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In this final - and therefore extra-long - episode, three parents who have previously been guests on the podcast talk about how their family's bilingual journey has progressed since then. I look back over the past four years, reflect on the future and, to conclude, we hear a poem written about and dedicated to bilingual children, and inspired by the podcast.
Our first guest is Liz. I first spoke to her in the first season of Kletsheads (in episode 4, about language mixing). Liz is originally from Limburg in the Netherlands but has lived in Canada for 10 years. Together with her Egyptian husband, she has a 4-year-old son, Otis.
Next, we hear from Marjolein. Marjolein grew up monolingually in the Netherlands, studied English and then became an English teacher. When she became a mother in 2018, she decided to also speak English to her infant son Owen. She now has a second son, James. Marjolein was first featured in this episode 2 of the first season on how much input does a child need to hear to become bilingual.
Finally, I speak to Christi. Christi was first on the podcast back in 2020 (in the same episode as Liz) as our Kletshead of the week. She spoke about her own upbringing as a trilingual child in Vienna, and about the choices she faced now that she had become her mother herself. In this episode she tells us how speaking German can sometimes be a challenge (especially when 'life' gets in the way) and how her eldest daughter has picked up Spanish from her mum. If you want to know how these three parents and their bilingual families are doing now, listen to the podcast!
To conclude this episode and thus the entire podcast series, we hear a poem, Three words for squirrel. This poem was written and is performed by spoken word poet, Wieke Vink. You might recognise Wieke from the first episode of this final season, when she interviewed our Kletshead of the week. If you listen carefully to the poem, you will hear many references to conversations, topics and words that have passed by in the past four in the podcast.
Three words for squirrel
This poem is for the little onesWhose mother tongueIs more than one With words in different flavoursOn the tip of your tongueOr flowing out of your fingertips This is for the childrenFor whom the crossroads of thoughts in your headCould be spread outInto at least two different languages With womb-held babiesBathing in soundFollowing the rhythmic patternsThat are with them – all around EmergingOut into the worldA holder of knowledge Growing up You already knowHow to be gentle with yourself and with othersHow to wobble on the table of conventions How to take it slowWhen a word doesn’t immediately come to mind When in search for the right ‘mmm’The nuance that you might knowFrom the flow of past conversations Not yet fully interpretatedBut held onto brightlyIn the library of your mind Your shelves full of boxesWith vocab and grammarTu sais que somewhereBetween the Malayalam, French and Finnishthere will be a great find This is for youAs you’ve feltHow language is part of connectionFor all our neurodiverse minds Language as a connectorFor all things funny and wise, silly and kind Dear multilingual child You might not be able to speak it allYou might not be able to read it allYet you are able to hold it all In a map of the worldThat’s unique to youAnd the communities that you belong to Your cultures sometimes resonatingIn the tones of your skinThe rhythms of your sentencesThe sounds of your name You know, language is part of identityYet our schools may beSo monolingual or full of variety With the need for heritage language educationAnd intercultural communicationWithin and across our different nations With all these languages holding the world in their embraceAnd a dialect in every corner And when seasons seem out of orderYou are asked to braze both our physical and our cultural landscapes As three seasons of a podcast droppedFrom the northern hemisphereCoveri... -
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Learning to read does not come easily to all children. Some children experience serious problems with reading and spelling. They have difficulty recognising and learning letters, they mix up sounds or letters, or read very slowly. With proper help, this often passes, but in some children these issues remain. Persistent problems with reading and spelling are sometimes due to dyslexia. What exactly is dyslexia? If a bilingual child has dyslexia, will they succeed in learning to read in both languages? Does dyslexia work the same in all languages, e.g. also in languages with different scripts? What can you do as a parent, teacher or speech language therapist to support bilingual children with dyslexia?
Researcher Ioulia Kovelman explains that being dyslexic means that you have long-term problems with reading. More often than not, these become clear when - after several years of schooling - children have persistent difficulties in connecting sounds and letters or sounds and characters but even before children start to read, there may be some signs that children will develop dyslexia, for example if they struggle to recognise which words rhyme with each other. We also learned that dyslexia works similarly across languages and so if your bilingual child has dyslexia in one language, they will have it in another. The tests used to diagnose dyslexia may however differ depending on whether sounds are matched to letters, as an in alphabetic languages such as English or Arabic, or to characters as in Chinese. One thing that Ioulia made very clear is that being bilingual does not make dyslexia any worse.
In Let's Klets, we spoke to Miriam de Oliveira from the International School Breda in the Netherlands. She told us about the Language Friendly School network. If you understand Dutch, you can hear me talk to the co-founder of this network, Ellen-Rose Kambel, in this episode of the (Dutch edition of the) podcast (Season 2, Episode 6).
Ioulia Kovelman is Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan in the US. She a neuroscientist studying the bilingual brain and how children learn to speak and to read in more than one language. You can read more about her research at the Language & Literacy Lab here. -
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Many bilingual children around the world attend heritage language education. Sometimes called complementary or supplementary schools, heritage language programs or mother tongue education, these schools offer children and young people a safe space where they can develop and maintain their HL and cultural identity. Classes take place at the weekend or after children are done for the day with their mainstream schooling, and in many cases include not only language but also a cultural and sometimes a religious component.
