Raising Children Bilingually in the United States [1 ed.] 9781443879231, 9781443872546

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Raising Children Bilingually in the United States

Raising Children Bilingually in the United States Edited by

Iulia Pittman

Raising Children Bilingually in the United States Edited by Iulia Pittman This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Iulia Pittman and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7254-7 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7254-6

With love to Hannah, Daniel, Luke, and Tanner

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .................................................................................... ix Preface ........................................................................................................ xi Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1 On Minority Language Maintenance in the United States Iulia Pittman Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 19 Piggy Pedagogy: An Adventure with Puppets and Toddler Bilingualism Alexander Sager Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 35 “Talk to Me in Real! Talk to Me in Plain!”: Meeting Second Language Resistance through Creative Motivational Techniques and Parental Persistence Christine Jernigan Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 49 Confessions of a Tabby Cat Dad: Stumbling Toward Raising Bilingual Kids David Marlow Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 67 A Case Study of Two Non-Heritage Simultaneous Spanish-English Bilingual Children in Alabama David Zuwiyya Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 87 Periods and Pockets of Immersion: Fostering Functional Bilingualism Aerin Benavides Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 99 Sufficient Exposure and Beyond: Creating Minority-Language Contexts Vera Lee-Schoenfeld

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Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 113 Building Bilingualism in Community: A Case Study of ISLA’s First Year as a Spanish Language Heritage Program Rachel Norman and Aerin Benavides Contributors ............................................................................................. 129 Index ........................................................................................................ 133

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the College of Liberal Arts at Auburn University for granting me a Professional Improvement Leave during the fall semester of 2014. Many thanks to my husband, Tanner, who gave me valuable feedback on this volume and for all his support over the years as we have seen our own story of bilingualism unfold. I would also like to thank all the contributors to this volume who made it possible to bring together so many inspirational stories on parenthood and bilingualism.

PREFACE

Growing up in Transylvania, Romania, made multilingualism a natural part of me. I was spoiled to be able to speak two languages (Hungarian and Romanian) at home and in the community and add a third language, German, by the age of three. As an adult, I immigrated to the United States and later became a mother myself. While I had a feeling that raising my children bilingually in the U.S. would not be as easy, I was not sure what to expect. Even before my children were born, I heard stories about parents who, despite all good intentions, were not succeeding in raising their children bilingually. Once my children were born, and given that I was the only person speaking Hungarian to them in the home and the community, the challenges of other families became more real to me. Conversations with like-minded linguists, some of them contributors to this book, led to my desire to edit a volume on bilingualism. The opening chapter in this volume, authored by me, starts out with some broad background information on the topic of bilingualism and moves on to several factors that play an important role in raising children bilingually in the U.S. Alex Sager (German, chapter 2), who learned German as an adult and decided to make a total switch from English to German with his son when he was two years old, employed the help of puppets to make bilingualism become part of his household. Christine Jernigan (Portuguese, chapter 3) writes an inspiring chapter filled with great advice for other parents who would like to teach their children a language that they learned as adults. A beautiful story about many languages and cultures, different parenting styles, high standards and flexibility, David Marlow’s chapter (Chinese, chapter 4) is a great example of how everybody’s family is unique. David Zuwiyya (Spanish, chapter 5), also a non-native speaker of Spanish, gives the reader insight into the vocabulary and grammatical features typical of bilingual children. Like in David Marlow’s case, whose daughters are grown up, Aerin Benavides (Spanish, chapter 6), writes about her family’s winding road to bilingualism and her three adult children who are all fluent in English and Spanish. Vera Lee-Schoenfeld (German, chapter 7) starts out with a few theoretical concepts and continues with a great deal of practical advice for other minority-language-speaking parents in the OPOL paradigm. Rachel Norman (Spanish, chapter 8) and Aerin Benavides (Spanish, chapter 8)

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conclude the volume with a chapter on a successful Spanish Saturday school in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. While all these authors have closed their chapters on bilingualism for this volume, I know that their life “chapters” on bilingualism will stay open for a long time. I sincerely hope for every family who wishes to raise children bilingually the best of luck, perseverance, and enjoyment on this rewarding journey.

CHAPTER ONE ON MINORITY LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE IN THE UNITED STATES IULIA PITTMAN

What the son wishes to forget the grandson wishes to remember. —Marcus Lee Hansen

Introduction This book is a collection of essays written from different perspectives on how to raise children bilingually in the United States. As we delve into the numerous factors that affect bilingualism, the different scenarios, and the various strategies that contribute to its success (for indeed the possibility of “failure” at raising bilingual children is constantly in view in the English-dominated U.S.), it is important to keep in mind that language use between parents and children “is a complex matter that is unique to each family.” (Betty Yu, 2013) The exact formula for successfully raising bilingual children will be similarly unique to each household. There is no question that being bilingual adds much to a person’s life. Studies have found that bilingualism delays Alzheimer’s (Gollan et al., 2011; Bialystok, 2011), that it helps with understanding abstract concepts better and from an earlier age (Adi-Japha et al., 2010), and that it enhances creativity (Leikin, 2013; Lee and Kim, 2011). This chapter, like the following chapters in this volume, will focus on questions like why raising children to be bilingual is so unexpectedly difficult, what parents and children should expect, and what can be done to make the road to bilingualism smoother and more successful.

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What is bilingualism? To start, I believe it is important to take a closer look at the term bilingualism, the different types of bilingualism, and bilingualism around the world and in the United States. Bilingualism, as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is “the ability to speak two languages.” This definition is quite broad, and a brief look at the literature quickly reveals concepts such as simultaneous bilingualism (when a child grows up learning two languages at the same time and the same rate, also known as balanced bilingualism), receptive bilingualism (when a person can understand but not speak a second language), and sequential bilingualism (when a person learns one language after the other). We can also distinguish between additive bilingualism (when learning a second language does not interfere with the first one) and subtractive bilingualism (when the second language replaces the first language). Not only do we find variation in the way two languages can be acquired by the same person, we also find great differences among bilingualism situations in the world. For instance, the experience of a Slovene person in Austria (who is part of a significant minority group in certain regions of the country) will be different from that of an American in China (where we need to consider that English is a global language and Chinese is fairly difficult to learn as an adult), and different still from that of a Latvian in Canada (where we probably find little community support for Latvian, and the pressure to assimilate is probably great). Similarly, Spanish-speaking families in Miami, Florida, have different experiences from Spanish-speaking families in Maine, and different experiences still from those of a Bulgarian family just about anywhere in the U.S. In studying these and other sorts of language interactions, linguists have summarized that some of the factors that play an important role in sustained bilingualism are language contact, status of the minority and majority languages, support in the community, exposure to and input from the minority language, and opportunity to spend time in the minority language country. The 2009 issue of Ethnologue, a publication by Summer Institute of Linguistics International, distinguishes between nearly 7000 languages. These languages are spoken by over 7 billion people who reside in nearly 200 countries. From these numbers, it is clear that in many countries around the world, multilingualism is the norm. We see sustained multilingualism in plurilinguistic countries (e.g., Switzerland, Belgium) or

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in countries where ethnic minorities have kept their minority language for numerous generations (e.g., Finns in Sweden, Hungarians in Romania).

Bilingualism in the U.S. The vast majority of sociological research on language in the United States focuses on English acquisition and use rather than other-language maintenance. The prevailing assumption seems to be that bilingualism is a transitional state. Cline and Necochea discuss in their 1995 article the great importance of biliteracy, or dual-language proficiency. They acknowledge that the politicization of the bilingual education debate frequently obscures the pedagogical and research findings supporting biliteracy and bilingualism.

Necochea and Cline (2000) further suggest that the education system in the U.S. should be restructured from a compensatory model (also known as the transitional model) to an enrichment model (also known as the maintenance model) (Hornberger, 1991). The literature often talks about the “three-generation shift” that commonly occurs in the U.S. In this paradigm the parents are often adult immigrants, and their children can speak both English and the minority language, but the children’s children can understand some but not speak the minority language anymore. Though many minority-language-speaking parents in the U.S. have a strong desire to pass on their linguistic and cultural heritage to their children, they are often not prepared for the challenges that such an endeavor poses. The U.S. is known as a melting pot, and while the very definition of “American” embodies the intersection of several different cultures, languages, and ethnicities, the assimilation process into the American culture often takes place at a fast pace and at the expense of minority languages and cultures. Maybe more so than in other parts of the world, immigrant parents in the U.S. have strong instrumental and integrative motivations, to use Gardner and Lambert’s1 terminology, to learn the majority language. For many minority languages, there is often little linguistic and cultural support in the community, and pretty much any 1

Gardner and Lambert (1959) define instrumental motivation as the desire of a person to learn a language in order to achieve better pay or higher status. Integrative motivation is defined as the desire of a person to learn a language in order to be able to understand the culture better and to identify better with the speakers of this language.

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minority language will have a lower status than that of English. All these factors make the maintenance of a minority language difficult. The next several sections look more in depth into some of the common challenges encountered on the road to bilingualism, some being more within our control than others. Following this, I will elaborate on several solutions to these challenges.

The dream, the reality, and the hard work The truth is that we cannot drift towards bilingualism. Raising a child bilingually is a commitment, and parents need to be intentional about it at every turn. There are many challenges that parents face, some of them expected but some of them unexpected. Many are obvious and come on suddenly, and others are more subtle and gradual. Heraclitus’2 famous quote, “The only constant in life is change,” that applies so well to any parent’s experience raising children, gets a whole new meaning when these children are being raised bilingually. There are a lot of changes that parents need to know how to adapt to. And while resources for parents at every stage in their children’s lives are abundant, specific information about how to raise bilingual children successfully is not so easily accessible. The dream of many families (whether articulated or simply assumed) is that by mere fact that one or both parents speak a minority language (and strongly identify with that culture), the language and minority language identity will rub off to the child(ren). Challenges are unexpected and the “linguistic highway” often splits into lanes to bilingualism, monolingualism, and other destinations somewhere in between. Exiting to monolingualism is often easier than staying on the road to bilingualism. Frequently, parents take the wrong turn without realizing what the consequences are. The reality is that raising children bilingually is not a smooth process and it does not happen automatically. It is a life-long commitment involving going out of one’s way to create opportunities for the minority language’s use. Difficulties should be expected, and there should be a plan to overcome them. While raising children bilingually involves a lot of hard work, awareness of what to expect is also an important factor in keeping many parents on the “highway.” In the following sections, I will cover some typical obstacles in parents’ plans for raising their children bilingually.

2

Greek philosopher who lived between 535 and 475 BC

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Factors to consider Speech production in early bilinguals A factor that often comes in the way of attaining bilingualism is (mis)information and (lack of) understanding of what is typical in the development of a bilingual child. It is still commonly thought that speech delays are typical of bilingual children. Hambly et al. (2013) conducted an extensive review of the literature on speech production in early bilingualism. While only limited evidence was found that bilingual children develop speech at a slower rate than their monolingual peers, more recent findings show that there are qualitative differences and increased variation in speech production when we compare bilingual and monolingual children. Moreover, research examining the linguistic characteristics of English language learners (ELLs) in the early stages of English acquisition has revealed striking parallels between bilingual children developing their language skills at age-appropriate speed and monolingual English-speaking children with language impairment (Paradis et al., 2008). Parents of children growing up speaking more than one language cannot be blamed for having anxiety over the fact that their child does not speak as well or as early as other children who are at the same age. Coupled with the fact that even educators and doctors will still sometimes tell parents not to speak the minority language because it will “confuse” the child, the battle for bilingualism can be lost before it has even started. Tip for parents: without ignoring potential real speech impairment problems, parents should not be alarmed if their children show different patterns of language acquisition than their monolingual peers. Parents of bilinguals should continue speaking consistently to them in the minority language.

