My 'Ambilingual Baby' project
May 31, 2017 23:40:51 GMT 9
Post by Ksenia on May 31, 2017 23:40:51 GMT 9
Hi everyone,
I think I will use this thread as our 'bilingual' diary. I'll write about our strategy and problems, small achievements, thoughts and concerns. Please feel free to comment and make suggestions, I am in no way persuaded that what I am doing is right and would appreciate any input I can get!
I am a mathematician requalified as a neuroscientist for my doctorate, through my work I had access to many interesting talks and publications in many medical fields, but biology is still new to me and I keep reading and learning new things all the time. When I was pregnant I was compulsively reading about pregnancy and raising children, having access to all the major journals was really helpful and good fun, made me feel like I am doing well in my preparations to have a child. It seemed that in order to give the child the best knowledge of both languages in the long run, it is better to speak only the minority language at home and let them pick up the majority language from their peers. From neuroscience perspective though, in terms of brain development that gives the best boost to general cognitive abilities (not necessarily to do with languages), the best thing to do is to introduce the second language as soon as possible.
Originally I wanted to give Daria 50/50 exposure to both languages until she starts school and then switch to mL@H with some exceptions, having lived in the UK for so long some of the cultural politeness must have rubbed off, we would feel extremely uncomfortable speaking minority language to our children whilst in mixed company, it just seems very rude, even though I'm sure our friends would understand. Now that she is here though and is starting to be more interactive, I'm not so sure about this approach. She is no longer an abstract idea of a perfect human, to whom I can give all possible advantages in life that are in my power, she is a very real and very much loved little human being with whom I want to communicate as fully as I possibly can. I don't care so much about the cognitive boost, I am thinking about how well we are going to understand each other when she will be all grown up and her English is way better than mine, and how she is going to build a relationship with my monolingual mum, with whom I am very close. I've recently read that even though kids pick up the majority language very quickly and within a year can have the same language score as their monolingual peers, it might take 5-7 years (that's half of their time at school!!!) to achieve academic proficiency and do well in the school subjects. This is quite a scary statistic, I am going to see if I can find any evidence for it on pubmed, I hope it's wrong, because if it isn't I really don't know what to do.
When D was born, my world turned completely upside down and all the ideas that seemed invaluable when I was pregnant seemed ridiculous. Why would a newborn care to hear some Roald Dahl while she is having her tummy time and looking at black and white pictures? She hates tummy time and hates the pictures, and wants to be in my arms, preferably when she is sleeping or feeding. Daria had colic for the first 3 months and screamed 90% of her wakeful time (fed for the remaining 10%), didn't sleep well (and didn't let us sleep), I was so worried about her physical health that I completely forgot to speak any English to her for the first 3 weeks, after that I've been making little progress to introduce some English into her routine.
Now that she is 9 months old, we go to baby classes or toddler groups 5 days a week, where she hears English from me as well as other mums, most of whom are native speakers. That only makes about 5-10 hours of English a week though, so my target has been to speak English for 1 'wakening' a day (the one including the baby class). She has 2 or 3 naps a day still, so I would speak English from the time she wakes up till the next nap. It doesn't work very well though, I can stick to one language in any given monologue, but very often if I go out of the room and am quiet for a while or if I receive a text in Russian, I forget to switch back and we speak Russian for a while. Also most of our books are in English, almost all of the children's songs that I know and like are in English, so even during the 'Russian slots' I find myself singing and reading in English. I don't know how my poor daughter is supposed to learn when she is supposed to speak which language...
Right now we might have a slightly bigger problem than the choice of bilingual strategy. Daria does not respond to her name and does not babble quite as much as she is supposed to at her age, so right now I am looking into baby speech therapies and will attempt some techniques in both languages. That is once I actually find some... So far it seems that the only thing you can do that really makes a difference is give them your undivided attention, which I am doing anyway, or so I think. I am trying to do as much housework as possible while she is sleeping and spend as much time in a face to face 'conversation' with her as feels natural.
Daria hates it when I read to her, she wants to chew the books, bash them against the floor and shred the pages, she is not interested in pictures either. I do attempt to give her a cuddle, point at the pictures and tell her what we see, but she only lasts about a minute and is off to crawl and chase the cat. So what I end up doing is I let her play and read to her in the background hoping that it all adds up somewhere.
Any suggestions and ideas would be most welcome! I haven't read Adam's book just yet, but I am very much looking forward to doing so in the nearest future (as soon as I finish looking into speech therapies).