In this episode we hear more about the research on heritage language education. Do certain types of complementary schools work better than others? What effect does attending these schools have on children's language development and their cultural identity? What other benefits are there, and are there benefits for parents as well as children?
Researcher Layal Husein tells us how complementary schools have indeed been found to support bilingual children's heritage language development, especially when it comes to literacy. They also serve as safe spaces for children to explore their cultural heritage and identity. Complementary schools can also serve as community hubs for parents, and for newcomers, help them navigate their new surroundings.
In this episode we heard excerpts from two previous episodes of Kletsheads: this interview with Gisi Cannizzarro (starts at 22m17), director of the Heritage Language Education Network, and this interview with Thorwen, who attended complementary school in Dutch whilst living in Hong Kong as a child. Another useful resource for anyone interested in this topic is the National Resource Centre for Supplementary Education in the UK. You can read more about mother tongue education being a human right here.
Dr. Layal Husein is a researcher the University of East London, UK. She recently completed her PhD on the effects of complementary schools bilingual children's language and identity. You can read more about this work here (if you have access - unfortunately, like many academic articles, this paper is behind a paywall). Layal grew up bilingually, learning Arabic from her Bahraini father and English from her mother and at school.
Our Kletshead of the week is the Sybil Vachaudez. She grew up in Denmark and Portugal, learning (and then forgetting) Danish alongside Portuguese, French and English. Curious about the Portuguese music you heard during our conversation? That was Portugal's 2022 entry for the Eurovision Song Contest, Saudade, Saudade by Maro.
In this episode, I also share our final Quick and Easy, a concrete tip you can put into practice straightaway to make the most out of the bilingualism in your family, class or practice: create a reading problem that your child will want to solve. Listen to the podcast to find out more! -
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According to WHO, 1 in 100 children have autism. Whilst exact numbers can vary depending on who's reporting them, where in the world you live, and how autism is defined, this developmental disability is certainly not uncommon. In fact, in many places, the number of people living with autism is increasing. Autism is a spectrum which means that it's different for everybody. It affects how people relate to others, how they make sense of the world around them, and how they communicate. And it's likely these problems with communication that raise questions about bilingualism in autistic children. Should you raise an autistic child with more than one language? Can autistic children who don't speak very much or at all become bilingual? What effect does being autistic have on a child's language development and is this any different for bilingual children? Researcher Philippe Prévost tells us about this emerging field of research. He tells us that whilst there's a lot that we still don't know about autistic children growing up bilingually, there's no reason to believe that autistic children cannot be raised with more than one language.
Philippe Prévost is Professor of Linguistics at University of Tours in France, and one of the few researchers working on the topic of bilingualism and autism. His research focuses on how different groups of bilingual children learn how to put sentences together, including children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and / or Developmental Language Disorder. To find out more about Developmental Language Disorder, listen to the previous episode of Kletsheads on 'How do you know if a bilingual child has a language delay?'. To find out more about bilingualism and autism, including hearing an autistic bilingual adult's lived experience, listen to this episode of the podcast Much Language, Such Talk.
Our Kletshead of the week is the 30-year-old Gema Garcia from New York. Gema grew up in an Ecuadorian family learning Spanish and English, and she tells us how she uses both languages professionally as an aspiring translator. During our conversation, Gema talked about an essay she wrote, first in Spanish and then translated into English, about her coming out experience. Curious to take a look? You can access the essay here (p. 82 in Spanish and p. 86 in English). Find Gema on insta @fernanda.ecu.
This episode's Quick & Easy is to have that conversation you've been meaning to have with your partner, parents or friends, colleague or child and to talk to them about that one topic that's been bothering you for ages and make sure you can move forward together. -
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In this episode we review two books about bilingual parenting: Bilingual success stories around the world by Adam Beck and Bilingual families. A practical language planning guide by Eowyn Crisfield.
We get the parental perspective from Maria Papantoniou, a Greek-speaking mother raising her child bilingually in the UK together with her Greek-speaking husband, and Sam Timmermans, a Dutch-speaking father who until recently lived in the UK with his wife and two children.
Language scientist Ludovica Serratrice joins me to evaluate the books from a research perspective. Ludovica is Professor of Bi-Multilingualism at the University of Reading in the UK, where she is also Director of the Centre for Literacy and Multilingualism and where she teaches on the BSc in Speech and Language Therapy. Read more about her research on the language development and processing of bilingual children and adults here.
In Let's Klets we speak to Daphne Vlachojannis, mother to three multilingual children, currently living in Greece. She tells us how she went about writing (and re-writing) her family language plan as her family expanded and moved countries. You can read more about Daphne and the work she is doing as a consultant at Raising Bilingual Children here.