Social factors It is not uncommon for children, who have been comfortably balancing two languages from birth, to start showing preference for English once they start preschool. This is a time when bilingual children both feel the necessity to learn and speak the majority language and experience a tremendous increase in exposure to this language. Furthermore, what happens during this time is that children learn and get used to playing with other children in the majority language. That is also the reason why siblings often speak the majority language among each other, even if the

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home language is the minority language, and they separately speak the minority language to their parent(s). As it turns out, peer influence is already greater than parents’ influence in preschool-aged children. (Altman, 2014) Tip for parents: The first time your child addresses you in English, do not respond until s/he repeats what was said in the minority language. You may have to explicitly say in the minority language “Please repeat what you said in [the minority language].” Do not be discouraged if the child goes through a phase when s/he shows preference for English and the English-speaking parent. The next big milestone is the middle school years. Caldas (2008) has done some interesting research on his three children (one boy and two twin girls, who are two years younger than their older brother) whom he and his wife raised bilingually in English and French. They were able to offer a lot of input and minority-language contexts for their children, such as consistently speaking French at home, spending approximately two months each summer in French-speaking Quebec, and enrolling the children in a French immersion program. But despite all these opportunities and efforts, when they were at middle-school age, the children had a very negative attitude towards their bilingualism. They refused to speak French and felt embarrassed when addressed in French around their friends. Nevertheless, only a few years later, they embraced their bilingualism, their language proficiency improved, and they were more comfortable with their bilingual identity. In general, the children valued their bilingualism and biculturalism much more as older adolescents and young adults than as younger adolescents. Caldas found that the initial rejection came due to peer pressure in early adolescence and that, as they moved toward identity-achievement, the children also exhibited greater bilingual self-con¿dence and diminished self-consciousness as older adolescents. This rediscovery and change in attitude towards bilingualism in postadolescence is supported by findings in studies by Woolard (2011) and Shi and Lu (2007) who found that maturation reduced the feelings of shame and intolerance of difference that inhibit adolescent second language use. We find support for these authors’ observations in the language socialization paradigm, which speci¿cally addresses the issue of how individuals use language to situate themselves with respect to others and acknowledges the dynamic relationship between children and the communities within which their languages develop (Garrett and Baquedano Lopez, 2002). The child’s sense of this language community can become so strong that it almost becomes an “invisible presence” in home life, making adolescents very self-conscious of their behavior

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(Hudson and Gray, 1986). Group socialization theory explains well what occurred in the Caldas family: the children were adapting to and assimilating the norms of their outside-the-home peer groups, which had a greater effect on their behavior (language choice, in this case) than the home environment (Harris, 1995). This idea of “the imaginary audience,” a term introduced by Elkind and Bowen in 1979, is interesting and insightful, and certainly explains behavior that often goes beyond language acquisition. Tip for parents: Armed with knowledge of the “imaginary audience” that adolescents feel, parents of U.S. bilingual children should continue being consistent in not allowing English to be an option between them and their children.3 They may want to start talking early with the children about the positive aspects of speaking another language and helping them feel proud of their multilingual background.

Consistency Lack of consistency is another factor that allows for minoritylanguage loss. There are several paradigms for raising children bilingually. The most common ones are the one-parent-one-language paradigm (OPOL) or the minority language at home paradigm (MLAH) paradigm. In some families, both parents are native or fluent speakers of a minority language, and they worry that their child will not be integrated and will not function well in the English-speaking society. They introduce English at home in order to ease the child’s integration process. However, while the intentions are good, usually when one parent speaks two languages to a child, confusion is created. This is particularly the case if the minoritylanguage parent is the main source of input for the minority language. As it turns out, children require a solid association with any given language. When one parent mixes the child’s first language (L1) and second language (L2), it weakens the language-to-person association that the child needs so badly. Once this association is weakened and children realize that it is an option for them to speak the majority language with the minoritylanguage-speaking parent, a typical next step is for children to start speaking the majority language to the parents (even while the parents continue speaking the minority language to them). Once we open this door, attrition of the minority language will come fairly quickly. Sometimes this shift happens despite the parents’ consistently speaking the minority language with the child. While the shift is initiated by the child 3

I believe that one exception to this can be when helping with homework.

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(as mentioned in the previous section, often due to peer influence), the parents frequently give in too easily and begin speaking English themselves with their child. Tip for parents: Be consistent in addressing the child and being addressed in the minority language.

Literacy and support in the community A factor that can greatly contribute to successful bilingualism is literacy in both the majority and minority language during the critical elementary school years. For languages where schooling is an option, it is important to understand what role this plays in bilingual children’s linguistic and cultural development. A study on Japanese Saturday schools in a large metropolitan area in the U.S. suggests that we need to approach heritage-language education not merely as an effort to enhance awareness of one’s heritage or an instruction in language but also as a schooling process, in which what constitutes legitimate knowledge and legitimate ways of attaining it are contested (Doerr and Lee, 2009). Furthermore, studies around the world (Dixon et al., 2012; Pearson, 2007) have found a direct correlation between minority-language proficiency and ethnic residential concentration. Lack of community support has been recognized by many researchers (Kirsch, 2012; DeCapua and Wintergerst, 2009) as an important hurdle in maintaining the minority language. And in the U.S., only a relatively small percentage of all minority languages have strong support in the community. All other languages have to compensate for this absence of community support via extra minority-language input. But there is a way to at least partially make up for lack of community support. Venables et al. (2014) conducted a study on several OPOL families and found that the attitude and support of the majority-language-speaking parent towards the minority language has an important effect on the acquisition of the minority language. Cunningham-Andersson and Andersson (1999, 3) conclude that “If the other parent does not support the minority language it will be almost impossible to make it an active part of family life.” In other words, an important factor that can determine the level of success for the minoritylanguage maintenance is the degree to which the majority-language parent is on board and has a positive attitude. Tip for parents: Seek out opportunities for exposure to the minority language in the community, be it through formal instruction, social interactions, or your family.

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Creating minority-language contexts The contexts in which events occur highly affect the way in which we organize our thoughts and our language output. In other words, in order to make it easier for the child to speak (and to want to speak) the minority language, we should create as many contexts in the minority language as possible. These include listening to music, watching shows, reading, interacting with other speakers of the minority language, especially children, traveling to the country where this language is spoken as a majority language, and enrolling them in Saturday school or any kind of formal instruction. According to Marley (2011), computer-mediated communication (CMC) is becoming a valuable source of input for minority-language learners. She found that while the young adults in her study saw speaking the minority language at home as a chore, speaking Arabic to cousins in Morocco was seen as fun. Tip for parents: Be intentional about exposing your child as much as possible to the minority language, be it through media, personal interactions in the U.S. and country of origin, or other contexts that are applicable to your family.

Quality of contexts Regarding the contexts, there are three important things to keep in mind. First, parents should make an effort to provide a variety of contexts in the minority language in order to make it more real to the child. It is unreasonable to expect a child to function well in a language if s/he does not experience “life” in this language. The variety of contexts will result in more time spent in the minority language, and it encourages the child to develop different idiolects in the language. Second, at least some of these contexts should be 100% minority language, where the child has no option whatsoever but to function like a monolingual child of that language. This will allow the child to think in the minority language, explore the language to its fullness, and develop an identity in the language. This is sometimes hard to do in the U.S. because English, like an octopus, has a way of easily extending its tentacles into every area of daily life. But with a little effort, it is possible. An ideal context for monolingual-like functioning, of course, is for the child to spend time with native speakers of the minority language. Place and Hoff (2011) note exactly this, stressing the importance of native-speaker input and finding further that it matters that children have exposure to

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conversational partners both exclusively in the minority language and from a variety of sources. Third, parents should make these minority-language contexts more attractive than the alternative in the majority language. If the child has the option of watching cartoons, s/he can choose between five minutes in English and ten minutes in the minority language. The English-speaking parent can read one book in English or the minority-language parent can read two books to the child in the minority language. If Saturday school is available, the parents could get the child ice cream or a reward after school is over. They should be looking forward to this event and not regret not being able to sleep in, go to that birthday party that they are missing, etc. Positive reinforcement can have great effects on the child’s attitude toward the language. Tip for parents: Be intentional and thoughtful about the opportunities your child has to experience the minority language. Since every family’s situation is different, every family’s plan to bilingualism will look different.

Quantity of exposure: the math behind it What is possible for one family is not for another. It is certainly great if the child can play with other minority-language-speaking children. Regular visits to the target country have a great effect on the child’s minority-language development. Formal instruction has been found to greatly increase literacy in the child. What is one to do if these options are not available? While some of these factors have a greater effect on the child’s L2 acquisition (e.g., a one-month visit to the target language country is far better than watching cartoons in the L2), parents can piece together the tools they do have available and make sure that they make the most out of every opportunity. It is recommended that the child spend roughly 30% of the time in the minority language. For one family, this minimum may be fulfilled by extended visits of grandparents from the target country. For others, it may mean watching daily 30 minutes of cartoons in the L2, speaking with the minority-language parent for two hours a day, vising family once a year, and occasional playdates with other children who speak the minority language. While the 30% (or twenty-five hours per week) is not set in stone, having flexibility and being aware that regular exposure is important makes the idea that one can succeed less daunting, even without significant time spent in the target-language country or regular attendance at a Saturday school. Every family can personalize its bilingualism plan.

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Tip for parents: Without stressing out to keep track down to the minute, it is recommended that parents create opportunities for the children to be exposed to the minority language as much as possible and maintain an average of twenty-five hours per week in the minority language.

Siblings While reading literature on bilingualism (for the present work) and reflecting upon my family’s linguistic situation I4 was noticing with a growing sense of helplessness that my three children (ages 2, 4, and 6) had a preference to speak English amongst themselves. Realizing that they are the other main source of Hungarian to each other, I decided to try to tap into that resource. Research has found that the medium of instruction at school and the presence of siblings are particularly influential over the children’s choice of the majority language (Yamamoto, 2001). Other studies note that a big shift occurs when a younger sibling is born or when bilingual children start to attend mainstream school (Shin, 2005). Yes, the literature suggests that you cannot force a child to speak a certain language and that it is common for siblings to speak the majority language to each other, but I decided to try to make speaking Hungarian more attractive to them. This approach is in line with what Obied (2009) found in her study on Portuguese-English bilinguals that “shared sibling support” does not happen automatically but needs to be encouraged and supported. At the beginning of the summer (when they were spending more time with me anyway, and less time with English-speaking children), I proposed to my children that if for a week they speak only Hungarian to each other, they will get ice cream. They were certainly excited about the reward, but they slipped back into English pretty quickly. Rather than taking away their ice cream, I told them that they can “buy” it back by doing some chores in the house. And they happily did. But they also increased the amount they spoke Hungarian, so as not to constantly remain in ice cream debt. The ice 4

I grew up in a (Hungarian-Romanian) bilingual household in Transylvania, Romania. I have always spoken Hungarian to my mother and sister and Romanian to my father. I have been living in the United States for nearly 15 years (since the year 2000) and my husband is American. He learned and speaks fluent Romanian and is learning (not actively) Hungarian with the children. The children and I always speak Hungarian to each other, and my husband speaks mostly English to them. His Hungarian is good enough, and the children are at a point where they accept Hungarian from him, so that he occasionally says short phrases in Hungarian to them.

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cream at the end of the week was a sweet linguistic victory. The next week, the “buy-back” came in the form of eating a new vegetable and the reward was a three-dollar toy. While there are days when I hardly have to remind them at all to speak Hungarian, even the days on which my children speak more English to each other, the amount of English is significantly smaller than it was before we started our experiment. During this shift in linguistic dynamics between the children, something else changed. Before the summer, I remember asking my oldest two children in the car on our way to preschool whether they ever speak Hungarian when they see each other on the playground. They said no, because other children would not understand. After the summer break, I took my two oldest to the birthday party of a little girl in my daughter’s first-grade class. I was pleasantly surprised to notice that my children spoke Hungarian to each other the entire time, not self-conscious about the fact that those around them could not understand. The main reason for this major shift was almost certainly the comfort level they had developed over the summer speaking to each other in Hungarian. Indeed, this is the only factor that changed: they were not necessarily more competent than back in the spring, and–just like back at the playground–nobody around them at this birthday party spoke Hungarian either. Tip for parents: Be creative in your methods of linguistic parenting and do not be afraid to be bold.

Proficiency The next question that I would like to address is that of proficiency. What exactly can we expect from bilingual children in terms of their proficiency in the minority language? In the field of foreign language teaching, in recent years, our profession has dealt with the questions of “what is a native speaker?” and “who owns a language?” If we look at English, we see that more people speak English as a second and foreign language than as a native language.

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Fig. 1-1 English in the World

At least currently, English has a completely different status in the world than other foreign languages. But the question of “what is a native speaker?” has come up in non-English languages as well. Claire Kramsch (1997) has done a lot of work in this area by reviewing the constructs of "native speaker," "heritage speaker," and "bilingual speaker" and cautions that it is not always realistic and important to strive for native-like or nearnative proficiency. Kramsch finds the entire construct of near-native proficiency imprecise. We need to take these considerations into account when we ask ourselves what our reasonable expectations can be and how we can best achieve the highest level of proficiency or the level of bilingualism, biliteracy, and biculturalism that works best for each family. This means that, not only is the path towards proficiency different for everybody, but maybe also every family’s goal is different. It is important to remember that, even if the minority language is maintained, it is reasonable to expect differences between the variety spoken by the bilingual children as an L2 and the variety spoken by monolingual children in the minority language country of origin.