Ksenia
I think I will use this thread as our 'bilingual' diary. I'll write about our strategy and problems, small achievements, thoughts and concerns. Please feel free to comment and make suggestions, I am in no way persuaded that what I am doing is right and would appreciate any input I can get!
I am a mathematician requalified as a neuroscientist for my doctorate, through my work I had access to many interesting talks and publications in many medical fields, but biology is still new to me and I keep reading and learning new things all the time. When I was pregnant I was compulsively reading about pregnancy and raising children, having access to all the major journals was really helpful and good fun, made me feel like I am doing well in my preparations to have a child. It seemed that in order to give the child the best knowledge of both languages in the long run, it is better to speak only the minority language at home and let them pick up the majority language from their peers. From neuroscience perspective though, in terms of brain development that gives the best boost to general cognitive abilities (not necessarily to do with languages), the best thing to do is to introduce the second language as soon as possible.
Originally I wanted to give Daria 50/50 exposure to both languages until she starts school and then switch to mL@H with some exceptions, having lived in the UK for so long some of the cultural politeness must have rubbed off, we would feel extremely uncomfortable speaking minority language to our children whilst in mixed company, it just seems very rude, even though I'm sure our friends would understand. Now that she is here though and is starting to be more interactive, I'm not so sure about this approach. She is no longer an abstract idea of a perfect human, to whom I can give all possible advantages in life that are in my power, she is a very real and very much loved little human being with whom I want to communicate as fully as I possibly can. I don't care so much about the cognitive boost, I am thinking about how well we are going to understand each other when she will be all grown up and her English is way better than mine, and how she is going to build a relationship with my monolingual mum, with whom I am very close. I've recently read that even though kids pick up the majority language very quickly and within a year can have the same language score as their monolingual peers, it might take 5-7 years (that's half of their time at school!!!) to achieve academic proficiency and do well in the school subjects. This is quite a scary statistic, I am going to see if I can find any evidence for it on pubmed, I hope it's wrong, because if it isn't I really don't know what to do.
When D was born, my world turned completely upside down and all the ideas that seemed invaluable when I was pregnant seemed ridiculous. Why would a newborn care to hear some Roald Dahl while she is having her tummy time and looking at black and white pictures? She hates tummy time and hates the pictures, and wants to be in my arms, preferably when she is sleeping or feeding. Daria had colic for the first 3 months and screamed 90% of her wakeful time (fed for the remaining 10%), didn't sleep well (and didn't let us sleep), I was so worried about her physical health that I completely forgot to speak any English to her for the first 3 weeks, after that I've been making little progress to introduce some English into her routine.
Now that she is 9 months old, we go to baby classes or toddler groups 5 days a week, where she hears English from me as well as other mums, most of whom are native speakers. That only makes about 5-10 hours of English a week though, so my target has been to speak English for 1 'wakening' a day (the one including the baby class). She has 2 or 3 naps a day still, so I would speak English from the time she wakes up till the next nap. It doesn't work very well though, I can stick to one language in any given monologue, but very often if I go out of the room and am quiet for a while or if I receive a text in Russian, I forget to switch back and we speak Russian for a while. Also most of our books are in English, almost all of the children's songs that I know and like are in English, so even during the 'Russian slots' I find myself singing and reading in English. I don't know how my poor daughter is supposed to learn when she is supposed to speak which language...
Right now we might have a slightly bigger problem than the choice of bilingual strategy. Daria does not respond to her name and does not babble quite as much as she is supposed to at her age, so right now I am looking into baby speech therapies and will attempt some techniques in both languages. That is once I actually find some... So far it seems that the only thing you can do that really makes a difference is give them your undivided attention, which I am doing anyway, or so I think. I am trying to do as much housework as possible while she is sleeping and spend as much time in a face to face 'conversation' with her as feels natural.
Daria hates it when I read to her, she wants to chew the books, bash them against the floor and shred the pages, she is not interested in pictures either. I do attempt to give her a cuddle, point at the pictures and tell her what we see, but she only lasts about a minute and is off to crawl and chase the cat. So what I end up doing is I let her play and read to her in the background hoping that it all adds up somewhere.
Any suggestions and ideas would be most welcome! I haven't read Adam's book just yet, but I am very much looking forward to doing so in the nearest future (as soon as I finish looking into speech therapies).
Ksenia