During this episode I referred to an earlier episode of the podcast with Eowyn. That was our very first episode How to plan for a bilingual child. I also mentioned the Planting Languages project. Their website shares materials in several languages which can be used by parents and professionals to think about which resources are available, the family goals, and many other factors which come into play when writing a family language plan. -
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If we are lucky, we will all grow old. And if we are even luckier, we will stay healthy for as long as possible. But even if we stay healthy, it is inevitable that we slow down -- both physically and mentally. We often don't function as well as we used to, we become forgetful, and we may also develop problems like dementia. Research shows that being bilingual might help when it comes to slowing down these kinds of problems. Why is this the case ? And does this apply to all bilinguals? Researcher Merel Keijzer explains how being bilingual can potentially help when it comes to slowing down these kinds of problems. But not always. So when does it help and when doesn't it? We learn that it's especially important to continue using both languages throughout your life and to use the two languages in different contexts, i.e. one language at home and the other at school or work.
We also talk about language loss. Quite a few children who grow up with two or more languages often prefer to use the language they use at school or the most widely spoken language in their community. In many cases, they no longer actively use their other language (the heritage language). What happens when these children get older? Do they lose this language altogether? And what happens to bilingual parents as they grow older? Can you also lose your first language (or parts of it at least) if you live in a different country than the one you grew up in, using another language day in and day out? In this episode, we learn that this is unlikely but that it is normal if sometimes you can't find the right word. However, such problems are less likely to occur when it comes to grammar. And except where there is also trauma, children will also not lose a language they have learnt from an early age so easily.
This episode's Quick & Easy : stop, think and evaluate! It's a good idea to every now and then reflect on how your child's bilingualism is coming along. Questions you can ask are: is everyone happy, are things going well, are we achieving our goals by doing it this way? It's important not to be afraid to change things, to choose a different route if needs be. And if things are going well, take a moment to think about why this is, and how you can make sure that this success will continue in the future. The two books we'll be reviewing in the next episode (Bilingual families - A family language language planning guide by Eowyn Crisfield and Bilingual success stories around the world by Adam Beck) are useful sources of inspiration fo this. As a teacher, you can also do the same. Ask yourself - with or without colleagues - how the bilignual children at your school are getting on. Are there things that could be improved or changed? To help you do this, use the materials developed by the Language-Friendly School and the PEACH project's guide for educators.
Our Kletshead of the week is the 9-year-old Youjin. He's growing up in the UK with Korean and French as his two heritage languages.
Merel Keijzer is professor of English linguistics and English as a second language at the University of Groningen. She's also a member of the KNAW Jonge Akademie. Merel's research focuses on language loss and the effects ageing can have on language use and vice versa, using insights from neuroscience, applied linguistics, cognitive psychologi and medical sciences. Read more about Merel and her research group at the Bilingualism & Ageing Lab here. -
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Identity. It's a word you often hear when talking about children growing up in a bilingual family, but what does identity really mean? To what extent can you have multiple identities, belonging to different cultures or ethnic backgrounds? What are the consequences for children if they identify more in one way than the other? What role do parents, friends, school and wider society have in play? In this episode, we're answering these questions with Virginia Lam, researcher at Univeristy of Roehampton in London, herself a bilingual speaker of English and Mandarin and mother of two bilingual children.
We learn that there's an important difference between 'identifying as' and 'identifying with' something or someone. For example, children might consider themselves 'half Chinese, half English' because they have a Chinese and an English parent, but this doesn't necessarily mean that they will feel like they are Chinese. We also heard that children start to develop their identity from very early on and that identity continues to develop throughout childhood and the teenage years into adulthood. Research shows that children who identify with both their HL culture and the mainstream culture will grow up into healthier and happier individuals and that family life will benefit from these positive identities, too.
Towards the end of our conversation, Virigina mentioned a resource called the Library 4 multilinguals developed by Yoshito Darmon-Shimamori. I also mentioned another episode of Kletsheads about well-being in bilingual families.
In this episode I also shared another Kletsheads Quick and Easy, a concrete tip you put into practice straightaway to make the most of the bilingualism in your family, class or clinic: Find something from your own culture to share or do!
Dr. Virginia Lam is senior lecturer at the University of Roehampton, London. She's a psychologist and her research focuses on identity, bilingual development, and complementary language schooling.
In Let's Klets I spoke to Denise Amankwah. Denise is as a speech and language advisor (not therapist!) on a project called the London EAL project at Speech and Language UK, working with children learning English as an additional language and their families. She has a Masters in Education, specialising in Language and Literac,y and also has an undergraduate degree in Linguistics, as well as years of experience as an Early Years Practitioner.
As you'll hear in our conversation, Denise is passionate about supporting parents and teachers to encourage children to see bilingualism as a gift, and she's particularly interested in sharing the positive messages surrounding bilingualism to Black African families from ex-colonies where a European language tends to be the most superior. She grew up bilingually in the UK in a Ghanian family speaking Twi, a language which she understands completely but no longer speaks actively, making her what we call a "receptive bilingual". -
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Why do some bilingual children end up becoming more bilingual than others? That's the question we're answering in this episode of Kletsheads, the first in our third season of the English-language ediition.
Most children become more proficient in one of their languages compared with the other(s). This is often the language spoken at school or the wider community. Some children actively use both languages, but many do not. And in much the same way as we see for learning to walk, or the age at which you lose your first tooth, we also see that some children are quicker to pick up their two languages than others.
