Just when I thought that my husband is the only person who reads this column, I received three “requests” from mothers via my Facebook account and 10 comments in my blog (www.readingruffolos.com) to write about how children learn to speak a language. Two mothers also asked me how my children are learning two languages at the same time.
Let me begin by saying that I am not a language expert. But perhaps I can share what I discovered in 2014 when I worked on a qualitative study on bilingual language acquisition with my twin children as “guinea pigs.”
The scenario is this: we are a multicultural family with an Italian American for a daddy and a Filipino for a mother who speaks Bisaya, Filipino, English, Mandarin Chinese and some Spanish and French. We lived in Guangzhou, China. Three ayis (househelpers) come over three times a week and speak Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese.
My mother, who visited us twice when we were living in Guangzhou, was concerned that my children will get confused about all these languages. Thankfully, I was enrolled in a class that gave me an excellent rebuttal to her arguments.
Here’s what I did: I observed the twins for four months which meant I recorded every conversation and every interaction every single day. I noted every word that they said while we were traveling to the Philippines and the US. I spoke to them in Bisaya, their dad in English, the ayis in Chinese.
The things you can do when you’re a stay-at-home mother.
Around the time when I started my study, the twins were 13 months old and I was already aware of the fact that even before babies come out of this world, they are said to be already “listening” to the sounds that surround them.
A psycholinguist named Jean Berko Gleason noted that babies acquire their native language on their first months, “long before they say their first words as language is built upon an earlier affective communicative base.”
Before babies turn one year old, “they are able to make fine discriminations among the speech sounds they hear, and they begin to communicate nonverbally with those around them.”
So you see, babbles and unintelligible words mean something. Parents and language coaches need to look beyond clear words and phrases and be sensitive about nonverbal expressions, body language and gestures.
Many researchers wrote that infants begin to babble midway through their first years which is seen as a progression and evidence of linguistic capacity. Children normally say their first words near their first birthdays to the delight of parents, like you and me, who get teary eyed at the first mention of “Mama” and “Dada.”
What about bilingual acquisition?
I was reading five books on language development at that time that I was overwhelmed with strategies. Readings were piling up on my study table that I decided to pick up the shortest of them all.
This is when I chanced upon Fred Genesee’s 2012 article on simultaneous bilingual acquisition.
In his article, Genesee said there is no definitive answer to the question as to how long should children be exposed to each language in order to fully acquire the languages. But he noted that bilingual children’s exposure to each language has a positive impact on their proficiency in each language.
Genesee suggests that bilingual children need at least 40% of their waking hour exposed to a language if their competence in that language is to be comparable to that of monolingual children when assessed using standardized test.
A strategy that we follow at home is the one-parent, one-language rule. Jeff speaks English while I speak Bisaya. Chinese is there occasionally. We have been successful so far.
But I need to point out that bilingual acquisition is a different ball game. A slight delay in language development is expected as children are building two vocabularies instead of one (in the case of monolinguals). Imitation/modeling is an important strategy in language learning. By this I mean that parents, talk to your children. Personal interaction is key. Do not let the television babysit your children. You are in the most crucial and critical position to teach them.
Our home is crazy. We have twins — a boy and a girl — who mimic each other’s learnings and mistakes so that is another nuance that we took note as language coaches to our children. Then there’s the role played by the twins in teaching their younger brother how to speak.
That is a subject of another column.
* * *
My heart is in the right place these days as I join the Basadours in celebrating its fifth anniversary on this very day. We invited children from a mountain barangay to join us for a day of stories, arts, food and music at the Sinulog Hall of the Rizal Memorial Library and Museum. The Basadours is a volunteer-based organization, but I am proud to say that the group has been doing literacy initiatives that are even better than some government programs and nongovernmental projects that I know of. It doesn’t need awards to prove itself. Just ask Cebu City Public Library chief librarian Rose Chua what the group has done and you’ll know what I mean. Congratulations, Basadours! Cheers to more years of meaningful stories shared to children!