Keeping it in the family
"You understand grandmother when she talks to you, don't you, darling?" The girl nods. I met her, her Japanese mother and English father on a plane to Japan. The parents were eager to 1 their experience of bringing up their daughter bilingually (使用双语地) in London. It isn't easy: the husband does not speak Japanese, so the child hears the language only from her mother, who has come to 2 that the girl will reply in English. This can be painful. Not sharing your first language with loved ones is hard. Not passing it on to your own child can be especially tough. Many immigrant parents feel a sense of 3.
Children learn languages easily, but this doesn't mean that 4 exposure is enough. They must hear a language quite a bit to understand it—and use it often to be able to speak it comfortably. This is mental work, and a child who doesn't have an intention to speak a language will often avoid it. So languages often die when parents move abroad. In the past, governments discouraged immigrant families from keeping their languages. These days, officials tend to be 5; some even see a valuable resource in immigrants' language abilities. Yet many factors ensure that children still lose their parents' languages, or never learn them. A big one is institutional 6. A child's time spent with a second language is time not spent on their first. So teachers often discourage parents from speaking their languages to their children. Parents often 7 obey, worried about their children's education. This is a(n) 8, for children really can master two languages or even more. Research does indeed suggest their vocabulary in each language may be somewhat smaller for a while, but other studies hint at intellectual advantages among bilinguals. They may be more skillful at complex tasks, better at maintaining attention.
Even without those side effects, 9, a bilingual child's connection to another culture is a good thing in itself. How to 10? When both parents share the native language, the strategy is often to speak that at home, and the national language outside. But when they have 11 languages, perhaps the most common approach is "one parent, one language". Francois Grosjean, a language expert from Switzerland, 12 the necessity. He recommends reserving occasions on which the only language that may be spoken is the one that needs 13. Sabine Little, a language expert at the University of Sheffield, puts the emphasis elsewhere. Making the native language yet another task 14 by parents can lead to rejection, she argues. She recommends letting the child form their own 15 connection to the language, for languages are not just another thing to be drilled into a young mind, but a matter of the heart.
