(Click here to read Part 1 of the Q&A session)

Emcee: Do we have other questions from anyone else in the audience?

Parent: Good morning and one question. How do you incorporate bilingualism practically in the environment of a working parent? That is part one of the question.

Part two, when the effort comes from one parent, and of course, the motivation. Because for myself, I’m effective in English, but Mandarin is theoretical.

Emcee: Maybe we start off by addressing how do we help our child when you know that most of the parents in Singapore are working parents.

Prof Annabel Chen: Oh, this is a reality kind of question, and Prof Suzy and I would have a different perspective. I myself am also a working parent. So yes, indeed, I know.

Especially when your kid is in school away from you the whole day. Right? So I think spending time together is very precious. So, for example, making a routine like having at least one meal a day together like dinner.

Making it like a very special time where it is expected everybody is at the table, not having devices, and that’s a tricky one while you’re eating, but just communicating with each other. I think that’s one way to communicate.

But learning about what’s going on with your kid as well, but also using language. At least have that routine first, and then the other will be tricky, because it’s like, maybe we want to communicate in Mother Tongue language, Mandarin, Tamil, or Malay.

It is tricky. It helps if you have a partner who can also speak in that language. Because when the kids are a little bit older, when they’re in school, one of the ways is learning together as well, where you could take the opportunity like, okay, let’s try for this session just to speak Mandarin together. It is not easy. It’s actually quite tricky.

We actually have that before, like that is actually instituted by my son. It’s like, just speak Chinese today, and it’s like if you slip into translanguaging, oops, you know, we got a point down. It becomes a game. It’s tricky, but there are other opportunities like what Dr Beth has mentioned.

Maybe during the weekends to try to immerse in other activities that may be more immersive in, you know, just learning Mandarin or learning Tamil. But if there’s activities that you can be together with your child to interact, that would be great as well.

Dr Beth O’Brien: Maybe in general, for any language it’s not necessarily the amount of time that you spend with your child, but your quality so like Prof Annabel mentioned. If you only have a little bit of time, you mark out of space where you do things actively together so you’re engaged in, you know, whether it’s over a meal and have some conversation without any digital devices that’s really important and bedtime stories, or story time. Any time you can squeeze it in.

Things that would allow you to do some of the types of conversations Dr Suzy showed earlier on, where you have more diversity of the language that you’re using different words. It’s also the quality of the input that you’re getting.

Parent: I speak in Mother Tongue and the child replies to me in English at first. Then, over time, it’ll ease the child. Is it okay? Or is it actually better to be a purist?

It’s probably a different perspective. In terms of the effectiveness, you know? Anyway at the end of the day they will have become an effective bilinguals. But maybe it’s a shorter route? Or longer route? Learning a language is probably a lifestyle.

Dr Suzy Styles: If I can add one more perspective that might be helpful. I like to think about what makes social sense for a young child and what might help them really want to engage with a language from their own social value, perspective, and by social value I mean to put it in really plain terms: what do kids think is cool right now?

So when we think about what motivates a six-year-old or a nine-year-old, it’s not necessarily having a polite chitchat with grandma that is the most exciting thing in their week. They might quite enjoy that and find it rewarding. But perhaps the thing that they find really really cool right now is that girl who lives in the next block that they sometimes see at the playground, who’s maybe just like a year older, and has a really nice dress, and you know they can see that this person has value in their social world. And that they might want to be or behave like that child.

So, from this perspective, one of the challenges that parents may face is that if the mother tongue languages are only being used by elder generations, that’s not necessarily the most exciting social context for a young child to want to be part of in their sense of identity and autonomy.

So, from that perspective, maybe we can think about things like ‘wouldn’t it be cool if Elsa from Frozen spoke Mandarin some of the time, or Malay! Wouldn’t it be cool if some of our favorite cartoon characters, the ones that our kids identify with, and sort of really want to see themselves as, wouldn’t it be cool if we could imagine those worlds incorporating the linguistic identities that are valuable to the rest of the family?’ So I want to sort of put out the idea here that we have to engage with the social motivations of little kids, and one way that we can do that is watching cartoons with the language settings flipped so that our kids might be able to sort of have a richer imaginary life in these other languages at an age appropriate juncture.

Parent: Her vocab is not at that level yet to be able to understand.

