Emcee: So just to get the ball rolling, I will start off with the first question, and it is: will learning more than one language slow down overall language development for my child?
Dr Suzy Styles: Hi! So, this is a wonderful question, and we know lots of parents ask this question, and it’s a great sign that you really care for your kids, and you want to help them out as best as you can.
And the first way of answering this question is to look at the kind of research that has been done in the past in those majority monolingual countries.
And when we look to the research from overseas, sometimes some reports of language use suggest that kids to a learning two or more languages at the same time might begin to do their talking at a slightly later age.
And this might be because they’re handling the way that language sounds in one language, and the way that language sounds in another language, and that those two sound systems might be kind of confusing for how the mouth is going to manage to produce both sets of sounds.
Now this is a very minor delay. Most people wouldn’t even notice it, and in general it’s only really a delay in when kids feel confident to start talking around others not so much about what they’re understanding when others speak to them or what they’re able to do with their linguistic thinking.
So, from that perspective, for children who are growing up in a monolingual majority context, sometimes educators can feel very nervous about this delay, but there’s not really any evidence to date that suggests that this tiny little slow down is a lasting effect, or that it’s actually a problem for the children themselves.
The other way we can answer this question is to look at a community like Singapore, where the majority of children have grown up with more than one language going on around them. And many of the adults in our audience, if you look around at your neighbors in the audience, you may have grown up in a multilingual household yourself, and have been the product of a multilingual exposure during your early years.
And once again, it seems to be the case that even if there are some very, very minor slowdowns in the rate at which speech is produced, it doesn’t seem to last long, and it doesn’t seem to affect us into our later years of development.
So, I hope that gives a perspective from the early childhood side.
Dr Beth O’Brien: I think I might just add that as children get a little older, some studies, some suggest that the rate of vocabulary acquisition, so the rate at which they are learning words and building vocabularies may be a little slower when children are learning two languages, I shouldn’t say slower, if you measure their vocabulary language in one of their languages, their vocabulary size might be smaller than monolingual peers.
But if you measure the word knowledge across all of their known languages, then they’re actually developing it the same way as their monolingual peers so that means they’re acquiring the same number of words as a child learning one language. It’s just that their known words are spread across the different languages.
Prof Annabel Chen: Also, from the brain perspective. Just to let you know, our brain is actually a miraculous organ, we can learn anything. So, it doesn’t matter how many languages, it can learn, it’s just that sometimes our networks take longer to build up than others.
So, this way you can see delays and all that, you know, they’re sort of normal delays. They are not picking up as quickly as other kids especially at a very, very early age, but then they will quickly pick up later on. So, it’s just individual differences.
Also coming from a clinical perspective. I’m also a clinical neuropsychologist. I often get asked, ‘what if my child is having difficulty in learning? That will become a factor. If your child definitely has difficulty in learning language, then yes, we want to focus on one language first. So not to overwhelm your kid, in trying to learn something else when we hadn’t built up that foundational part of it. But most of us don’t have difficulties, it’s just that we will need a little bit more time learning different languages. That’s fine, and their brain can handle.
Dr Suzy Styles: If I can jump in with one more follow up to Prof Annabel’s point about if a child is having difficulty learning their whichever language is used most at home, then maybe they can focus their attention on just one language. We should also mention that there is a new line of research that’s coming out quite recently which is investigating what’s going on for kids who have other kinds of developmental differences. So kids who might be at risk of developing autism or another kind of developmental difference. And for children who have these kinds of developmental differences or delays, there’s actually very good research to show that using all of your languages, together with children with these kinds of differences actually can be beneficial, because it can help a child to be more fully engaged with the whole range of family activities and the full repertoire of linguistic resources going on in the house.
So, in the special case of the child who might be struggling with their language development in one language, we might want to exercise caution, or communicate with some speech and language practitioners for specific guidance. But if we have a case where a child might be having social or other kinds of delays in their development, then actually, a multilingual environment can be very enriching for that child as well.
Emcee: Thank you. I will ask the second question: if I’m not confident in my language skills, how can I support my child in learning another language?
Dr Beth O’Brien: Many families that we talked to for our research there’s often times multiple generations in their home. So there’s always good opportunities.
If the parent maybe it doesn’t feel as secure in their proficiency than everyone at home, there might be an opportunity for a relative, either in the home or a relative who would be regularly visit as a family who could provide some of that input.
There’s also resources that you could use, like books or other electronic story books where the words could be pronounced by the device. And then you can just reinforce that. So if you’re not sure in other words, how to pronounce the words properly you can use these tools to learn together with your child.
So that’s one way, and there’s other opportunities for communities as well. So there’s some community centers that often will have either programs or activities, or children who learn through an extended family.
Dr Suzy Styles: So, in addition to the resources that Dr. Beth has mentioned, I like to think about how a family can almost form a catalogue of what linguistic resources are available to them from both people and some of these external resources, like films and videos and books and things like these as well.
