness it because it is changing so quickly. And we can shape it much more easier building resilience during this period, and I think it’s really important.
Dr Suzy: I have two things to add on. One from the very beginnings of life and one from the very end of life. There’s a concept in developmental psychology called secure attachment which is about how very young children form bonds that let them know that they are safe and loved that come from their adults in their life. And children who have this bond of secure attachment with their loving family members are more resilient to a variety of hurdles that life can throw at them.
Part of this secure attachment is going to be mediated by the effectiveness of parental communication with their kids right so part of this development is going to be linguistic. We’re going to use words when we talk with our kids about their feelings, we’re going to use words when we talk with their kids, about their needs and wants and desires and this can all be part of building resilient futures for our kids. And how you can navigate that space multilingually is going to differ depending on your own linguistic strengths in your different languages. It may be that you focus your mood and emotion talk in the language that you feel best able to support your kids’ moods and emotions and you focus some of your other linguistic behaviors like reading books together on the languages that you might feel less confident in at a particular time. But language is there all the way along in this secure attachment stage so I think that’s a lovely thought for the early years.
There’s another thing we can think of in the later years of life which is that it turns out older adults who have been bilingual in their earlier years – if they happen to have a brain injury or suffer a stroke, they are more likely to recover language skills if they were bilingual. So if you want to think about your children’s futures throughout their life course, not just their first few years, not just a secure attachment, if you want to set your kids up to have robust and resilient brains, bilingualism is good for the aging brain as well. That’s just another thing that you can think about.
Dr Suzy: I don’t think anyone in the world has evidence that one is faster. We know that there are some contexts called immersion contexts where if you have a school where 100 of the children are monolingual English speakers and you have one child from a different context and that child is dropped into this context where everybody only speaks English, then they can learn very quickly the language that everyone around them speaks. But that’s an immersion context where you have a minority and a majority and a wholly one language context and there are some situations where that sometimes occurs as part of the linguistic landscape. For example, with migrants, you don’t have a choice if everyone in the community speaks one language and it’s not the same as the one at home. We know that children can learn fast – however, when it comes to deeply multilingual communities, we don’t have evidence that it’s faster to pretend you don’t speak the other language.
Children are very clever and they get very annoyed very quickly if they think they’re being treated like fools so if they know you speak the other language and they’re trying their best to communicate their needs, you might be doing better to align with the secure attachment that the child is trying to develop and meet their needs in the language that is most effective at points where there might be an emotional breakdown, for example, while at the same time supporting their language development in the other language.
Some things that might work effectively are using the target language first but providing co-language support with the familiar language. This gives them the opportunity to build the neural network for the target language by using a former representation for the speech sounds, trying to figure out what the words are. But if they have no clue, you still want them to know what’s going on in their world and if they know you know how to say it, you’re just breaking down the relationship that the child of trust that the child has with you, to think that you’re a rational linguistic agent in their world, and so they would treat you as a liar. One of the things that is potentially interesting in this space is figuring out whether your school or your care context has a policy that you can share with parents about your preferred way of working or information that you can point parents to that might help them understand where your perspective is coming from. I think by the time we get into the school years it’s more common for a school environment to have a policy in place that they can disseminate with parents and explain their reasonings, but these are some things that you could think about for your different contexts.
Dr Beth: I think yes you could count it as being bilingual. French and English will have a lot more overlap so there’s the ability for the child to transfer these skills for reading more easily. And since they’re learning French in the school context and then there’s also English at home and English print all around Singapore, it’s easier for them to pick this up, whereas Chinese might take more of an effort for them to learn the print. There’s an extended period of time for learning written characters that is different from learning to read in the other languages. But one thing that we’ve also found for all of the mother tongues, particularly for Chinese, is that what contributes to literacy skills in younger children is their vocabulary. That’s a big component. Having a foundation where they know a large number of words in Chinese can help them with learning to read better.
Also, some of the skills that I talked about with morphological awareness where you can kind of play games with meanings of the characters and the words, and get them to build the understanding of the meaning units could also help them with developing literacy. And having them exposed to the language, there is some research on writing characters to copying characters for learning, and handwriting is helpful too. But I think especially in the public schools they’re a little worried about overdoing this, so you don’t have to have them copying so much so that they lose the anticipation and excitement about learning. I think just probably from the home being able to support them with exposure to words and then also mapping that to print as much as possible would be most helpful.
Prof Annabel: And also maybe to add a little bit from the brain perspective we do have research showing that learning different languages using what we call ‘embodied learning’, movement will be helpful but we do know that if we learn something it’s better to learn it from different sensory modalities. It could be hearing, it could be looking at pictures and then movement, or kids’ movement is really fun. One of the things that’s been mentioned is that learning needs to be fun for kids and if it is fun, they don’t even think it’s work, so it comes naturally. When we build brain networks, the more exposure and different modalities actually helps to strengthen those networks. When you talk about writing in Chinese it’s not just families with different languages but a lot of our kids who are Chinese English bilinguals don’t like to learn Chinese because the character writing is a little bit more difficult. So, teachers and schools have now come up with different strategies for certain words, e.g., they use body movement to represent the characters and to tell stories about those words, to help you to sort of remember them.