Dr Suzy Styles: So one of the things that’s quite interesting is when kids have the opportunity to be immersed in a language environment, they might be able to develop up their linguistic knowledge. Or if kids are able to watch a cartoon in both languages but some of the time they’re watching it in Mandarin, then their knowledge of what’s actually going on in the story might help carry them over to map those word meanings for the words they don’t understand. It’s not always a challenge to not understand every word that you’re hearing at a time, and, in fact, it can be quite motivating if you are most of the way into your understanding and still learning alongside. Then it can be a great hook for kids who want to be able to speak like Ariel in Tamil, for example. If they have some conceptual knowledge already about the kinds of words that she might be saying, and then they have this new linguistic token that they might be able to map to.

Dr Beth O’Brien: I’ve said that when they’re developing their languages, they will first understand more than they can say. You have to, you know, give them a little bit of runway to get them to learn how to speak as well as understand. And then maybe also as a follow up to any of the things that you have them view. So whether it’s a movie or a cartoon, it’s also good to process instead of just passively watching and absorbing and hearing your words, but also get them to process afterwards. So maybe talk about the program with them, so get them to summarize. You know what happened, or what did she say, or how did she feel? So get them to talk about it in either language, so they can process their understanding of what they heard.

Emcee: Thank you. Do we have any other question?

Parent: Hi everyone. Actually, I don’t have a question. For me, I just want to add on to the worrying mothers’ concern about this. Because I’m also a very busy mother. I’m a primary school teacher, so I don’t have a lot of time to spend with my children, and what I usually do is just like what the Professor had shared.

So we start off with what they’re interested in. So maybe for my daughter, she’s interested in, like, the little mermaid. So she had already watched short snippets on YouTube, on the little mermaid. So I say, ‘oh why not we find a video that is in Chinese about the little mermaid story. It might not be exactly the same, but let’s like watch it in Chinese, because I want to learn how the story goes in Chinese, too.’ Yeah. So then we will stop at different points. And yeah, talk about it. Talk about the language, yeah, and subsequently based on her interest. How I incorporate all this so that there’s more exposure would be bedtime.

Because bedtime she likes to, like, ‘can you read to me?’ you know, and we’re like, huh, we have to think about a story to entertain her, and I’m not as creative as the father. The father can, like, just come up with stories very easily. So I was, like, why not I just say 小美人鱼 [trans. Little Mermaid] Yeah, and then she’s, like, oh, okay, sure.

So it’ll be playing at the background. And she doesn’t need to like, remember word for word  what exactly happened. But because we went through it already she’s very interested to, like, oh, what is this part talking about? And she could relate to the background noises and all, and then maybe the change in character tone. She’s like, ‘I think it’s the father talking. I think this is the little mermaid answering.’ Oh, this is yan yan yan yan. I think it’s the dolphin or something. Good friend.

She’ll be like, ‘oh mummy, yan yan’. Then I’ll be, like, ‘yan yan yan’. So yeah, that’s how I kind of take advantage of the very little time we have to keep the exposure going, and another way that I think is very simple, you know like how sometimes our main language is English we don’t want them to understand what we say. So we will talk in Chinese to each other. Actually, that’s the way to expose them to Chinese I mean, they’re like, ‘what are they talking about? Why are they speaking in Chinese?’

But they actually do hear us speaking Chinese, even though it’s not to them. But that role modeling in the background actually is a way to expose them to the language already. So you don’t have to be very worried that they are not speaking it very often, because I’m also a case in hand that I’m very, very like going to speak to her constantly in Chinese, sorry, in Mandarin, in order for her to be effectively bilingual, but actually for them, they really do need to listen, and they don’t have to be exposed to the proper pronunciation, you know, like, it must be PRC type of Chinese, in order for them to understand. So just do whatever you can, and I always say just base it on their interest. So if their interest is like the Wizard of Oz, for example. “Let’s look on Youtube if you can hear the Wizard of Oz story in Chinese”. 

Then, that’s one way to take advantage but you don’t have to force yourself to, like, oh, let me translate these stories that she likes in Chinese on your own. There’s always resources out there. Yeah. So don’t worry. We’re all here in it together, definitely.

Dr Suzy Styles: Yeah, the other thing just following up on this comment is co-watching of videos together can help bridge some of those gaps. So if the level of language is a little bit more advanced than your child’s understanding, they can always ask you.