Conclusion The situation in the U.S. shares many similarities with that in other areas in the world (immigrants wanting to fit in, children refusing to speak the minority language, parents not knowing how to overcome hurdles, etc.), but it is also unique in some ways (e.g., it only has two neighbors, one of them being a mainly English-speaking country, English is a global

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language carrying high linguistic status, and the U.S is a very large country with immigrants from many corners of the world). I believe that by better informing parents and by replacing the compensatory approach with the enrichment model, many more U.S. parents can expect to raise bilingual children. Is it worth it? Emphatic yes! As professors, we often see heritage students at the university who are learning their parents’ native language as a foreign language. And they struggle and are sad about the lost opportunity of having learned it as children. Remember Caldas’ children who, as adults, embraced their bilingualism and biculturalism. For the ties to heritage, cultural wealth, intellectual resources, and family bond it fosters, working with children to maintain a minority language is indeed worth the effort. But is it worth it at any cost? No. Parents should stay informed and be sensitive to their children’s emotional state. When parents come to the point of having to choose between communicating with their child and insisting on being addressed in a language the child does not want to speak, keeping the lines of communication between parent and child is more important. Many of the points I raised in this chapter are to increase parents’ awareness of how to foster the minority language at an early age and, thus, hopefully to avoid getting to such a tough crossroad.

Works Cited Adi-Japha Esther, Jennie Berberich-Artzi, Affaf Libnawi. 2010. Cognitive flexibility in drawings of bilingual children. Child development 81: 1356-1366. Altman, Carmit, Zhanna Burstein Feldman, Dafna Yitzhaki, Sharon Armon Lotem, and Joel Walters. 2014. Family language policies, reported language use and proficiency in Russian–Hebrew bilingual children in Israel. Journal Of Multilingual & Multicultural Development 35: 216-234. Bialystok, Ellen. 2011. Reshaping the Mind: The Benefits of Bilingualism. Canadian Journal Of Experimental Psychology 65: 229-235. Caldas, Stephen J. 2008. Changing bilingual self-perceptions from early adolescence to early adulthood: Empirical evidence from a mixedmethods case study. Applied Linguistics 29: 290-311. Cline, Zulmara and Juan Necochea. 1995. 2000 biliteracy. Thrust For Educational Leadership 24: 36 Cunningham-Andersson, Una and Staffan Andersson. 1999. Growing up with Two Languages: A Practical Guide. London: Routledge.

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DeCapua, Andrea and Ann C. Wintergerst. 2009. Second-Generation Language Maintenance and Identity: A Case Study. Bilingual Research Journal 32: 5-24. Dixon, L.Quentin, Jing Zhao, Blanca G. Quiroz, and Jee-Young Shin. 2012. Home and community factors influencing bilingual children’s ethnic language vocabulary development. International Journal Of Bilingualism 16: 541-565. Doerr, Neriko Musha and Kiri Lee. 2009. Contesting heritage: language, legitimacy, and schooling at a weekend Japanese-language school in the United States. Language & Education: An International Journal 23: 425-441. Elkind David and Robert Bowen. 1979. Imaginary audience behavior in children and adolescents. Developmental Psychology 15:38-44. Gardner, Robert C. and Wallace E. Lambert. 1959. Motivational Variables in Second-Language Acquisition. Canadian Journal of Psychology 13: 266-272. Garrett, Paul. B., and Patricia Baquedano-Lopez. 2002. Language Socialization: Reproduction and continuity, transformation and change. Annual Review of Anthropology 31: 339-361. Gollan, Tamar H., David P. Salmon, Rosa I. Montoya, and Douglas R. Galasko. 2011. Degree of bilingualism predicts age of diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease in low-education but not in highly educated Hispanics. Neuropsychologia 49: 3826-3830. Hambly, Helen, Yvonne Wren, Sharynne Mcleod, and Sue Roulstone. 2013. The influence of bilingualism on speech production: A systematic review. International Journal Of Language & Communication Disorders 48: 1-24. Hansen, Marcus Lee. 1987. The Problem of the Third Generation Immigrant. Rock Island, Illinois: Swenson Swedish Immigration Research Center. Harris, Judith Rich. 1995. Where is the child's environment? A group socialization theory of development. Psychological Review 102: 458489. Hornberger, Nancy. 1991. Extending enrichment bilingual education: Revisiting typologies and redirecting policy. Bilingual education: Focusschrift in honor of Joshua A. Fishman on the occasion of his 65th birthday 1: 215-234. Hudson, L. and W. Gray. 1986. Formal operation, the imaginary audience, and the personal fable. Adolescence 21: 751-65. Kachru, Braj B. 1986. The alchemy of English. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

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Kirsch, Claudine. 2012. Ideologies, struggles and contradictions: an account of mothers raising their children bilingually in Luxembourgish and English in Great Britain. International Journal Of Bilingual Education & Bilingualism 15: 95-112. Kramsch, Claire. 1997. The Privilege of the Nonnative Speaker. PMLA 112: 359-369. Lee, Hangeun and Kyung Hee Kim. 2011. Can speaking more languages enhance your creativity? Relationship between bilingualism and creative potential among Korean American students with multicultural link. Personality & Individual Differences 50: 1186-1190. Leikin, Mark. 2013. The effect of bilingualism on creativity: Developmental and educational perspectives. International Journal Of Bilingualism 17: 431-447. Marley, Dawn. 2011. “Code-switching in websites for the Moroccan diaspora.” In Code-switching, languages in contact and electronic writings, ed. Foued Laroussi, 33-52. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Necochea, Juan and Zulmara Cline. 2000. Effective Educational Practices for English Language Learners within Mainstream Settings. Race, Ethnicity & Education 3: 317-332. Obied, Vicky Macleroy. 2009. How do siblings shape the language environment in bilingual families? International Journal Of Bilingual Education & Bilingualism 12: 705-720. Paradis, Johanne, Mabel L. Rice, Martha Crago and Janet Marquis. 2008. The acquisition of tense in English: Distinguishing child second language from first language and specific language impairment. Applied Psycholinguistics 29: 689-722. Pearson, Barbara Zurer. 2007. Social factors in childhood bilingualism in the United States. Applied Psycholinguistics 28: 399-410. Place, Silvia and Erika Hoff. 2011. Properties of dual language exposure that influence 2-year-olds’ bilingual proficiency. Child Development 82: 1834-1849. Shi, Xiaowei and Xing Lu. 2007. Bilingual and bicultural development of Chinese American adolescents and young adults: A comparative study. The Howard Journal of Communications 18: 313-333. Shin, Sarah J. 2005. Developing in two languages: Korean children in America. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Venables, Elizabeth, Susana A. Eisenchlas, and Andrea C. Schalley. 2014. One-parent-one-language (OPOL) families: is the majority languagespeaking parent instrumental in the minority language development? International Journal Of Bilingual Education & Bilingualism 17: 429448.

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Woolard, Kathryn. 2011. Is there linguistic life after high school? Longitudinal changes in the bilingual repertoire in metropolitan Barcelona. Language In Society 40: 617-648. Yamamoto, Masayo. 2001. Language Use in Interlingual Families: a Japanese English sociolinguistic study. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Yu, Betty. 2013. Issues in Bilingualism and Heritage Language Maintenance: Perspectives of Minority-Language Mothers of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders. American Journal of SpeechLanguage Pathology 22: 10-24.

CHAPTER TWO PIGGY PEDAGOGY: AN ADVENTURE WITH PUPPETS AND TODDLER BILINGUALISM ALEXANDER SAGER

Without the help of puppets, bilingualism would have been an experiment I conducted with my toddler and abandoned after a month instead of the endlessly rewarding two-year-and-counting adventure it has turned into. Originally, I had decided against raising my son—Jamie— bilingually. Although I possess near-native fluency in German (hereafter L2) and have been teaching the language at the college level for 15 years, since I began learning it when I was twenty-one, I felt that I lacked certain German language and cultural instincts, especially when it came to children and the strata of language associated with childhood. My son was already two years old when, at the prompting of a former student who was raising her children bilingually,1 I looked into some of the recent literature on the subject, in the course of which I changed my mind. Of course, I couldn’t simply change languages with my son, who was already fully verbal. Initially, my plan was to use a mixture of English (our L1) and German in a few specific contexts he really cared about and where I was often actively involved in the play (the main ones being his beloved stuffed animal community and Thomas the Train set), then to smoothly and gradually increase the proportion of German in my own discourse. We made what I felt to be good progress in this way for about three or four weeks. Then Jamie seemed to reach a dead end, growing tired of the repetitions and losing interest in learning new words and phrases. Basically, he got tired of German as a game, and saw no need of it as a real medium of communication with me, since he already had one. So I backed off for a few days. When I began again, Jamie declared outright he 1

I would like to express my great gratitude to Katie Nicolai.

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didn’t want to learn German anymore. The solution I hit upon was to introduce a hand-puppet who was monolingual in German, thus obligating my child to learn the language in order to communicate with the puppet. It worked immediately and brilliantly. Although the idea came to me independently, it is certainly not original. Puppets have long been widely used in children’s language education at school, and I have since read a number of short descriptions of their use at home in order to reinforce bilingualism. I offer the following account of my experiences and reflections, as well as some of the main techniques, exercises, and scenarios I have found useful, in order that they may help and inspire other parents and language teachers.

Conditions Since teaching a second language to a child is a time-intensive and family-impacting enterprise, here is a brief sketch of the professional, material, and domestic conditions that have made it possible for me. An academic schedule, as well as the job security that comes with tenure, has allowed me the luxury of devoting, in addition to significant amounts of time during the summer and holiday breaks, generally one full day during the week of the academic year (mid-August to early May) entirely to L2intensive activities alone with my son. He is an only child, which has made sustained periods of exclusive L2 use much easier than if he had siblings. No less importantly, my wife has been able and willing to adapt to my and Jamie’s gradual shift to the L2 as our main language of communication. Although she herself speaks almost exclusively English with both of us, her German was good enough to allow her to follow all our L2 interactions from the beginning and even to participate in some of the early ones.2

2

One other condition deserves mention: We live in a small town with quick access to a wide network of country roads with very little or nonexistent traffic. This has made intensive regular use of audiobooks, which I feel are a crucial resource, possible beginning in the sixth month. In my experience, real sustained attention to audiobooks is only practicable for a small child while in a child-seat in the car. I would not have risked so much extraneous driving if we lived in an urban environment with even moderate traffic. As it is, I only feel guilty about increasing my carbon footprint.

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Timeline Though I have never kept detailed notes on Jamie’s progress in the L2, I have kept track of the main milestones. All in all, it took about eleven months for him to achieve English-German bilinguality. I used active puppetry constantly throughout this whole period, beginning in February 2012, when my son was two years and two months old. For the first six months, the puppet and I, as well as the puppet and Jamie, interacted exclusively in L2. With the puppet on my hand, I spoke as much L2 with Jamie as I could from the very beginning, though always supported by sufficient L1 to serve main understanding. In communicating with me in the presence of the puppet, Jamie spoke mostly L1, though he used single L2 words and phrases from the start. Gradually his L2 use with me increased, but whenever the puppet was not present, he reverted to L1. That began to change at the end of the sixth month (July 2012), when the L2 became our primary medium of communication in the presence of the puppet. At this time Jamie also began to accept me using the L2 when away from the puppet; he himself would use both L1 and L2 in such situations. After a further four months, by November 2012, the L2 had become our default medium of communication. It was also during this period (beginning of September 2012, eighth month) that I first recorded Jamie using the L2 in alone-play around the house. By January 2013, he would tell me to speak L2 when I inadvertently addressed him in L1 when alone. Conversely, I now had to remind him to speak L1 with me when we were interacting with other people in an L1 environment. From here forward, I gradually began to scale back the amount of time the puppets actively spent on my hands and to increase passive use.

The puppets For the first five months, I used one hand-puppet, the model “Piggy” by the Folkmanis company.3 I chose this particular puppet because it offers excellent simultaneous control of the mouth, face, and two front feet using only one hand. The mouth and face are highly manipulable and make for a very realistic imitation of speaking and facial expressions. At the same time, it is possible to grasp, hold, and manipulate objects (with a little practice, even write and draw) while making the puppet speak. This versatility proved very important, given that I would have these puppets (first one piggy, then two) on my hands pretty much non-stop for the next 3

http://www.folkmanis.com/Prod-67-1-264-1/piggy.htm

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eleven months during virtually every domestic interaction with my son. I have since added a number of different Folkmanis and other puppets to the mix, but so far none of them offer such easy simultaneous mouth and paw control as does the Folkmanis Piggy.