And keeping in mind that for very young children, the most powerful kind of input is input that is socially relevant to them. One of the things we can think about is whether the materials or the resources that we’re putting together are age appropriate and engaging for kids.
So we might think about books and TV and movies and things like that as being part of a child’s passive exposure. But we can also go out of our way to find things like age-appropriate YouTube clips a child might be really interested in paying attention to in a meaningful way. The other thing that we shouldn’t forget is the opportunities that come in the digital world. We know that sometimes we might have an extended family network who we don’t get to spend much time with face to face.
But if our extended family network is very rich in their other language skills and you want that as part of the portfolio of skills that your child may have access to, then introducing zoom interactions as part of your child’s language diet might be a really good way of supplementing or boosting up those engaging, socially relevant exposures to the full range of languages that you’re aiming for.
Emcee: Thank you. We’d like to open the floor to our parents.
Parent: Hello. I think I learned something new, ‘translanguaging’. At home, I speak Chinese to my son. Exclusively. My wife speaks English. I had the belief that to be an effective bilingual, you shouldn’t translanguage. In Singapore, if we translanguage, it’s fine, so if I talk to someone in Singapore, they’ll probably understand me if I mix Malay or Chinese, but if I speak to someone from, let’s say China, who usually speak only Chinese, I think it doesn’t work.
So my question will be then, is my way of raising my son preparing him to be effective bilingual? I mean, effective bilingual to me means that you speak that language, just using that language. And I think it’ll be more difficult next time, because you have some business languages that you need to use.
Dr Suzy Styles: So translanguaging is, I think, as I mentioned earlier, a skill that’s very poorly understood by the academic community who have historically studied only one language at a time.
So I think one of the first things that I want to mention is that many of us have grown up or been trained in a discipline that told us that it’s dangerous or incorrect to use our languages together, and that’s a perspective that comes from monolingual communities. Now I totally take your point that when we reach adulthood, and in our professional lives we might want to be able to separate out those languages, so that we can do our communication effectively in a business context, or something similar to that. But it’s not necessarily the case that we have to do that from the start.
So we know from the experience of Hispanic communities in the US and indigenous communities in the north of Australia, that it can be quite effective during early childhood to use the combination of linguistic resources that is most natural, most engaging, most fun, and most connected to the community while children are still developing their language skills, and they can go on to develop proficiency in a more formal kind of code switching as they grow older.
So if what works for you and your family is to speak one language at a time when you’re communicating with your parent, that can be one pathway to effective bilingualism. But what I want to share with our community is that other pathways are also possible, and they’re not necessarily damaging or dangerous for your children.
Dr Beth O’Brien: I’ll just add a couple thoughts, so we’ve done a few studies, I’ll just mention two: one we looked at, this is for older children in kindergarten. So we looked at the classroom behaviors in kindergarten classrooms, and when the teacher tended to use language switching themselves or translanguaging themselves. We found that the output of the children tended to also have more of these types of language switches. Whereas the teachers who switch less, their students also switch less.
But that could be part of the classroom environment in which children develop expectations of what’s acceptable and what’s not acceptable, based on what that teacher is doing. So I think what Suzy’s mentioning, the earlier years, it’s not necessarily bad if you’re switching.
Children are observed to naturally switch speech, even when the parents aren’t. So I think it’s part of a natural developmental phase that they would go through when they’re acquiring two languages.
The other thing is within the context of Singapore. What we’ve also found is that because of the school system, once a child gets into the school system, they will have, you know, the support in the school system for their English. And that’s also true, maybe more so in the larger community that English has support. They’ll get plenty of exposure to English. They’ll learn, they’ll take in English when they get to school.
So, it was actually the more input, you know, regardless of which family member said it. But the quantity of the input in the home in Mother Tongue would actually help them to achieve more, or learn more words and build a block, a larger vocabulary, and eventually start their proficiency in Mother Tongue. Whereas, using more of the Mother Tongue language at home, does not negatively impact their English. I’m sorry to use double negatives, but in other words, it doesn’t hurt to use Mother Tongue, the English skills, but if you’re using predominantly more English at home, it may not give them enough input in Mother Tongue for them to develop their Mother Tongue skills.
The Q&A session was held as part of Our Bilingual Futures: The science of raising bilingual children. Click here to read a summary of the event!
If you would like to watch and listen to the talks by our guests from NTU and NIE about the way children in a multilingual society such as Singapore learn language, we’ve uploaded them onto our YouTube channel (with subtitles):
Dr Suzy Styles: https://youtu.be/WVH8eY2WqHA
Dr Beth O’Brien: https://youtu.be/bd4F3UHkROE
Prof Annabel Chen: https://youtu.be/MtEfDIxkDqc
Q&A session: https://youtu.be/gtDI5N58GNU
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