Sometimes there are seemingly obvious explanations for all this variation between children, but not always. Sometimes children growing up in apparently very similar circumstances have very different outcomes when it comes to how well or how much their use their two or more languages. What exactly causes these differences? Why do some bilingual children end up being more bilingual than others? And as a parent or professional, is there anything we can do to maximise a child's chances of becoming as bilingual as possible? To answer these questions, I'm joined by Johanne Paradis, professor at the University of Alberta, Canada.
We heard that there are a whole host of reasons why some bilingual children end up being more bilingual than others. Younger is not always better and that it's better in the early years to concentrate on the heritage language. Amount and type of input children hear at home is important, and - crucially - research suggests that this especially the case for the heritage language. Extra-curricular activities and friendships involving the heritage language are just two ways in which you can create richer input and increase your child's chances of becoming and remaining an active bilingual. These are some of the factors that you have (some) control over as a parent, or at least they are things you can change, but there are also factors that impact on children's bilingual outcomes that you can't change. Language aptitude is one example of this.
In many instances, if not all, there's no one-size-fits-all, no one factor that wins out above all others - as Johanne said, it's often a trade-off. The choices parents make are personal and will depend on individual circumstances, individual children and even the languages in question. What's crucial, though, is that you're aware of the potential consequences of the choices you make as a parent or the advice you give as a teacher or parent. I hope this episode will help you make those choices.
In this episode I also shared another Kletsheads Quick and Easy, a concrete tip you put into practice straightaway to make the most of the bilingualism in your family, class or clinic: Find someone to talk to about bilingualism in your family, classroom or practice. If you already know someone, send them a message or email now, or give them a call, and otherwise start thinking today about who you might be able to approach.
Our Kletshead of the week was Reyhan and he was interviewed by Wieke Vink.
Johanne Paradis is Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Adjunct Professor in Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of Alberta. Her research focuses on bilingualism in children with typical development and in children with developmental disorders, in particular children learning English-as-a-second language from immigrant and refugee families. She is co-author of Dual Language Development & Disorders: A Handbook on Bilingualism and Second Language Learning and she recently wrote an amazing review paper on much of the research she discussed in the podcast. The article is entitled 'Sources of individual differences in the dual language development of heritage bilinguals' and is published in the Journal of Child Language. It's open access, which means that you don't need to pay to read it. Note, however, -
Kletsheads is back! Season 3 is on its way. We'll have a new episode for you on the 15th of every month from now through November, eight episodes in total. In this short trailer, I'll tell you more about what we're going to be talking about.
This season of Kletsheads was made possible thanks to funding from HaBilNet. The Harmonious Bilingualism Network HaBilNet aims to support and stimulate scientific research into harmonious bilingualism and to make sure the results of that research reach the general public. If you want to know more about this organisation, check out their website (habilnet.org) and follow them on Facebook and Twitter. Many thanks to Habilnet for making this season possible! -
What do bilingual children think about being bilingual? Children - from 8 to 38 years old - talk about the fun and not so fun sides of being bilingual, their favourite words, the language they use with their pets, and what language they will speak when they become parents themselves.
In the first two seasons of Kletsheads, I talked to children about what it is like to grow up with two or more languages, our Kletshead of the Week. In this special episode, I bring you the best of, a compilation of my favourite bits from 'Kletshead of the Week'.
Want to listen to the whole conversation with one of our Kletsheads? You can. You can find the link to the relevant episodes below:
You'll find brothers Aiden and Quinn in the very first episode of Kletsheads on How to plan for a bilingual child.
Christie, who spoke about the different personalities associated with her languages is in Episode 4, Season 1 (Should you worry about language mixing?).
French-English bilinguals Loïc and Ella are in Episode 2, Season 1 (How much language does a child need to hear to become bilingual?) and Episode 6, Season 1 (Bilingual siblings), respectively.
Katriina tells us about her struggles with Finnish in Episode 9, Season 1 (How to make the use of bilingual children's home languages in the classroom: Translanguaging), and South African Rehoboth talks about swearing in Episode 4, Season 2 (Trilingual with Xitsonga and Hot off the press).
You can find Japanese-English bilingual Naia in Episode 3, Season 1 (How do you know if a bilingual child has a language delay?), and Italian-English-Arabic trilingual Sara in Episode 8, Season 2 (Language mixing and bilingual secrets).
Thorwen talks about how his parents persuaded him to attend heritage language school in Episode 7, Season 1 (Does it matter if a bilingual child only actively uses one language?). -
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It's over two years since the Covid-19 pandemic broke out and families across the globe were forced into lockdown, with schools and childcare centres closed and many parents having to juggle working from home with caring for younger children and homeschooling older ones. Whilst this was a shared experience across many communities in many (if not most) countries around the world, individual families found themselves in many different circumstances, some more bearable than others. In the second season of Kletsheads, we spoke about the impact of the pandemic of multilingual families in a special episode dedicated to the topic in early 2021. In that episode, I also told you about a research project which I was carrying out together with students following the MA in Linguistics programme at Radboud University, The Netherlands. Many listeners (and many others) took part in this project and in Hot off the Press (starts at 01:12), I tell you about our main findings. You can read all about them in the full report and infographic on the project's webpage, available in English and in Dutch. A publication in an academic journal will follow soon.