Introducing the puppets I learned that the puppets could be introduced in a way to create and constantly renew enthusiasm for the L2. Since my son’s first L2 experiences had ended on a negative note, my wife and I decided to pique his interest by creating some buzz around the piggy’s introduction into the household. At the dinner table one evening, I “casually” mentioned to her that one of Jamie’s stuffed animals had received a letter from a friend in Germany mentioning that another friend (the piggy) was interested in America and wanted to come for a short visit. Did my wife think this was a good idea? I myself wasn’t sure, since the piggy apparently only spoke German. How would he talk with the other stuffed animals? How would he talk with Jamie? My wife saw my point and shared my doubts. By this time Jamie, with whom reverse psychology is very effective, was jumping up and down in his seat, insisting that the piggy should be allowed to come and that he really, really did want to learn German. We drew this drama out for a few days, long enough for me to practice with Jamie (now very willing!) some words and phrases he would need in order to properly welcome the piggy and make him feel at home (greeting, introduction, offers of hospitality, short tour of the house, etc.). Then I brought the piggy home, the welcome and introductions came off very well, and life has been very different ever since. The first piggy’s name is Friedel. The second puppet, Friedel’s cousin Thusnelda, was introduced after five months, after an elaborate and drawnout production, the excitement of which was very motivational for further language learning. This has been repeated and varied many times since. I seek to piggyback (pun intended!) as much fresh, new, and progressive L2 use as possible on Jamie’s enthusiasm for each new arrival. Most discussions of puppets I have seen stress the importance of having the child also operate the puppet in order to encourage language production, including in L2 context.4 I myself discouraged this as a general policy, though I have not prevented it entirely and occasionally 4

Cf. Amy Hornby Uribe (“And don’t forget that adults aren’t the only ones who should use the puppets. One never knows how much a child will talk given the chance to converse with a puppet or make two puppets talk to each other!”)

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allowed it for limited tactical purposes. The reason is because I felt it was pedagogically important to make Friedel as real a character as possible, with his own personality, boundaries, and a unique perspective on the world that needs to be respected, taken seriously and—the actual pedagogical rub—listened to very carefully. I have followed this strategy with every puppet. When Jamie does operate the puppets, it is usually when they themselves have requested it (“Hey Jamie, can you put me on and make me say this or that silly thing?”) and involves a follow-up that reinforces their autonomy (usually just uproarious laughter on the part of the puppets over what they have just been made to say). I feel that such conceits of authenticity better sustain long-term interest, mostly on Jamie’s part, but also on my own as puppet-master. On a more theoretical level, which I discuss below, an “autonomous” puppet world allows for more effective triangulation.

First phase exercises and activities I used the puppet primarily in three types of scenarios in the beginning 1) ritualized game-routines of narrow scope targeting the progressive inculcation of basic L2 vocabulary, grammar, and syntax; 2) puppetmediated reading out-loud to Jamie in L1 and L2 simultaneously; and 3) watching L2 television and listening to L2 audiobooks. The first required a little planning and lot of work and energy from the puppet-master, the second somewhat less, the third still less. On my L2-heavy days alone with my son, we would typically cycle through all three types of activities in the order above. 1. Ritualized game-routines. My philosophy here was basic communicative methodology: beginning with a restricted vocabulary of single words and short phrases, to model amusing and (for a toddler) psychologically satisfying interactions with Friedel; to ease Jamie from a passive-observer into an active-participant role in the interactions; to repeat them many times; and to gradually add variation and complexity. I knew my biggest ally was a toddler’s love of endless repetition. Since toddlers also love to issue commands, I started with the following kind of scenario: I commanded Friedel (always in L2) to perform various amusing intransitive actions,5 taught Jamie a word for “Again!”, then made Friedel 5

Grunt, fart, burp, eat/feed, also to stop something he was doing, etc. I started with the infinitive command (“Grunzen, Friedel!” “Aufhören, Friedel!”), then introduced the informal singular imperative (“Grunze, Friedel!” “Hör auf, Friedel!”).

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repeat the antic at his command. After a couple of days Jamie had learned the commands himself and would issue them to Friedel directly. After several days of this, I added commands for transitive actions and made sentences that included direct objects (accusative) in all three genders.6 One game that we repeated dozens of times involved Jamie building a blanket-tent somewhere in the house, then sending Friedel to go to his bedroom and fetch his stuffed animals. After initial rounds where Friedel and I modeled all of the language, the interaction would proceed thusly: Friedel: Wen möchtest du jetzt?7 Jamie: The kitty! Friedel: Ich verstehe nicht. Alex: Das bedeutet “die Katze.” Friedel: Ach so. Holen wir die Katze! (Friedel and Alex to the bedroom and back) Friedel: Hier ist die Katze! Jamie: Danke! Friedel: Wen möchtest du jetzt? etc. (Friedel: Whom do you want now? Jamie [in L1]: The kitty! Friedel: I don’t understand. Alex: That means “the cat.” Friedel: Ah, ha! Let’s get the cat. (Friedel and Alex to the bedroom and back) Friedel: Here’s the cat! Jamie [in L2]: Thanks! Friedel: Whom do you want now? etc. )

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Fetch, bring, eat, etc. I was interested to note that my son learned the accusative forms of the articles before the nominative forms, but it makes sense: it was initially easier to interest him in acting upon an object (“Hol den Ball!” “Bring the ball!”) than in merely identifying or describing it (“Das ist ein Ball.” “That is a ball”). 7 I would usually introduce a phrase like this wholesale. I.e., I would tell Jamie in the L1: “Friedel is going to ask you ‘Wen willst du jetzt?’ This means ‘Who do you want now?’ Just answer with the name of the animal, in German if you know it, in English if you don’t.”

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After several days, when Jamie could ask for all of the animals in German (I made sure to cover all genders), I had him respond to Friedel’s initial question with a complete sentence. Ich möchte die Katze. Very gradually we built on this foundation, adding more complexity, concentrating on only one or two new things at any given time: plural forms of the animals (die Katze > die Katzen), new sentence formulations (Kannst du die Katze bringen?), new ideas (Die Katze ist nicht da!), pronouns (Ach, die Katze! Holen wir sie.), more complex syntax (Ich möchte, dass du die Katze holst ). Over the course of weeks, the tent game and many other patterns of this kind developed slowly from fixed routines into free-form interactions as Jamie internalized the relevant vocabulary and linguistic structures. 2. Reading. The easiest and most obvious kinds of L2 reading at this stage involved “first word” picture dictionaries and German versions of popular baby books like Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar / Die kleine Raupe Nimmersatt. I had already been reading several books of this kind with Jamie in the pre-puppet phase, and he had not been entirely unwilling to continue even after he had declared he didn’t want to learn the L2 anymore. Now, Friedel’s companionship, reading, questions and funny commentary really improved the whole experience for Jamie. For example, he enjoyed being quizzed by Friedel on the vocabulary in the picture dictionary and Friedel’s amazed exclamations at how much the Very Hungry Caterpillar ate. We made faster progress by availing ourselves of the fact that, like many two-year-olds who are read to regularly, Jamie already knew a large number of more advanced L1 stories practically by heart. Since there were no L2 translations available for most of these, I made many of my own, simplifying the language as much as possible, then going back and gradually revising the translations toward wider vocabularies, variations in sentence structure, and greater grammatical and syntactic complexity. These translations worked very well, but they took a great deal of my time apart from the reading sessions proper. What worked extremely well and did not take any extra time was a simple shift of focus, enabled by the puppet: Instead of reading to Jamie, Jamie and I started reading to the piggy, since after all Friedel was the one who needed to hear these exciting stories and also to learn English. With Friedel on my left hand, Jamie to my right, and the L1 book in my lap, I would read sentence by sentence, translating into L2 for Friedel, answering his many questions, while Jamie looked on, very focused on Friedel’s responses, reactions, and questions. After a few repetitions of a story, I would test Friedel’s L1 vocabulary in the following manner:

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Chapter Two Alex: “That’s not my frog. Its feet are too soft.” Friedel, wie sagt man “soft” auf Deutsch? Weißt du noch? Friedel: Ach, nein, ich habe es vergessen! Weißt du, Jamie? Jamie: Weich! Seine Füße sind weich! Friedel: Ach, weich natürlich! Danke! (big kiss) (Alex [in L1]: “That’s not my frog. Its feet are too soft.” [In L2] Friedel, how do you say “soft” in German? Do you remember? Friedel: Umm, no, I forget! Do you know, Jamie? Jamie: Soft! Its feet are soft! Friedel: Ah, soft, of course! Thanks! (big kiss)

It turned out that Friedel is not that good at languages, so Jamie had to help him a lot, in the course of which he would quickly memorize the book in the L2 as well as pick up a lot of important metalanguage. We worked through all the favorite L1 books in this way, then moved on to new L1 books. Together with the constant repetition and progressive linguistic revision of a select few translated stories (which my wife was meanwhile always continuing to read with Jamie in the original L1), the reading provided a huge source of L2 input to complement the narrow focus of the game-routines. The benefits of simultaneous L1 + L2 reading seem obvious to me now, but they were not at first. I had to overcome the fixed idea that L1 use should be as minimal as possible in all situations and that back-andforth translation is detrimental. But I also think L1 + L2 reading only really works with the puppet, and under the conceit of a focus on the puppet. Helping Friedel learn, relishing his enjoyment of and reactions to the stories, and to a certain degree also competing with him over who is the better language-learner: these factors provided a far more powerful nexus of motivations to learn the L2 than straight reading. Furthermore, without the puppet, there would have been far less metalanguage in play. When I directed questions like Wie sagt man dies oder das auf Deutsch? or Was bedeutet dies oder das? (“How do you say this or that in German?”; “What does this or that mean?”) directly to Jamie, he quickly became irritated and frustrated. But he loved it when I interrogated Friedel, sought to come up with the answer first, and learned to ask the questions himself. The rapid development of a metalanguage for negotiating understanding was, I feel, one of the single biggest factors in making Jamie comfortable with the switch to L2 between him and myself. 3. Other media. In an effort to further increase and diversify L2 input, I have sought to expose Jamie to as much L2 audio and visual media as I have felt to be compatible with responsible parenting. Television played

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the major role toward the beginning of the first six months, later supplemented by audiobooks and—much later, during the second year— apps for tablet computer. Although I have only my intuitions on this, I believe that without the widespread availability of free and cheap audio/visual resources in German made possible in the last ten years or so,8 it would have been very difficult to effectively teach my son German, for three main reasons apart from the simple availability of vast L2 content interesting to children (a very important reason of itself, of course): First, it would have been virtually impossible to create a credible virtual version of the authentic L2 language community beyond our household and a limited number of local relationships in which Jamie interacts with other children in the L2. Secondly, I could not have easily availed myself of synergies between literary, audio and visual versions of the same story, which have proved crucial in sustaining my son’s interest in a program of endless repetition. And thirdly, as a non-native speaker who myself only began to learn the L2 as an adult, these resources have been invaluable in helping me develop the dense lexica and strata of language associated with childhood. But here, too, puppetry played an important mediating role. As with the reading materials, Jamie did not have enough German at the beginning to get much out of even a very basic children’s program in the L2, which are visually very busy and fast-paced. What worked very well in this case was the converse of the reading scenario: to make Friedel the one who wanted to share what he knew with Jamie and me. At first I placed emphasis on myself. So, for example, while watching a new episode (about 15 minutes) of Kikaninchen, I would play dumb, asking and having Friedel answer many basic questions about the characters and plot as the episode was running. At the end, I would say to Friedel something like: “Let me see if I understand,” then summarize the episode in a few sentences. Then we would replay it, with somewhat less Q&A. By the third repetition, Jamie was understanding significant portions of the episode. Since Kikaninchen, like many children’s shows, repeats and varies a simple plot formula and much language, subsequent episodes were increasingly easy for Jamie to understand and required ever less in the way of introduction. It didn’t take very long before it was possible to park him in front of the television or computer for any episode of several programs we had worked up in this way. At the end of a long day of the other L2 activities described above, it was certainly a relief to be able to 8 The main resources have been YouTube videos (free) and audiobooks and Hörspiele from Audible.de.