I would encourage you to think about fun ways to see how you can excite your child to learn about it and of course immersion like what Dr Suzy was saying is a huge thing. But it’s very challenging for parents so it’s almost like re-learning if our Chinese is not as good. As we learn together with them, reading story books together but in Chinese, or speaking if it’s possible, have designated times where you just try your best to speak that language with your child and try to not to use other languages at the same time. Those are various ways that we can increase the exposure of the language.
Dr Suzy: I’ll add just a couple of little ones – a lot of these streaming platforms these days have a lot of movies that your children might be familiar with that have language support in other languages. So, if you want to watch a Disney cartoon that happens to be in Chinese language with the Chinese language subtitles on you can be boosting print exposure at the same time as you’re boosting oral language exposure for content that your kids are already motivated to enjoy. That’s one nice little trick Dr Beth shared with us, quite a few little tips and tricks on word games that you can play with your kids that are sort of English-centered where you might be trying to find the sounds when you were reading a written word of English.
We can think creatively about ways that might map to other languages and other scripts so if you happen to be in a part of Singapore where there are hawker stalls that have some of their signage in Chinese, you might be able to play little games like let’s see if we can find all of the symbols that have animals in them so if you’re looking for the little legs at the bottom of the character for fish, for example, you can find the little legs and you know it’s an animal I’m talking about […] print in ways that might be more of a hunt, a hide and seek, or foraging game where you’re just trying to find or solve puzzles, or looking for the three little splashes of water for characters that have something to do with water for example and turning that into fun games when you’re out and about in the world. This might also help to provide backup, something that is an everyday part of life not just special occasions.
Dr Suzy: There’s a little bit of evidence about number systems that is quite interesting where the number system of Mandarin is much more regular. It doesn’t have weird words like ‘twelve’ and ‘thirteen’ right, it has tens and numerals that make sense in the number system and are always regular throughout. There’s a little bit of evidence that suggests that children who have learned their number words in Mandarin may have an advantage in early arithmetic learning – to do sums with two-digit numbers is a little bit easier if all of your words are lined up nicely just like the numbers are so that’s one little hack.
There’s a second little hack that is specific to Mandarin which is that the spoken words for the numbers are a little bit shorter than the spoken words or the numbers in English and the other mother tongues of Singapore. If your children happen to be learning to count in Mandarin, they will not understand the difference between three and four at a younger age – that seems to be biologically fixed across the whole globe – they will not understand the difference between four and five at an earlier age. However, they will be able to memorize longer numbers so if you’re trying to remember a phone number that someone has just told you, you can hold in mind a random set of numbers that is a longer sequence if you can repeat those sounds in rendering compared to others. So, it’s a little hack and bilingual children have the opportunity to use their linguistic resources in more than one way or boost their language understanding if they have representations of number space that can be used in different ways as well. But other than that, and these are both relatively small effects, most children end up at the same destination regardless of the path to numeracy, but that those are two features of the Chinese language in particular that we have evidence about.
Prof Annabel: Yeah, just to add on a little bit to the second point that Dr Suzy is mentioning is actually what we call ‘working memory’. It’s what we can put in our mind while we’re manipulating some information to get us somewhere, e.g., remembering phone numbers, we have to keep it in mind when it’s new so that we can write it down or to tell somebody else. You can imagine for Chinese characters in terms of digits it’s just one syllable. So, this is fifteen or four or other seven or multiple-syllable English numbers so the span in terms of syllable – you can actually squeeze in more numbers in terms of syllable than let’s say English or another language that has multi-syllables for one number.
But having said that, another thing that’s more generic is that we have found in both neural imaging research as well as cognition research that working memory actually supports both learning of language as well as numeracy or learning math. So you know if you could practice or work on working memory itself, there are some benefits in learning both languages and how they interact with each other. So right now we are looking into more research trying to understand how they are related with each other and also if we could improve any one of them one using either modality. But we’re still looking into more specifics of how to do that and why it works together.
Dr Suzy: I love that you’ve raised this question of identity and I think one of the complicated things to think about is that the very first years one of the things that our work tends to focus on is have we given our kids enough early on that their brain has grown in a way that will allow multilingualism to flourish. That’s early years flourishing that families like yours are working hard on, you know, supporting those early skills. When kids get a bit older, as you say, the way that they identify in language and the way they choose to position themselves in part is going to be based on what they think is cool and it can be very challenging to think about what does cool look like in different languages and where can we find the cool examples that will that will resonate with our kids.
Because at some point in our lives when we were little children we were very connected to our family and we identified with them. And at some point we didn’t want to become our own mothers, we wanted to become the kid who was like a year older with like the cool sneakers and that toy that I didn’t have that she had, you know, that was the person we wanted to be. It was a near peer or maybe it was a teenager on a talent show but like there were people we wanted to see ourselves as who were not our parents.