Top tip for parents is, if you can find a different language version of a video that you want to watch together that has English subtitles. Then, even if you, as a parent, are not feeling super confident in your sophisticated vocabulary for the other language that you’re trying to support, then you also have a little bit of text support that might help you help your child understand a little bit more about what’s going on. So watching these kinds of resources together is a great way to sort of boost up the amount of exposure and the kinds of conversations that you can have.

So thank you very much for providing that example too.

Emcee: Okay I think we will end off just with one last query that anyone would like to ask?

Parent: My question is regards to… two questions. So the first question is: because we do translanguaging very often at home, one practice that we’re used to when we try to explain a term in Mandarin we would use English, and then it goes the other way round as well. But I don’t realize that in my language learning journey, then it becomes such that when… I mean that we will start to think, for example, I’m dominant in Chinese, I will tend to write or reply in English using a Chinese thinking or grammar structure. So I want to know if that is something we need to correct in our child, because the way you know, when we speak. You know the sentence structure and everything in Mandarin, it’s very different from English.

Dr Annabel Chen: So I just want to come back. I think it is really interesting to know that we all struggle with.

I think the gentleman actually started off with that. Do I speak one language? It depends on the context, right? And also the mom talked about, like, I don’t want to kill the passion my kids are currently on. So it really depends on the context. But if it’s just playing around, you know, and communicating, translanguaging, it’s fine. But let’s say it’s a context where we are trying to speak more fluently in one language, then we want to focus playing around to just speaking one language, like, how do I explain this term using the same language?

So the thing is becoming more like a game to make it still interesting for the kid but not be like, you know, forcing it like a tzar. You have to say certain things in only one language. So it depends on the context. I think that the key point is like, yeah, we don’t want to kill the learning passion, you know. We want to foster and nourish them.

I’ll give it to Dr Suzy to talk more about translanguaging.

Dr Suzy Styles: One of the other properties of the Singapore language context that I find really interesting is there is a mode of speaking in Singapore that is not really 100% English, and is not really 100% Chinese, and it’s not really necessarily mixing between them, and it’s sometimes been called Singlish, where we use English words but the grammar might be more consistent with the way that a sentence would go together in Chinese.

And this has sometimes been described as a phenomenon that has come out of the deep language contact between the 2 languages, and it’s a very special property of communication in Singapore in informal settings.

Now, it’s not necessarily a sign that you’re mixed up between your Chinese and your English, but maybe you’re using this mode of communication in a context where that mode of communication is appropriate. So whenever we use expressions like ‘can’ at the end of a sentence, or when someone asks us a question and we reply with ‘can’. Now that’s not what we would consider a well-formed utterance of formal English or of Singapore standard English, but it’s a perfectly grammatical sentence in the informal variety of Singapore English. So I guess what I’m trying to highlight here is, if we sort of take a different view of these kinds of translanguaging behaviors, we can see that there might be norms that are shared by the community that are appropriate in some contexts.

Now, just like you, as an adult might have some awareness of when you’re doing this, your kid will also be developing some sense of when it’s appropriate to use this speech. Now, when they’re younger, they might kind of sometimes pick the wrong mode of speech for the wrong context.

Or maybe if they’re a little bit stressed or there’s a lot going on, and they feel the pressure to communicate is more important than checking whether the mode of communication is the correct one, they might come out with an utterance that doesn’t feel right in that context.

But this is another form of code-switching, selecting the way that you use your language for the context that you’re using your language in.

And as they grow and work their way through the school system, one of the goals of the school system is helping kids figure out the formal variety, the sort of expected standard syntax of English grammar.

Because English is the dominant language in the school system throughout Singapore, you effectively don’t have to worry about whether the English will come out, whether your kids will gain an awareness of that formal variety of English. By the time they get to the end of the school system they will have been exposed to tons and tons and tons of that, and they will have been helped to figure out ways of aligning with that norm.

On the other side, your communication in your family and in your community is allowed to be joyous and playful and familiar and cozy, and to have those fun, informal sentence structures as well.

So that would kind of be my perspective on the fact that you’re not necessarily as an individual making mistakes when you formulate your sentences like this. You’re actually aligning to a norm that is shared by a lot of Singaporeans in a way of constructing informal speech in the Singlish way. So it’s not wrong to do so with your kids.

But perhaps, as Prof. Annabel was suggesting, one of the things that you can do is practice switching on or off those different registers in different contexts together.

Or give demonstrations of how you might say it differently in a different context, and that might help your kids navigate that space well.

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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