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park him in this manner and, say, get dinner ready. But there were also tactical reasons to do so. For example, I could take Friedel away with me and then, after the episode was over, have him ask Jamie questions about what had happened. This was the beginning of practices of reportage, something puppets are especially useful in soliciting from child languagelearners. One other technique I used to good effect beginning later in this first phase was inspired by the 1990s cult television show “Mystery Science Theater 3000” (MST3K), in which the main characters, a man and his robot sidekicks, sit around and mock cheesy low-budget films. Using an innocuous vocabulary of words like “funny,” “silly,” “crazy,” “strange,” “weird,” “dumb,” “dense,” etc., Friedel set an example of making (gentle) fun of various characters in his children’s shows, animal behavior in L2 documentaries (especially pigs and other farm animals), and amateur videos featuring baby or animal antics. Jamie would join in Friedel’s laughter, even without necessarily understanding it at first. In later repetitions he would remember and repeat Friedel’s commentary and reactions.

Puppets and L2 correction Error correction is a controversial topic among L2 teachers and researchers. In my experience, L2 puppetry can be handled in such a way as to play both sides of the field, as it were. When I notice that Jamie is repeatedly making a certain error, I work the error into my own speech and have the puppet correct me, or I ask the puppet which is correct, version A or version B, and have the puppet respond with the right answer. When Thusnelda came along, I made my inner linguistic pedant into a part of her personality, developing a kind of “good cop, bad cop” routine in which Thusnelda—an unapologetic prescriptivist—corrects Jamie, and Friedel— a resolute descriptivist—criticizes her for interrupting. One counterintuitive but especially delightful version of this involves Friedel conspiratorially whispering to Jamie that he should deliberately make a given mistake or use a slangy expression in order to provoke a comic tizzy from Thusnelda. I can’t prove it, but my intuitions tell me that this kind of play with correction and linguistic normativity—another instance of metalanguage—has helped Jamie develop internal awareness of his own language faster than otherwise would have been the case.

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Second phase activities After six full months,9 the L2 had become my primary language of communication with my son as long as the puppets (the second piggy, Thusnelda, had joined us by this time, followed since by numerous others) were present. With the exception of social activities involving other people, this was constant—during virtually every domestic routine, every family mealtime, every second evening of bedtime reading, every trip, every car drive, every bike ride, every neighborhood walk, etc. However, this no longer meant that the puppets were always on my hand in these settings. Once their stories and characteristic voices were established, it was sufficient for me to simply do the voices with the puppets nearby (while driving the car or the bike, for example, or at the dinner table after the first few weeks). Later, and up to the time of writing, the puppets no longer even have to be present; whenever I do their voices, Jamie will act as if the puppets are there. At this point, I began to phase out the game-routines (the most intense and tedious of the activities), increase the amount of L2-only reading, and devote significant time to L2 audiobooks.10 Although they were no longer necessary to mediate basic understanding, the puppets were helpful in engaging and sustaining Jamie’s interest in higher-order activities like discussing a story after reading, listening to, or watching it. Even when I did very little or nothing with them, the mere presence of the puppets during any activity heightened Jamie’s enjoyment and sustained his interest in it. Conversely, the absence of the puppets, or of any particular puppet, now also became an important tool. If Friedel was not present when Jamie experienced anything notable, then Friedel needed to hear about it when we got home. I could then don Friedel and tell him, for example: “Friedel, Jamie wants to tell you what happened to us at the supermarket,” upon which Friedel would look at Jamie expectantly, and Jamie would describe what happened—at first in phrases, later in short sentences, then paragraphs. It was easy to foster such narration by dropping comments ahead of time like “You’ll have to tell the piggies about this when we get home; they’ll think it’s hilarious!” or “I wonder what the piggies would have to say about that?” This helped lay the basis for more advanced activities of renarration that became possible during the second year. It is 9

N.B.: Half of this period (mid-May through the beginning of August) was during my academic summer break, during which I was able to devote more time than usual to L2 activities. 10 Purchased and downloaded from Audible.com, an incredible resource.

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especially with regard to these sorts of scenarios that my intuitions tell me that less “autonomous,” “authentic” puppets would have been less successful in eliciting the desired response.11 It was also during this phase that I found some of my academic research dovetailing serendipitously with the puppetry in a way that opened up further horizons. This work, which drew inspiration from contemporary discussions in German sociology and culture studies, involved the exploration of triangular constellations, “triadic” relationships, and figures of “the third” in German literature and culture.12 The work of two scholars was especially relevant, the early twentieth-century German sociologist Georg Simmel and the contemporary French cultural theoretician René Girard. Simmel maintained that modern societies are constituted at the core via the introduction of various forms of relational triangle. “Where three elements, A, B, and C form a community,” Simmel writes in his Soziologie (1908), “the direct relationship between A and B is supplemented by the mediated relationship both have gained through their shared relationship with C.”13 The latter relationship separates and connects A and B in different ways and hence objectifies (or institutionalizes) their relationship, while also calling it into question. For Simmel, three basic types of figures of the third give institutional form to social interactions: 1) the non-partisan or mediator, who seeks to reconcile conflicts between individuals or parties (judges, referees, diplomats, counselors, etc., also children in a marriage); 2) the tertius gaudens or “laughing third,” who draws personal advantage from relationships (often of competition) between individuals or parties (consumers in a capitalist economy, small parties that “tip the balance” in parliamentary coalitions, sought-after partners in romance or marriage); and 3) figures who follow a logic of divide and conquer, fostering conflict between individuals or parties where none previously existed (Simmel cites examples from domestic and international politics; others have analyzed trickster figures 11

Of course, I don’t mean to suggest my son is not aware that the puppets are not living animals. Already very early, he would often say things like: “Friedel is not real; he’s just a puppet.” But in the way of small children, he is capable of profound situational make-believe in the face of knowledge to the contrary, and that is what I have sought to encourage. 12 For a good orientation cf. Eva Eßlinger, Tobias Schlechtriemen, Doris Schweizer, and Alexander Zons, eds. Die Figur des Dritten. Ein kulturwissenschaftliches Paradigma (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main, 2010). 13 Georg Simmel, Sociology. Inquiries into the Construction of Social Forms, vol. 1. Translated and ed. Anthony J. Blasi, Anton K. Jacobs, and Mathew Kanjirathinkal (Brill: Leiden, 2009), 93.

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in myth and literature in this way).14 All of René Girard’s work is centered in one way or another on the concept of “mimetic desire,” that is, that all human desire is imitative of and mediated through third figures rather than direct, spontaneous and rooted in the desired object.15 I would not say that my exploration of this material granted me any totally new insights or took the puppetry in any fundamentally new direction. That children imitate and model others’ desires, for example, often coming to new desires through such imitation, is obvious to any parent or teacher of children. Furthermore, one of the reasons I had started adding more puppets was in order to stage little altercations in which Jamie could play the role of mediator and learn vocabularies of conflict and reconciliation. All this was a matter of intuition and experimentation. However, reading Simmel and Girard did get me to think more broadly and systematically about the possibilities of triangulation. First, it led me explicitly to reinforce the autonomy of the puppets and the puppet world, so that the triangularity of the relationships would be felt by my son to be more real. Secondly, it prompted me to triangulate as many interactions as possible. Thus the constant inclusion of the puppets in daily activities and the constant reference to them even in situations where they were not present. Thirdly, and more specifically, Simmel’s second and third categories, as well as Girard’s notion of mimetic rivalry, led me to experiment with numerous scenarios I had not yet tried. For example, the trickster role has proven to be very productive. Jamie enjoys sewing conflict among the puppets, watching their reactions, then mediating and reconciling. Girardian mimetic desire is also a very powerful force, especially when it mobilizes envy and rivalry (Girard uses the term “mimetic rivalry”). As I suggested above, one of the reasons L1 + L2 reading worked well was because it harnessed competitive instincts. Once Jamie and I were speaking exclusively L2, I availed myself of mimetic desire and rivalry much more broadly and systematically: frankly put, I did this in order to manipulate my child into engaging in whatever L2 activity I thought was important at any given time. All that was necessary was for a puppet to express a strong preference, and Jamie would almost always go along with the program. But I found myself having to be careful. While Jamie was still only two, I got it into my head that I could teach him to read. At that point, he was not yet interested and actively expressed unwillingness. So lo and behold, one of his puppets 14

Simmel, Sociology, 101-128. The first and, in my view, still the best text is René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel. Self and Other in Literary Structure (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966). 15

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suddenly developed this ambition. I would tell my son: “Ulli and I are going into the kitchen to make some words (i.e., with the refrigerator magnet letters).” Jamie would protest, and I would tell him he didn’t need to join us, but he always would, and then he would enjoy himself, get into the flow, and really make progress. However, I abandoned this after a few days, realizing it was just too early to worry about literacy and feeling uncomfortable with actively fostering a psychology of competition at such a tender age. Now, I only deploy the forces of mimetic desire for limited tactical purposes, or to gently prod Jamie out of his inherent conservatism and get him to try new things I think he will like.

The puppets after bilinguality Ever since January 2013, German has been the primary language of communication between me and Jamie. He addresses me in German unless I ask him not to, whines and cries in German when with me, and mumbles German when I’m with him when he wakes up in the middle of the night. The puppets are no longer strictly necessary, and I have indeed greatly reduced the amount of time I actively operate them, be it on my hands or in voice. At this point, sometimes a whole week will go by without any active puppetry. At the same time, besides being “part of the family” in countless idiosyncratic ways beyond the scope of this discussion, I find that they are ever helpful in developing new scenarios for progressive L2 production. For example, in recent weeks Jamie has started developing a network of pen-pals among his puppets’ friends and acquaintances throughout the world. I write the emails, but he sits with me at the computer and tells me what he wants to say. Return correspondence is looked forward to with great anticipation and volubility, and when it arrives, it resonates in his mind—and in our house—for days. I have no idea how long this will last. At some point, after he starts going to school, Jamie may well lose interest in the L2 or rebel. Even if that does not happen, somehow I can’t quite see heading with him into the intensity of puberty and the teenage years, much less early adulthood, in a language that is not my native tongue. Still, this fear of artificiality and unnaturalness was one of the reasons I had originally decided against bilingualism, and it turned out to be totally insignificant. If anything, the L2, in prompting me to interact with my son with more verbal intensity than otherwise and to use quantitatively more language with him in different ways, has brought me emotionally closer to him. We shall see. At this point my long-term goal is limited: enabling Jamie to read as easily in German as in English, in the hope that he will

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choose do so independently. Then he can decide for himself what he wants to do with the language. Friedel, Thusnelda & co. agree and have told me that they will help as long as they can. (Please see the author’s blog http://piggypedagogy.blogspot.com/ for ongoing documentation and discussion of L2 experiences subsequent to those described here.)

Works Cited Eva Eßlinger, Tobias Schlechtriemen, Doris Schweizer, and Alexander Zons. 2010. Eds. Die Figur des Dritten. Ein kulturwissenschaftliches Paradigma. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main. Girard, René. 1966. Deceit, Desire and the Novel. Self and Other in Literary Structure. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Simmel, Georg. 2009. Sociology. Inquiries into the Construction of Social Forms, vol. 1. Translated and ed. Anthony J. Blasi, Anton K. Jacobs, and Mathew Kanjirathinkal. Brill: Leiden. Uribe, Amy Hornby. 2012. “Using Puppets to Raise Bilingual Kids.” http://spanglishbaby.com/2012/11/using-puppets-to-raise-bilingualkids/.

CHAPTER THREE “TALK TO ME IN REAL! TALK TO ME IN PLAIN!”: MEETING SECOND LANGUAGE RESISTANCE THROUGH CREATIVE MOTIVATIONAL TECHNIQUES AND PARENTAL PERSISTENCE CHRISTINE JERNIGAN

The words, “Talk to me in Real! Talk to me in Plain!” (J.I., interview) come from a four-year-old girl frustrated with her mother for speaking Spanish. I have to admit that as I did the interview with her mother, I felt a flood of relief that I wasn’t the only parent struggling with raising bilingual children. This woman has the odds stacked against her. She is an American trying to speak her second language (L2). Her husband doesn’t speak Spanish, her extended family doesn’t understand it, and strangers look at her as if she were doing something just plain wrong. I began interviews like these when my daughter was still an infant. I needed advice because I wanted to raise her to speak my L2, Portuguese. I was living in Australia, a country even more monolingual than the U.S. Though I searched high and low, I found little material written on raising a child to speak the parents’ L2. I started my own research and interviewed over 80 families striving toward bilingualism. In this chapter I will share what I learned from parents on how to handle negativity from strangers, relatives, spouses, educators, and health professionals. I’ll also offer some suggestions for working with “rebellious” children.