And so part of the challenge when we hit this transition between early childhood and the growth of an individual identity is where do we look for and how do we identify those near peers that can help our kids feel cool in the language of their mother tongue? How can we help them transition into young people who want to be in both their languages? And these are big and challenging issues and we might need to look to pop culture or look to, as I mentioned before, if we can watch popular child age-appropriate videos but with language support in the other language so that the cool cartoon character is cool but in our language – all of those things can help but I think these are the things that are perhaps very challenging for Singapore’s future if we want all the languages to be as strong as each other, not just present, but as strong, so I think this is a really great question.
Prof Annabel: Yeah in fact I do resonate with your feeling as a mother with kids growing up in Singapore as well. It’s challenging to maintain the ethnic identity and the language that they use at home and especially when they go to primary school you know things change very very quickly because they learn so fast. But one of the things I found really helpful like what Dr Suzy’s saying finding things that the kid really would be curious about and enjoy so one of the things is to think about cultural identity but also stories about that culture that they would want to learn more about that’s fun.
They will then explore and then you could tell those stories in the native language to engage them. And also I think one of the ways is the social media it’s about find[ing] as much information and when we talk about the Bilingual Futures, actually a lot of things are online nowadays but we are exposed to the English online world more than anything. But there are actually other worlds out there in different languages, so if you’re able to read, for example, Chinese or Tamil, or you know other kinds of languages and you go into the internet with sites that [are] completely in that language it’s almost like a different culture or different world, so it’s an exposure to another place. So curiosity, I think, is one thing that we could encourage and continue with our children as well [as] in ourselves to keep us learning and to keep those brain networks building continuously.
Dr Suzy: Just on that note, speaking of the internet, what are the things that our team has started focusing on recently is we are aware of, particularly for the Malay language, that the focus of the education system in Malay is on standard Malay as it has been formalized in dictionaries and books on grammar on how the Malay language works, but we’re also aware that the spoken version of the Malay language has features that don’t turn up in written formal Malay. But we found out and I mean, it should come as a surprise to no one but especially people who actually use Malay in their day-to-day conversations, that there is a rich world of written informal Malay conversations going on in everybody’s WhatsApps right when people message each other about whether they’re going to be home on time or not. there are new ways of writing Malay that are emerging as community standards but that have not been documented anywhere in the Singapore linguistic literature on Malay.
And so with our team we’re starting to work on what’s the day-to-day way of spelling different words in Malay, what’s the day-to-day way of representing the way people speaking casual language right, because we think that this is a very important part of linguistic performance and linguistic identity. Because you can choose whether you want to present yourself in writing as your most formal self or whether you’re being a bit casual in life right. So we think that’s an important potentially missing link for how we can engage with literacy activities, especially for young kids who might be at that transition point between who am I when I’m a lay speaker, can I be myself, can I write a play that is in the informal language that I use with my friends rather than an essay which is in the formal language of news readers right, can I be all of these things at once. And that might be part of the puzzle of forming a rich linguistic identity that covers the whole span of being in a language.
Q7: How do children with ASD learn Chinese?
Dr Suzy: I would have to say that there’s limited evidence to date about the intersection between neurodiversity and multilingualism. However, just last year there was a very important paper published about whether it’s better for families to reduce the number of languages that are spoken with kids with developmental disorders so that they don’t get confused versus use all of the household languages with kids with developmental disorders. The logic behind this thinking goes: if we’ve already got one thing that’s complicated, maybe we should reduce the other things that are complicated for the child.
However, this paper has shown very clearly that it is better for the child’s outcomes to have access to all of the languages of the household that are normally used than to reduce the linguistic input for that child to just one language. this goes back to that issue of secure attachment and it goes back to that issue of learning how to socially be your full self if you have a family that has three languages in the home, and you speak to some people in all three languages and you speak to one person in only one language, they have a reduced opportunity space to learn how to interact socially and they have less backups.
This is something we haven’t talked about at all, but kids who are multilingual – if they forget a word in one language they can just use another one, they’ve got a backup plan right. Monolingual kids don’t have this option – if they forget a word, they’re stuck. But multilingual kids often have a backup plan and this is true also in cases of kids with developmental disorders, they can be more included in the full range of household activities if it is a family who has strong language skills in all their languages and would normally be using all of their languages right. So whatever is normal for your family is good for your kids with developmental disorders and the data are very very clearly in favor of not artificially restricting languages for kids with developmental disorders.
Prof Annabel: That’s very important information to keep in mind for autism spectrum disorder children. I think one of the challenges actually for them is language in terms of communication so the idea is how do we help them to communicate better or just communicate at home. So regardless of what language it is, I think it’s important to learn ways to communicate to bring across what is needed, but also the different ways to express their feelings or their needs or to develop communication skills now. Whether learning Chinese or for kids with ASD is different from learning English, it’s essentially the same process in learning language in general because you can imagine kids, let’s say in Chinese environments would need to learn to communicate in that language. So very similarly, either depending on what is spoken in your family environment and how they are brought across, it’s more important establishing the mode of communication than to emphasize which language. But it is in the school kind of environment perspective it will be very similar to what we do in learning the different types of languages.
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This event was funded in part by the National Research Foundation Science of Learning Grant awarded to Dr Suzy Styles.