In Let's Klets (starts at 09:57), I talk to Dr. Francesca la Morgia is Founder and Director of the Mother Tongues, a social enterprise working to promote multilingualism and intercultural dialogue in Ireland. Co-incidentally, she also contributed to the earlier Kletsheads episode on bilingual families in lockdown. Francesca is a linguist, researcher and social entrepreneur based in Dublin. As she mentioned in our conversation, Francesca is also the creator of the Language Explorers Activitiy Book, which can be used by teachers and parents to help children explore their own bilingualism as well as bringing them into contact with 30 different languages in a fun and interactive way. Another great resource! Find out about all of Mother Tongues' various activities - including the Mother Tongues festival - on their website.
This is the final episode of the season. Stay in touch via social media and thanks for listening! -
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Bilingual children sometimes say things that their monolingual peers would never say. This is the same for adults, too. They don't always know certain words in each of their two (or more) languages. And in the many cases when bilingual children do know the word in question, they can't always think of it straightaway. Again, this also holds for adults. I speak from experience as someone who sometimes has to use google translate from Dutch to English to remember what a word is in my native language. As a parent, teacher or speech language therapist, you may wonder whether all of this is normal. The answer is "yes". Being creative with words, not always finding the right one, and sometimes saying things in ways monolinguals would never do is quite normal. In this episode research Elly Koutamanis explains why this is the case, how we know this exactly, and what this tells us about how the bilingual mind deals with words from two languages.
We talked about two different kinds words: cognates and false friends. Cognates are words which look or sound similar and mean the same thing. For example, cat in English looks and sounds like kat in Dutch, and they both refer to the same four-legged furry creature that miaouws. False friends also look and sound similar but they mean something different. For example, the German word schlimm 'bad' sounds and looks like the Dutch word slim, which means something quite different: 'clever'. Research shows that the bilinguals respond differently to these two kinds of words, both compared with each other and compared with words that are completely unrelated across languages. Listen to the podcast to find out how exactly! What this research shows is that bilignuals are unable to switch off their languages and this means that how they use or understand one language is often influenced by the other. It also shows that a bilingual's two languages live together in the same 'bin' rather than in two separate 'bins', one for each language.
How words from two different languages are connected to the same concept (the triangle idea Elly spoke about in the episode)
In this episode, I also share the last Kletsheads Quick and Easy (starts at 18:00) for this season, a concrete tip that you can immediately and easily use to make a success of multilingualism in your family, classroom or practice. This episode's tip is to talk to your child about their bilingualism! In the episode I mention Eowyn Crisfield's book, Bilingual Families: A Practical Language Planning Guide, and the animations, Bilingualism in the picture. These are three short films about bilingualism and what it means to grow up bilingual. They are available in English - and if you go to the Dutch website - in Dutch, Polish, Turkish and Arabic.
Elly Koutamanis is a PhD student at the Centre for Language Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Her research is on exactly the same topic as this episode: how does the bilingual child's mind handle words from two languages. She's a member of the 2in1 project, which investigates how bilingual children's languages influence each other more generally. We heard from another project member, Chantal van Dijk, in an earlier episode on this topic last season. You can read more in this piece by Elly, Chantal and colleagues on the MPI TalkLing blog. -
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Most bilingual children mix their two languages. Perhaps not all the time and not in all contexts, but as many parents will know, bilingual children regularly start a sentence in one language and finish it in another, or they insert a word from one language whilst speaking the other. Such behaviour is perfectly normal. You might say it's part and parcel of being bilingual. Yet why children mix and why some do it more than others remains poorly understood. Given that language mixing is often one of the biggest concerns raised by parents raising their children bilingually, it's surprising how little research there is on the topic. In Hot off the Press (starts at 01:05) I tell you about one of the few pieces of research on language mixing in bilingual children where researchers in the US asked what makes children mix - not being proficient enough in their two languages or not being able to control which one they're speaking? It turns out that it's a bit of both. Listen to the podcast to find out more or take a look at the research paper yourself. Here are the details:
Gross, M.C. & Kaushanskaya, M. (2020). Cognitive and linguistic predictors of language control in bilingual children. Frontiers in Psychology. 11:968. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00968
Megan Gross is a researcher at the University of Massachussetts at Amherst in the US, and you read about her work on her Bilingual Language Development Lab's website. Rita Kaushanskaya is a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, also in the US. Read about her work on her Language Acquisition and Bilingualism Lab's website.