No, We’re Not Telling Secrets Many of the negative comments parents hear from strangers have to do with insecurity. People are afraid that the language they are hearing and not understanding includes secrets. They assume the incomprehensible

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language must hold a negative coded message. Columnist Barbara Ehrenreich quips, There is the fear, common to all English-only speakers, that the chief purpose of foreign language is to make fun of us. Otherwise, you know, why not just come out and say it? (Dauntless Jaunter 2011)

Perhaps the best advice I received on handling strangers’ comments is to plainly and succinctly state your language plan: “We are raising our daughter to speak Portuguese. I realize that may seem rude since you cannot understand, but we must speak to her all the time or she will not learn. If we’re ever saying something you’d like to hear translated, just let us know.”

Family Dynamics More difficult to handle than strangers are extended family members. My parents and I have a loving relationship, and they are full of support for my endeavors. However, once the children got old enough to talk, my parents realized they were not understanding much of what the children were saying. They asked me to speak English while they were around. This, however, did not work well with our language goals. There is more than one solution to family friction. One way is to explain how the L2 is an integral part of your life, a goal that you as a nuclear family have agreed to. Extended family members might pick up on any resistance from your children and assume that they’re having to learn something they don’t want to learn. Developmental pediatrician, Dr. Naomi Steiner, encourages parents to stay the course in the face of this assumption. She rallies, Don't cave in if people around you express disapproval or concern that you are “forcing” your child to speak another language. It can sometimes be difficult for a monolingual person to understand that raising a child to learn to speak two (or more) languages is in some ways like raising a child to learn to eat a healthy diet. (2009, 109)

Explain the analogy of healthy food to L2 use: you are guiding your child to use the L2 because it will benefit him now and later. Other parents have more aggressive solutions. One of the authors of Bilingual is Better: Two Latina Moms on How the Bilingual Parenting Revolution is Changing the Face of America writes,

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I even have a few family members who get angry with me because we can’t have a three-way conversation since I only use Spanish with my daughter and refuse to switch to English regardless of where we are or who we are with. (Flores and Soto 2012, 89).

The course of action requires strong conviction. The author’s power came from “…observing how well my girl communicates in both languages at three years old[.] I’m learning better how to not care what others think” (89). But it’s difficult not to care, especially when we’re talking about the kids’ grandparents. Virginie Raguenaud, in her book, Bilingual by Choice: Raising Kids in Two (or More!) Languages (2009) says that grandparents are hoping to see themselves in their grandchildren. That’s hard to do when the child is speaking a language unintelligible to them. With the language barrier distancing the grandparents from their grandchildren, it’s easy to see why they push for English. In my case and in the case of several parents I interviewed, certain concessions were made to family members. This was especially true when the L2 speaker was dealing with in-laws who felt lost and frustrated. Some switched to English when family was around. Others spent less time with their parents and their children in the same room. With my parents, I translated nearly every word that came out of our mouths. I also asked the kids to direct their speech to their grandparents instead of to me.

Partners and Spouses Of bigger concern is the frustration of the L2 speaker’s partner or spouse. One mother writes in an email interview, The other difficulty is having to explain and translate to my spouse. He is wonderfully understanding and supportive but he stills misunderstands what we (the kids and I) are discussing sometimes, or gets frustrated if he has to wait to find out what I am telling them. It is tiring at best. (P.R., email interview)

It’s important to recognize that though the non-L2 partner doesn’t understand the L2 when the child is born, it doesn’t mean his knowledge will remain in that state. He will be overhearing the language for years, starting with simplified baby talk and getting more and more complex as the child grows. I found that my husband has learned enough that he is now able to follow the main idea of the L2 conversation if I give him the gist—just a

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short translation like, “I’m asking about the math test.” It’s helpful to communicate with your partner about the L2. Is he feeling uncomfortable? Would he like more translation? Do you need to speak the first language at certain times of day?

Health Professionals Unfortunately bilingualism, even among health professionals, gets blamed for children’s language problems. One father talks about his doctor’s reaction to his son’s speaking an L2: I think that the misconception in our westernized brain is that for the child this [speaking the L2] is a burden. For a child, it’s a normal way of being, it’s not an extra effort. It’s like learning how to ride a bike or swim because [of] their brain capacity. (E.O., email interview)

There is a great danger when bilingualism becomes the scapegoat for language problems like stuttering. First, it means doctors encourage parents to discontinue use of the L2 when the language was actually advantageous to the child. Bilingualism is often…seen as causing cognitive confusion—reducing a child’s ability to understand things and develop. Sometimes people picture the bilingual brain as two engines working at half throttle! But this isn’t true. Where two languages are well developed, bilingualism is more likely to lead to cognitive advantages rather than disadvantages. (BBC Home, 2003)

And second, because if bilingualism is wrongly seen as the root of a child’s speech challenge, the physician is not treating the actual problem. Edith Harding and Philip Riley point to the lack of background knowledge health professionals have on bilingualism and encourage parents to look elsewhere for language advice. Bilingualism does not appear on the training syllabus of doctors...nurses, social workers, or even psychologist and speech therapists. It makes as much sense to ask your doctor for advice about bilingualism as it would to ask him about your car. (1999, 147)

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Educators Probably most surprising of the L2 naysayers are educators. One would assume they would understand the benefits of bilingualism more than most. However, some teachers make the mistake of presuming that any communication issue is caused by the L2. One mother who adopted her three-and-a-half-year-old son from China writes about how he nearly missed getting the care he needed, Despite my rumblings, my son was not tested for dyslexia or learning disabilities, and not accepted into a special reading program. I was told that his reading fluency (how quickly, accurately, automatically and expressively someone reads) was slow because he was still mastering English (and Spanish). (Spanish Baby 2013)

If you are faced with a teacher who holds anything but high regard for your intention to speak an L2, be kind but clear. Bilingualism is a plus. It quite likely is not the root of your child’s issue. To promote bilingualism in your child’s classroom, offer to volunteer in class teaching some of your L2 to the children. Bring in an L2 story to read. Ask your teacher for his or her support in shining a positive light on bilingualism.

My Child Won’t Speak At first, I labeled this section, “Child Rebellion.” I changed my mind, though, since not all children who refuse to speak the language are actually rebelling. Many are simply doing what our brains naturally do— search for efficiency. The human brain is hardwired to seek the path of least resistance since it is the quicker option. More often than not, the L1 is the easier option. You want to find ways to make the L2 the quicker path because that will get your child using it on a regular basis.

Indirect Re-Cuing There are many tricks to getting your child to choose the L2. I’ll avoid using the word “correcting” and will instead use “re-cuing.” One way of organizing these different ways is to separate indirect re-cuing and direct re-cuing.

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Don’t Show Them Off You may notice that your children are fine speaking the L2 at home, but become reticent to speak it with others around. Ask them why that is. It could be that their friends have laughed at them. In this case, they would need a model for how to handle their friends’ comments. Something like, “I speak German so I can talk to German people who don’t speak English. I can teach you some words if you want.” Make sure that other people aren’t asking your children to “speak some Spanish.” Harding-Esch and Riley take a hard line against showing children off. When visitors ask children to “say something in French,” parents should shield children from having to answer. Several children in our study chose this as the only disadvantage they could think of in being bilingual… “saying something” [was] excruciatingly embarrassing and totally unnatural.

Help your children come them to speak the language. want me to say?” Your kids along. You might help them “I’d rather not right now.”

up with something to say when people ask My kids say, in Portuguese, “What do you may need permission from you to not play state, “That makes me uncomfortable.” Or,

“Normalizing” bilingualism As children get older, they tend to rebel more. Some researchers feel that’s because as children age they want to be less like their parents and more like their peers. They don’t want to appear weird. To normalize bilingualism, find ways for your child to spend time with speakers of second languages. The languages don’t have to be your L2. Just being exposed to other tongues makes them seem less odd and more interesting. George Saunders in his book Bilingual Children: From Birth to Teens talks about his son meeting other kids who spoke Greek, Turkish, and Italian to their parents. He showed considerable interest in this and obviously took some pride in the fact that he, too, could speak a language other than English. Wendy [my wife] and I capitalized on the situation to portray bilingualism as something natural but special. (1988, 118)

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Keep It Novel Children, like adults, respond to novelty. They get excited about a new game, a new toy, a new friend. If you can link the L2 to novel situations, you’ll have your children more easily hooked. Sometimes novelty can take the form of something tangible, like a new book or a new DVD in the L2. It can also be a situation, like a trip to the zoo where you’ll take pictures and learn all the names of the animals. It can also be as momentary as speaking the language in a funny voice. I remember when my daughter was four years old, I started singing questions to her in the L2. Soon she was singing her answers.

Using Points Some children respond well to making language a game. Consider giving children a certain number of points or tokens at the start of the day. To keep their points, they must use the L2 in ways you’ve agreed to. You and your children can negotiate what a point is worth. In fact, the more you bring your child on board in the planning phase of this new system, the better, since children feel more motivated the more control they wield. I’ve tried two different systems. First, I gave cards for each day that they spoke Portuguese. The children could bundle their cards for a trip to the ice cream store. I’ve also had points that the kids could turn in for money. It became a form of allowance, but one they earned by using the L2.

A Language Trigger Sometimes children are not necessarily refusing to speak the language; they are forgetting to speak it. Work with your child to come up with a language trigger that will serve as a reminder to speak the L2. It might be a hand motion, like your hand over an opened mouth. Or you might choose a word or sound like, “Oops!” Be sure to say the word in the L2 and keep it light and silly. My kids chose the sound, “peep.” The reminder didn’t feel like a correction because the peeping made us laugh.

Be Über-Interested Several families I interviewed had one parent who spoke the L1 to the child and the other who spoke the L2 (One Parent/One Language). Some L2 parents complained that their children tended to talk more to the L1

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parent as a way to avoid speaking the L2. Cunningham-Andersson and Andersson interviewed a mother in this situation: Whenever both of us go to pick our daughter up from the childcare, she wants to go straight to my husband and absolutely refuses to come to me... She might not like to be spoken to in Japanese. Even at home, she wants to be with him rather than with me, especially when she is tired. (2002, 31)

I would suggest in this situation that you become the über-interested parent. Give eye contact, repeat back what your child has said, smile and frown at the right places, and ask a lot of questions. Similarly, Saunders suggests interaction that is child-centered, where parents …actively work at sustaining a conversation with the children by being responsive to the children's contributions to the conversation, by working at maintaining a topic once it has been introduced, and your being more interested in conversing with the children than in exerting control over them. (1988, 133)

Direct Ways of Re-Cuing Depending on the personality of the parents, the motivation of the children, and the situation, more direct ways of re-cuing are more effective.

Mind Your Manners You might find it beneficial to openly discuss with your child how the L2 is non-negotiable. Explain how it is like having good manners, eating healthy food, or brushing their teeth. It might not always be easy or convenient, but it is worth it: it will help them excel in subjects like reading and math, speak and relate to more people, and better learn another foreign language.

Pretending If you’ve tried discussing the importance of the L2 and your child still persists in speaking the L1, you can try a strategy called “pretending.” Suzanne Barron-Hauwaert, in her book Strategies for Bilingual Families: The One-Parent One-Language Approach, calls it the “false monolingual strategy.” It means the L2 parent pretends not to speak or understand the L1.

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Imagine that your child has asked you a question in the L1. To encourage the L2, you would ask, (in the L2), “What?” If he continues to address you in the L1, ask, “I’m sorry?” until you are successful in hearing the L2. There will be times when part of the utterance will be in the L2. You want to recognize that part by repeating it to your child. Note the following encounter with a French child learning English: Child: Where are mes bottes? Mother: Where are your what? Child: My boots.

It’s important to note that this is not a strategy to use when your child is tired, hungry, or overly frustrated. To keep children motivated, Saunders argues that parents who use this method must be “persistent, yet show understanding and good humour” (1988, 126).

Feeding the Word There will be many times when your child just forgets a word. That one word can draw a fast halt to the conversation. One mother writes about her young daughter, Sometimes Mary Kate likes for me to speak French because it’s special and different but sometimes she hates it because if there are too many words in a sentence she doesn’t understand, she gets frustrated” (J.F., interview).

A teenager raised bilingually was able to express her own feelings of frustration: The biggest frustration with Serbian would be when you are unable to say something or find the rights words. It almost feels like somebody’s silencing you. Also, I sometimes feel inferior or “dumb” when I’m unable to speak it. (M.S., email interview)

It may be most effective to simply feed children the word so they can continue with what they were saying. You don’t want to resort to this method often, or your child will start letting you translate everything she says. You should also make sure your child repeats back the new word. My children are very accustomed to this method. We mainly use it when they have been in an all English environment for a while and then are back with me. The conversation would go like this (though I’m swapping

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English and Portuguese). James: We had a good corrida in P.E. today. And it-Christine: A good race? James: Yes, a good race. And it had all the boys on one side and all the girls on the other.

Notice how what I said was just a brief interruption. He knows, after years of using this strategy that he is to repeat the word given. Had he not automatically repeated, “race,” I would have simply said, “Say ‘race’.”

Consistency Perhaps the most important factor for parents is to be consistent in their insistence on the L2. This is particularly true as children age. Carey Myles, in her book Raising Bilingual Children explains how “it is not uncommon for adolescents to use language choice as a way of expressing their increasing independence.” She goes on, Although it may seem manipulative, from the parents’ point of view, the less a teenager thinks about making a choice regarding which language to use, and the more the family minority language becomes habit for them, the better for their continued language development. (2003, 11)

Instill Your Love of the Language If you really love the language you’re speaking to your child, find ways to express your enthusiasm. This expression can take many forms.

Cultural Component Some parents who speak a heritage language with their children worry that since they are in the U.S., their children are not surrounded by the culture of the target country. Parents who are teaching their L2 worry that since they are not native speakers, they will not accurately teach culture. In both cases, we must broaden our definition of culture. Research has long separated culture into two types. “Capital C” culture refers, to “the high arts of theater, painting, music, etc.” (Culture at Work 2014). “Lower-case c” culture is defined as everyday living. It is how people of a certain country behave. It is not so crucial that you choose to infuse your time with your child with both of these; it is important that you find elements of either that you are interested in.

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In my case, for example, I love Brazilian music. It has been something easy for me to purchase and play in my home and in the car. Since I am not Brazilian, I do not have as many lower-case c cultural values to share. If you are a native speaker of the language, you may prefer American music and forego playing music from the target country. You will be able to share ways of living, however—lower-case c culture. The essential thing in both situations is that you love the cultural bits you’re sharing because it shows you love the language. One mom writes, You must love the language because all the message – the whole nonverbals are having to say this is desirable and kids pick this up. They know what mom and dad like and they also, at the lower [younger] age, they really like to go along with that. (S.B., interview)

This mom goes on to say that as children age, they tend to rebel more. She makes some suggestions on drawing attention to the forms of the language as a way to preempt their disinterest. Kids love funny things, so if it’s a gendered language, introduce there are all sorts of differences between a gendered and a non-gendered language and kids find it fascinating at primary school age even because you can tap on the creativity of the languages. They appreciate that. Once they get bigger the computer and friends and brand name clothes take over so you can’t start early enough. Don’t wait. (S.B., interview)

Some parents didn’t use the word “culture,” but they seemed to be describing the emotions tied to a language. You also need to be very observant of the fact that the language isn’t just a language but it has a whole emotional arena around it and so when you teach it, if you see it only as a language and nothing more, it won’t gain the emotional presence it would gain if you taught it or spoke it with your heart. (B.B., interview)

Reading in the Language Another important way to share your love of the language is to read to your child in the L2. Cunningham-Andersson and Andersson write, No amount of visiting the country where the language is spoken or contact with other speakers can hope to give a child as rich a vocabulary and such a mastery of the nuances of the language as a thorough immersion in its children's literature. (1999, 58)

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If you are a non-native speaker, you may encounter words as you read that are unfamiliar to you. Keep a small dictionary nearby and look up words as you find them. When you read a new word, show an interest in knowing what this new treasure holds. Don’t act like you know everything. It’s better to show that you’re willing to learn than to pretend you know it all. You will probably have more books in English than you have in the L2. So put the L2 books in prominent places in your home and buy new ones from time to time. See Languagelizard.com or Multilingualbooks. com for a wide variety of titles. When you do purchase a new book, wrap it or put it in a gift bag for your child to open. It will convey the idea that the L2 is special. If your child rebels against books in the L2, try to give her some element of control over your reading time. If you usually read to her in bed, ask if she’d like to try reading in a chair, on the carpet, or on the sofa. Make the books more appealing by reading in funny voices and using amusing sound effects. Most importantly, pay special attention to your child as you’re preparing to read. Use your child’s name a lot, ask lots of questions as you read, and ask for her opinion of the story once you’re finished.

Conclusions In closing, we parents should examine how we encourage our children to use the L2. Some methods that work well in certain circumstances, such as openly correcting a child, will work when life is going smoothly and our child is happy and well. They will, however, fall dismally flat on a bad morning or a grumpy afternoon. Before you try any specific strategies, ask yourself what makes most the sense in this moment. A gentle nudge? A friendly push? Nothing at all for now? Also keep in mind that just because your child appears to be rebelling against the language, this may be a phase that will pass. Don’t berate yourself for not having 100 percent L2 communication. It may be that for now, your child understanding you while not actually speaking the L2 is the best you can hope for. This passive bilingualism can lead to actively speaking the language later on. Claire Thomas, in her book Growing Up with Languages, agrees, “It is certainly much easier to go from the ability to understand a language to being able to speak it than having to learn it almost from scratch” (2012, 87). So follow your intuition about your child, keep your communication open, and proceed with confidence.

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Works Cited Andersson, Una Cunningham-Andersson and Staffan. 1999. Growing Up with Two Languages. London: Routledge. Barron-Hauwaert, Suzanne. 2004. Language Strategies For Bilingual Famili: The One-Parent-One-Language Approach. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd. BBC Home. 2003. September. http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/schoolgate/aboutschool/content/4inwelsh. shtml. Culture at Work. Accessed January 28, 2014. http://www.culture-atwork.com/concept1.html. Eilers, Christian. 2011. Dauntless Jaunter. August 27. Accessed February 4, 2013. http://www.dauntlessjaunter.com/2013/08/27/23-great-languagelearning-quotes/. Flores, Ana and Roxana Soto. 2012. Bilingual is Better: Two Latina Moms on How the Bilingual Parenting Revolution is Changing the Face of America. Madrid: Bilingual Readers. Harding, Edith and Philip Riley. 1999. The Bilingual Family: A Handbook for Parents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harding-Esch, Edith and Philp Riley. 2003. The Bilingual Family: A Handbook for Parents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Myles, Carey. 2003. Raising Bilingual Children: Parent's Guide series. Los Angeles: Mars Publishing. Raguenaud, Virgina. 2009. Bilingual By Choice. Boston: Nicholas Brealey Publishing. Saunders, George. 1988. Bilingual Children: from Birth to Teens. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd. Spanish Baby. 2013. November 7. http://spanglishbaby.com/2013/11/ell/. Steiner, Naomi. 2008. 7 Steps to Raising a Bilingual Child. New York: Amacom. Thomas, Claire. 2012. Growing Up with Languages: Reflections on Multilingual Childhoods. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd.

CHAPTER FOUR CONFESSIONS OF A TABBY CAT DAD: STUMBLING TOWARD RAISING BILINGUAL KIDS1 DAVID MARLOW

Introduction Some twenty years ago an American boy met a Chinese girl at a Japanese language school and fell in love. The boy spoke no Chinese; the girl spoke no English, so they dated, married, and established a household using imperfect Japanese as their only shared language. I was that boy and my wife, Yuan, was that girl. Two years later, we moved from Japan to the Midwestern United States and soon thereafter had our first child: Jennifer. For the first time, language choice became a contentious issue in our home. As a dreamer studying linguistics and second language acquisition, I wanted to teach our baby English, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, and Finnish–all at the same time–and just for the joy of it. Yuan, a pragmatist who was already planning an Ivy League education for Jennifer, favored an English-only policy, even though her own English was quite limited at the time. We compromised. Yuan would speak her nascent English to Jennifer while I used my broken Chinese; Japanese would be relegated to parental discussions and slowly fossilized into an idiosyncratic pidgin. When Jennifer was nine months old–just as she began to speak–Pópo (፠ ፠),2 Jennifer's Chinese grandmother, came to live with us for several 1 I thank Jane Addison, Stephen Davis, and Jennifer Marlow for comments that greatly improved this manuscript. 2 Pópo (፠፠) traditionally has referred to “husband’s mother” while wàipó (እ፠) has referred to “wife’s mother.” The children would use năinai (ይይ) for their paternal grandmother and lăolao (ጭጭ) for their maternal grandmother. The terms for the wife’s mother have negative connotations (እ= wài = outside, foreign and

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months, and Jennifer’s bilingualism was firmly established. When Jessica, our second daughter, arrived, there was no debate: Jessica heard both English and Chinese from both Yuan and me on the day she was born. This chapter explores the challenges and jubilations of raising bilingual children with no strategic plan. To give due credit, this chapter is loosely inspired by Amy Chua's memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother3, with two major distinctions. First, while Chua focuses on parenting styles and interpersonal relationships, I focus on linguistic aspects of bilingualism and heritage language retention. Second, I follow her personal introspective narrative approach but support my reflections with footnotes directing interested readers to more academic texts. If you are seeking a Do-It-Yourself guide to raising bilingual children, I suggest you consider reading Bilingual by choice: Raising kids in two (or more!) languages by Raguenaud or The bilingual edge: Why, when, and how to teach your child a second language by King and Mackey. The latter even offers strategies for monolingual parents wanting to gift their children with bilingualism. This academically oriented narrative explores the simultaneous acquisition of multiple languages4 in a bicultural family.

Background Understanding my stumbling approach to raising bilingual children necessitates an understanding of the language backgrounds of both Yuan and me. I was raised in an essentially monolingual English home. My mother was a second-generation immigrant and a rememberer of Finnish.5 She would use a few words and phrases from Finnish in tightly controlled environments (e.g., when we kids were in trouble, or at bed time). I now use a smaller subset of these words sporadically and errantly. My only other early exposure to world languages occurred in school. I grew up in a ጭ is constructed of ዪ meaning female and ⪁ meaning old). Hence many Chinese families, including ours, now choose to use pópo as an umbrella term encompassing both mother-in-law and grandmother. 3 Chua (2003) 4 While I use the term bilingualism in the title of this chapter, my family is multilingual. In this chapter, I use bilingualism to refer to the use of two or more languages following the example of Lewis (2009) and others (e.g. Genesee, 1989; King, 2008; Schecter, et al. 1996). In the text below, if a cited author uses the term “multilingualism” I follow that lexical choice to the end of the related thought. Elsewhere, I employ the term bilingualism, even if more than two languages are involved. 5 My use of this terms follows Grinevald (2003)

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rural district of Northwestern Indiana and attended a rural, mono-cultural high school where I took four weeks of French and four years of Spanish. I continued my study of the latter for one more year in college and today consider myself a survivor in Spanish.6 In my mid-twenties, I spent four years in Japan as an English teacher by day and a student of Japanese by night. I developed conversational abilities during my time there and mastered the two syllabaries: hiragana (ࡦࡽࡀ࡞ ) and katakana (࢝ࢱ࢝ ࢼ),7 as well as approximately 2,000 kanji (₎Ꮠ). Time, together with physical and cultural separation, has left me a survivor in Japanese as well. As for Chinese, I have never had formal training but have acquired lowintermediate skills in the language through constant proximity with native speakers combined with a desire to learn. In general, I struggle with languages, examining my own speech and the speech of others as I attempt to learn and memorize new sounds, syntactic patterns, and vocabulary before I put them to use. Yuan, on the other hand, tends to glide into her languages through enculturation and with a low affective filter,8 which allows her to communicate freely even before she has mastered the rules of the language. Yuan was raised in a monolingual Chinese home where Mandarin was the language of choice. Her father, born in Shanghai, was fluent in the native language of that city as well as in Mandarin.9 He also studied English during his university days. Yuan does not recall her father ever using Shanghainese at home, but he would tease her using English. She fondly recalls that he would call her a “very bad boy” in heavily accented English. Her mother, a medical doctor, understands a few healthrelated terms in English but is otherwise a monolingual speaker of Mandarin.10 Growing up in Beijing during the Communist Revolution, 6

Here I follow Lawless (n.d.) A syllabary is like an alphabet in which each symbol represents a syllable (consonant +vowel) rather than a sound 8 See Krashen (1982) for an introduction to his “Affective Filter Hypothesis” which suggests people like me may have too strong an affective filter, making it difficult for us to converse in a second language while people like Yuan may have too weak a filter, enabling them to converse quickly, but with a high percentage of errors which tend to be resistant to correction. 9 While many Westerners refer to Chinese as if it were a single language, Ethnologue (Lewis, 2009) suggests there are 298 distinct languages in China. Mandarin and Shanghainese are mutually unintelligible, though they share the written system of Chinese characters (㯱Ꮠ). 10 For the sake of simplicity, for the remainder of this chapter, Chinese refers to Mandarin Chinese, or P·tǀnghuà. 7

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Yuan received no world languages training in school or at home, but in her mid-twenties she moved to Japan where she lived for six years, learning Japanese and training for an executive position in a Japanese company. Yuan had a significant advantage over me in learning Japanese in that Japanese kanji originate from Chinese characters.11 While I struggled to learn 2,000 characters, all of which seemed very foreign to me, she came to the study of Japanese with a post-secondary degree in Classical Chinese and knowledge of 30,000 characters. Still, she had to learn completely new lexical, grammatical, and phonological systems, plus the incorporation of the Japanese syllabaries in the written word, as well as the cultural functions of a new language, so she too had much to learn. When I first visited China in 1992, Yuan’s father surprised both Yuan and me by greeting me in English. Because of strained relationships with the West, he had not spoken more than a few words of English in 30 years, but conversed with me for the sake of his daughter. Though Yuan and I were both bilingual, we approached our bilingualism from different perspectives and with conflicting visions of what linguistic foundations we should lay for our children.