In this episode I also talk to another Kletshead of the week (starts at 12:21). This episode we're off to Ireland where I talk to 12-year-old Sara who's growing up with English, Arabic and Italian. She tells me about learning to read in Arabic and how one of the benefits of being bilingual is being able to use your 'other' language as a secret language when you don't want everyone to know what you're saying. This is in fact one of the most popular answers we've had to that question on the podcast! -
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Every three years, teenagers around the world are tested on their abilities in maths, science and reading, as part of PISA, the Programme for International Student Assessment. Basically, it's a way of comparing how well countries are doing when it comes to educating their children. Because of Covid-19, the latest PISA data we have are from 2018 and what these data show is that in many countries, there are huge differences between children in how well they score, differences that are related to, for example, their parents' level of education (often referred to as socio-economic status), where their parents come from (whether they have an immigrant background), and also the language spoken at home. What causes these differences and when do they emerge? Do we see the same differences for all bilingual children? In this episode of Kletsheads, we're talking about the relationship between bilingualism and academic achievement. To what extent does speaking another language at home affect how well a child does at school?
In conversation with researcher Orhan Agirdag, we discover that the performance gap between bilingual students and their monolingual classmates is *not* due to their bilingualism. It is precisely the children who use their home language more that do better at PISA. So what is the reason? According to Orhan, this achievement gap is caused by the way bilingual children are treated in education. We talk about the role of teachers' expectations, a country's educational system, and about using the multicultural capital of bilingual children in school.
Orhan Agirdag is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Psychological and Pedagogical Sciences of KU Leuven and at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences of the University of Amsterdam. He has more than 100 publications to his name on all kinds of subjects concerning bilingualism and education. If you want to know more about his research and about the topics he discussed in the podcast, and you read Dutch, then read his book, Onderwijs in een gekleurde samenleving.
In this episode I also share another Kletsheads Quick and Easy (starts at 25:44) with you, a concrete tip that you can put to use straightaway to make a success of the bilingualism in your family, class or clinic. This episode's tip is to play a game with your child. It's a tip taken from the resources provided by the PEACH project. The PEACH project is a European project supporting families raising bilingual and multilingual children by creating a handbook for parents and educators as well as informative videos and a whole host of free resources for you to use (be sure to scroll to the bottom of the page!). As I mentioned in the podcast, there are even pictures you can download to turn into jigsaw puzzles to play with your child whilst speaking your hertiage language. It's well worth a look! -
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When you're raising a bilingual child and you're the the only source of one of your child's two or more languages, it can be a good idea to try and find other people or places for your child to hear and use that language. One way you can do this is to use multimedia resources such as tv and films, apps, audiobooks and music. In Hot off the Press (starts at 01:12), we talk about a recent piece of research from Singapore that investigates whether using multimedia resources really does support bilingual children's language development. This is the study in question:
Sun H and Yin B (2020) Multimedia Input and Bilingual Children’s Language Learning. Front. Psychol. 11:2023. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.02023
The researchers asked what matters most: how much time children spend engaging with this resources or how many different kinds of multimedia resources they use? It turns out that for the dominant language in the children's wider environment, English, multimedia resources didn't have much of an impact at all. For their children's heritage language, Mandarin Chinese, the diversity of resources was positively related to their scores on a range of language tests, but how much time they spent engaging with such resources was not.
Our discussion of multimedia resources continues in Let's Klets (starts at 09:26) when I speak to Ute Limacher-Riebold from the PEACH project. The PEACH project is a European project supporting families raising bilingual and multilingual chidlren by creating a handbook for parents and educators as well as informative videos and a whole host of free resources for you to use (be sure to scroll to the bottom of the page!). As Ute mentioned in our conversation, there's also an ever-increasing set of Spotify playlists with all kinds of audio resources in a range of different languages (go to Spotify and search for PEACH project) and there are PEACH ambassadors around the world. Ute also mentioned a number of other resources she's been involved in creating, including the Activities for Multilingual Families YouTube channel.
Ute Limacher-Riebold is a language consultant with expertise in intercultural communication and multilingualism. She is based in the Netherlands but has lived in various countries around the world, although never in her parents' country of origin, Germany. Find out more about Ute and her work at Ute's International Lounge. -
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Learning to read is an important step in your child's development. When children start to learn to read depends on the country they live in. In some parts of the world, like the UK, children are taught to read pretty much as soon as they enter school, whereas in other countries, like here in NL, children spend a year or two first learning to recognise letters before they're actually sat down and taught how to read and write. Learning to read comes more easily to some children than others. And as a parent, it's important to help your child by reading to them, helping them sound out words, and of course encouraging them to read themselves. In this episode we discuss what you can do as a parent to help your bilingual child learn to read in both languages together with Elise de Bree.
We start by discussing the process of learning to read, the steps involved and where children might experience difficulties. We learn that bilingual children learn to read in exactly the same way as monolingual children and all parents can support their children's reading development by helping them practice, having them sound out words and reading to them yourself. This will help children to learn new words, a crucial part of learning to read, because even if you can figure out what each letter on the page sounds like, if you don't then recognise the word you're reading, you won't be any the wiser.
We also discuss the question of how to approach reading in the home or heritage language (or languages). How do you make sure that your child can read in their heritage language as well as their school language? Is it always better to start with the school langauge and then move on to the other language? Or is it ok to do it the other way round ? Or even at the same time? What happens when the two languages use different scripts? Listen to the podcast to find out the answers to all of these questions.
In this episode I also share my third Kletsheads Quick and Easy (starts at 24:45) with you, a concrete tip that you can put to use straightaway to make a success of the bilingualism in your family, class or clinic. This episode's tip is to map your child's input. The book I mentioned in the episode, where this tip comes from, is Eowyn Crisfield's recent book, Bilingual Families: A Practical Language Planning Guide. There you'll find more about the idea of mapping your child's language input. For a similar (and simpler) approach, take a look at the materials developed by the Planting Languages project and in particular at page 13 (step 5) in their booklet for parents (here in English but also available in Polish, French, Dutch and Greek). As I said in the podcast, I also tried to map my daughter's input. Here's the result:
In the podcast I mention a tool that we've designed as part of the Q-BEx project. Essentially, this is a questionnaire which parents complete online (or together with a teacher or speech language therapist) and which outputs various measures of language exposure, language use and language richness, in both of the child's languages. In other words, it's a way of mapping a bilingual child's input! If you want to find out more, take a look at the project's website where there's information for teachers, parents and clinicians. We'd love it if you gave it a try!
Elise De Bree is professor of Developmental Language Disorders in Inclusive Education at the Faculty of Social Sciences aan de Utrecht University, the Netherlands. This is endowed professorship from the Koninklijke Auris. Her research focuses on reading and spelling, including dyslexia, and the language development of children with development language disorder (DLD). Find out more about Elise's research here. She contributes to several national organisations (Stichting Dyslexie Nederland and Nederlands Kwaliteitsinstituut Dyslexie) which provide research-based information and advice to parents, teachers and clinicians. -
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In Hot off the Press (starts at 01:12), I tell you about a recently published study from Canada. This research deals with two important factors in bilingual language development, namely how early you start (age) and how much contact you have with a language (amount of language input). It's often thought that age is more important than language input, but this research shows that this is not the case. The study focused on the language development of bilingual children in Montreal who were growing up with French and English and/or another language. The children were 6 and 8 years old and had started learning French at different ages (before 3 years or after 3 years). The results show that -- once how much contact the children had with French was taken into account -- the early and late bilingual children hardly differed (or did not differ) from each other, nor from monolingual French-speaking children. It was true, however, that there was lots of variation between bilingual children in their scores on the language tests used, and these were related to differences in the amount of input in French that children had had up to that point. This research was led by Elin Thordardottir, professor in the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders atMcGill University. Here are details:
Elin, Thordardottir (2019). Amount trumps timing in bilingual vocabulary acquisition: Effects of input in simultaneous and sequential bilingual school-age bilinguals. International Journal of Bilingualism, 23, 236-255. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367006917722418
It's open access, which means that you don't have to pay to be able to read it.
Would you like to know more about the Q-BEx project (Q-BEx stands for 'quantifying bilingual experience')? You can find an infographic about what the questionnaire involves here and summaries of our research so far - all written in accessible language - here.
Our Kletshead of the week (starts at 13:13) is 13-year-old Rehoboth. He lives in South Africa and is growing up trilingual with English, Afrikaans and Xitsonga as his three languages. He tells me which language he dreams in, and why he thinks it's unfair if your school books aren't available in your heritage language. -
Transcript
Children who grow up hearing two or more languages do not always end up actively using all their languages as they get older. In such cases, it's typically the heritage or minority language which suffers at the expense of the school language. As we heard in the last episode of Kletsheads when I spoke to my neighbour Kate, children may be perfectly capable of speaking the heritage language but prefer to use the language or languages spoken at school. in some cases, however, they might not be able to speak the heritage language well enough in order to express themselves properly. This is often a great source of frustration for parents, who may feel disappointed and in some cases rejected by their child's inability or unwillingness to use their native language. It can also make communication quite difficult and parents may sometimes switch to speaking the school language in order to be able to communicate with their child, even though in some cases they themselves might not be very proficient in that language. All of this can a negative impact on the relationship between parent and child, and on children's well-being. This is the topic we're talking about in this episode of Kletsheads, together with researchers Elspeth Wilson and Napoleon Katsos. What is the impact of children's use and knowledge of the heritage language on family well-being? We talk about the role of language use and language proficiency (it's quite hard to disentangle the two), about the importance of promoting the heritage language culture, and we share tips for parents and teachers about what you can do to make sure that the bilingual children in your environment are happy, engaged and generally feel positive about life!
We also hear our second Kletsheads Quick & Easy (starts 21:18), a concrete tip that you can put to use straightaway to make a success of the bilingualism in your family, class or clinic. This episode's tip: find one new source of language input for your child's heritage language.
Dr. Elspeth Wilson is a post-doctoral researcher in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge. Her research mostly focuses on how children learn to understand what other people mean when they're talking, especially when what they literally say is often not what they mean (this area of linguistics is known as pragmatics).
Professor Napoleon Katsos is professor of Experimental Pragmatics in the section Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. One of his many research interests is language learning in monolingual and bilingual children and on the relation between bilingualism and autism.
Together with colleagues, Elspeth and Napoleon published what's called a scoping review on the relationship between bilingualism and well-being. A scoping review is bascially a way of bringing together all the research that's been done on a topic and summarising it for others. As we heard in the episode, there's not actually that much research on this topic but what there is, you can find in this paper. Here are the full details:
Müller, L-M., Howard, K., Wilson, E., Gibson, J., & Katsos, N. (2020). Bilingualism in the family and child well-being: A scoping review. International Journal of Bilingualism, 24(5-6), 1049-1070. doi:10.1177/1367006920920939
It's open access, which means that you can go to the website and read it there or download it for free. (Should that not work for you, send Kletsheads a message and we'll email it you!).
Elspeth and Napoleon are also part of the Cambridge Bilingualism Network, and as Napoleon mentioned on the podcast, they helped develop a set of materials for bilingual parents-to-be and antenatal practioners who work with them. You can find these on the We Speak Multi website.
Another great resource when it comes to well-being in bilingual families is the Harmonious Bilingualism Network directed by Professor Annick De Houwer. -
Transcript
In this episode of Kletsheads we talk about one of the greatest frustrations faced by parents raising their children bilingually: you speak consistently to them in the heritage or home language and they consistently respond in the school language. Of course this only happens when you're proficient in that language, too, and for many parents this is indeed the case. In Let's Klets (starts at 15:35), we speak to Kate, English-speaking mum to two daughters, aged 5 and 8. Until recently, they both almost always spoke to her in their other language, Dutch, the language of the community they grow up in, the language they use at school, the language they use with their father, and a language which Kate herself speaks very well. It will be a familiar situation to many, no doubt. Kate tells us how a summer holiday in the US last year changed all this and how she discovered just how much English her children actually knew. It's a story of hope which I'm sure will inspire many parents to stick at speaking their heritage language even when it might seem like they're fighting a losing battle.
In one of our new features for this season, Hot off the Press (starts at 01:37), I tell you about a recent piece of research on bilingual children. In this first edition, we hear about a study looking at bilingual children who speak Russian as their heritage language and who were growing up in five different countries (Norway, UK, Germany, Latvia and Israel). The study examines their acquisition of grammatical gender. Grammatical gender in Russian can be tricky, because it's not always clear which gender (masculine, feminine, neuter) a noun has. Some genders are harder to learn than others and in this study, we learn that those which have less 'transparent' cues need more input, that instruction in the heritage language can help in this regard, and that for this particular aspect of Russian, any influence from the children's other language was minimal. The study in question is free to access:
Rodina Y., Kupisch T., Meir N., Mitrofanova N., Urek O. & Westergaard M. (2020) Internal and External Factors in Heritage Language Acquisition: Evidence From Heritage Russian in Israel, Germany, Norway, Latvia and the United Kingdom. Frontiers in Education https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2020.00020 -
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Children start talking when they are around one year old. However, we know from research that they are already working on language before that. In this episode, we learn what exactly babies know about language. And we hear about the ingenious ways scientists have developed to figure this out. For example, they measure how fast babies suck on a fake teat, or measure the activity in their brains.
Bilingual babies by definition hear more than one language while in their cradle. How do they keep their two languages apart? How do they know which combination of sounds belong together and in which language? How do they learn their first words? These are all questions we discuss in this episode of Kletsheads. We do this together with Krista Byers-Heinlein from Concordia University in Canada.
We learn that bilingual babies can hear differences between all kinds of languages, and just like monolingual babies, they start to zoom in on the sounds of the languages they hear around them in the first 12 months. Babies use the rhythm of language to distinguish different languages. In the podcast you will hear three languages, German, Spanish and Japanese. All three have a different rhythm. The pieces in the podcast were all from adults reading children's books.
Spanish: Pollito Tito - Chicken Little in Spanish with English subtitles
Japanese: Learn Japanese with Children's Books - 12 Minutes of Japanese Kids Books With Hiroko
German: Noaanou's Kinderkram - Vorlesegeschichten: Pixi Buch "Conni bekommt eine Katze"
Importantly, keeping the two languages separate by having each parent only speak one language only does not appear to be necessary for babies to keep their languages apart. As Krista put it, mixing your languages won't mix up your babies.
We also hear about bilingual babies learning languages which are similar to each other, and about differences between bilingual and monolingual babies when it comes to their flexibility in learning new rules that don't have anything to do with language: bilingual babies adapt to the environment they're growing up in and this can have consequences for how they learn such rules.
In the first edition of our new feature, Kletsheads Quick and Easy (starts at 25:35), I encourage you to give your bilingual child a compliment about their bilingualism. Compliments make a child feel valued, it boosts their self-esteem, and gives them self-confidence. It is also a way of recognising that speaking two or more languages is not always easy, and that it can sometimes take extra effort.
Krista Byers-Heinlein is Research Chair in Bilingualism and Open Science in the Department of Psychology at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. In her lab, she researches studies how bilingualism in the infant and preschool years affects children’s language, social, and cognitive development. She has published widely on these topics and regularly communicates her findings to a broader audience in talks and appearances on podcasts such as this one. You can read about her research here. - Se mer
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