Establishing a Bicultural/Bilingual Family Two years into our marriage, Yuan and I decided we wanted to expand our family. Frustrating experiences navigating doctors' offices and hospitals in Japan convinced us that we needed to be in one of our home countries before any children arrived. The year was 1994, just five years after the Tiananmen Square incident and four years after the opening of the first Chinese McDonald's. Opportunities were limited for an American not yet conversant in Chinese and lacking both significant business experience and connections, so we decided to move to the United States where I would pursue a doctorate in English and Linguistics. It wasn't too long before we got the news that we would soon be parents. Our first child would be a girl and she would need a name. Names are important in any culture, and in China one's name is traditionally thought to represent the identity of the child who receives it. The naming of a child carries weight beyond mere sounds as it is expected

11

While Japanese utilizes Chinese characters, the meaning of some of these characters has shifted in amusing ways. The Japanese word for letter for example is ᡭ⣬ (tegami = hand paper) which is directly related to the simplified Chinese characters: ᡭ习 (shԁuzhӿ) which means toilet paper.

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to influence her future character and aspirations.12 My wife's name, ⦻‫ݳ‬ (Wáng Yuán), for example, literally translates as "king currency." Her parents set a high standard for her to reach and she credits at least some of her success to their aspirations. Yet, she wanted to ensure that our daughter's name would seem natural in both cultures–rich with meaning in Chinese yet easily recognizable in American English. I suggested we invert my mother-in-law's name 㖾ⵏ (MČi ZhƝn, roughly translatable as beautiful purity) to create ⵏ㖾 (ZhƝn MČi, purely beautiful) as this sounds similar to Jen Mae in English. Thinking this was too conceited but liking the idea of honoring her mother, Yuan agreed to “Jennifer Mei” for her official American name. In Chinese, she is known simply as ⧽࿞ (ZhƝn NƯ) which sounds similar to “Jenny.” While a direct translation of this name is difficult, ⧽ means treasure and the character ࿞ is used in association with females, so a close English approximation is treasure girl. Our second daughter, Jessica Li, was born three years later. In Chinese, her name is ᶠᐼ (Jié XƯ) which sounds similar to “Jessy.” ᶠᐼ translates as brilliant hope. Yuan chose Jessica’s middle name to match Jennifer’s. Mei and Li taken independently are variations of beautiful, and when put together, 㖾ѭ (MČi Lì) translates as extremely beautiful. While this certainly strikes me as prideful, middle names are not typically used in Chinese, so the conceit is covert and therefore acceptable. Thus, our family's intentional blending of cultures began early. Later stages were equally complex, but considerably less orchestrated.

Debating the Desirability of Bilingualism Although Jennifer had both English and Chinese names and heard both languages on the day she was born, she heard these languages with strong non-native accents as I spoke to her in Chinese while Yuan used English. This inverted approach to language choice was based in our differing perceptions of bilingualism and soon withered as neither of us could long avoid speaking to our baby girl in our respective native languages. As an embryonic linguist, I was convinced of the many benefits of bilingualism from infancy onward. On the cognitive level, for example, studies have demonstrated that bilingual infants can learn two languages at equal speed and with equal proficiency levels as monolingual infants and have greater facility in completing complex mental tasks than their 12

Li’s 1997 article focuses on Chinese using Western names and includes relevant discussion of the weight of naming in Chinese culture overall.

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monolingual counterparts.13 To borrow a term from Psychology, bilingual children appear to have greater executive control over cognitive processes including both memory and flexibility in problem solving.14 These benefits persist throughout adulthood.15 Additionally, bilingualism helps delay the onset of Alzheimer's and other forms of age-related dementia.16 On a more personal level, I very much felt the difficulty of learning Japanese and Chinese as an adult. Having spent four years living, working, and studying in Japan only to consider myself functionally conversant, and having been exposed to Chinese for two years with very little language ability to show for it, I was anxious to provide my children an easier path: simultaneous bilingualism.17 Yuan, not a linguist and having grown up in an environment where her father hid his bilingualism for decades to protect his family from political repercussions, knew first hand that bilingualism could be dangerous. In response to my claims that bilingualism could delay dementia, she countered that when dementia strikes bilinguals, they tend to lose control over language choice and code-switching abilities18 and that bilingualism has long been associated in the United States with learning deficiencies and low verbal capabilities.19 There was much truth in her latter argument. Since the early 1900s, the educational system in the United States has had a tendency to "blame the victim" for their own lack of academic success,20 particularly when the victim is part of a minority community.21 Bilingualism was labeled a problem in educational literature as early as 192122 with particular attention to Hispanic students in border states, and the chief of the Mexican-American Affairs Unit of the US Office of Education was still battling this perception in 1968.23 So severe was the educational system's misunderstanding of bilingualism, that in 1970 the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare issued a memorandum stating, in part, that "[s]chool districts must not assign national origin-minority group students to classes for the mentally retarded on the 13

Kovács & Mehler (2009) Kovács (2012) 15 Bialystok, et al. (2004) 16 Bialystock, et al. (2007) 17 Meisel (2001) provides an accessible introduction to simultaneous bilingualism 18 e.g. Hyltenstam & Stroud (1993) 19 e.g. Cummings (1982) 20 Ryan (1971) 21 Cummings (1982); Dubois & Guadalupe (1980) 22 Fitz-Gerald (1921) 23 Rodriguez (1968) 14

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basis of criteria which essentially measure or evaluate English language skills."24 The problem still existed in 1982, however, when Cummings observed that educators still widely held to the myth that "bilingualism gives rise to language handicaps."25 He further noted that many bilingual teachers refrained from sending bilingual students who exhibited features of learning disabilities to psychological testing, knowing that "the students [would] return with a permanent label and a one-way ticket to a monolingual English special education class”26 Even today, this concern lingers in classrooms and percolates in educational literature as precise and effective techniques are still sought to distinguish cognitive deficits from language differences. 27 Despite her fears, Yuan's love of her home country, her longing to share her heritage, and her desire to have our children speak freely with her side of the family convinced her to embrace both English and Chinese for herself and our daughters.

Bilingual Parenting: The Early Years Stumbling best describes our approach to both daughters' language development, especially in the early years. Recall, if you will, that neither Yuan nor I had any formal training in the other's language and that our shared communication was in Japanese. My personal resolve to speak only Chinese to my new baby daughter dissolved the first time I held her. If memory serves, Yuan’s resolve to speak only English held out until we brought Jennifer home from the hospital and then crumpled as thoroughly as mine. Within days, communication in our home became a muddle of Japanese, Chinese, and English. King and her co-authors28 suggest that the strategic parent should consider language planning in terms of status (in what circumstances to use a given language with their children), corpus (what types of literacy activities to target), and acquisition (when and how to overtly instruct language skills). We used none of these with any consistency. At various points we attempted to bring order to the linguistic chaos in our home with regimented language schedules like speaking Chinese only on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and English only on the other days, or the much more popular "One Parent, One Language" 24 See the full document at http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/lau1970.html. Read more about this important issue in Malakoff & Hakuta (1990) 25 Cummings (1982: 1) 26 Cummings (1982: 1) 27 e.g. Durán (2013) 28 King, et al. (2008)

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approach.29 In the end, however, we simply focused on our day-to-day lives and let our daughters' languages develop as they would. While first language acquisition is ubiquitous worldwide regardless of parental involvement, the success rate for passing bilingualism on to children varies widely in the United States. Portes and Hao, for example, suggest that less than 8% of second-generation immigrants from Asia maintain bilingual proficiency while nearly 40% of Hispanic immigrants continue to speak their native language.30 De Houwer, studying secondgeneration bilingualism in Flanders, Belgium found success rates closer to 75%.31 The one thing on which all researchers agree is that language use within the home has a strong impact on children's bilingualism. My daughters grew up with few connections to the American side of our family. My parents lived in Missouri, approximately 600 miles away. During Jennifer’s first years of life, I kept busy as a graduate student and teaching assistant at a medium-sized state university in the Midwest while Yuan dedicated herself full-time to raising our daughters. Before Jennifer entered preschool, we moved to Massachusetts, even further from family. My parents would come for week-long visits two or three times per year, and we had even less interaction with my siblings. On several occasions we attended family reunions in my heritage home of Soumi, Minnesota where annual Finnish lessons became a treat the daughters eagerly anticipated, but these lessons went without reinforcement as my Finnish was limited to gently scolding and bed-time phrases. Ironically, although Beijing was nearly 7,000 miles from our home, connections to the Chinese side of the family were stronger. Pópo (፠፠) visited the United States twice. The first time, when Jennifer was a baby, she stayed for six months. The second time, when Jessica was born, she stayed for a full year. As she speaks no English, these were times of intensive Chinese input for our daughters. Additionally, the girls attended a school for Chinese children on Sunday afternoons in Boston for two years where they sang traditional children's songs, learned folk dances, wrote Chinese characters in calligraphic form, and practiced heritage art forms like watercolor painting. Even though the children were at the school to study Chinese language and culture, they interacted with each other in English, using Chinese only with teachers in classrooms. When a retired teacher from China moved to our town and initiated her own class, 29

Barron-Hauwaert (2004) credits Maurice Grammont, a French linguist, with originating this approach in 1902. 30 Portes and Hao (1998) 31 De Houwer (2007)

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Jennifer and Jessica transferred there. This class was more academic, focusing mostly on the acquisition of Chinese characters and the reading and recitation of famous children's poetry and prose. All the Chinese families in our social network sent their children to this class as well, and families from this group would often get together for dinner, so many of the children became close friends. Even though all the children could speak Chinese, they used English to converse amongst themselves, and shifted into Chinese only when their parents forced them to demonstrate their knowledge of the language for other adults. As part of our desire to endue our children with strong connections to their Chinese heritage both daughters have returned to China at least once every two years, typically staying between one and three months. Our oldest daughter took her first trip to China when she was two. When she left, she spoke a few words and phrases in both English and Chinese with a tendency to speak more Chinese with Yuan and more English with me, but without complete control in her language choices. When she returned to the United States after three months, she spoke no English whatsoever. Two years later, both daughters went to China for three months and both came back speaking English. When I remarked on this, Yuan assured me that the girls had spoken in Chinese to family and friends, but always addressed each other in English.32

Authoritative Bilingual Parenting We took several steps to surround our daughters with a language-rich environment. Our joint parenting style could be classified as authoritative,33 though Yuan is much more authoritative than I. If Amy Chua is a tiger, Yuan might be a lynx, while I am more of a tabby cat. I bring this into the discussion because some researchers like Steven Chen and his colleagues report that authoritative parenting style "confers benefits for children’s adjustment"34 and that authoritative parenting can help to bridge language differences between immigrant parents and their English-speaking offspring. At various times in my daughters' development, I have questioned the value of the authoritative approach, but the end results very much indicate the efficacy of an authoritative style – at least if academic success is the goal. In addition to the language 32

This follows Montrul's (2010) observation that heritage language siblings tend to speak in the language of their peers more than in the heritage language. 33 In Chen et al.'s (2014) terms, "characterized by high warmth and high control/demandingness." 34 Chen et al. (2014: 198)

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concerns which are the primary focus here, and thanks solely to Yuan’s efforts, both of our daughters knew their addition and multiplication tables before they entered kindergarten, both played classical piano for 10 years and took cello lessons for 3 or 4 years. Both have scored in the top one percent on every standardized test they have taken and reside at the top of their respective classes. Jessica found it very annoying in second grade when she had to respond orally to timed multiplication problems. Having memorized these tables in Chinese, she found it time consuming and frustrating to translate the numbers into English so her teacher could understand.35 My role in all of this has been to reserve some time for fun, though I acknowledge that even in the fun there have typically been elements of language development. Around the house, our daughters interacted with neighborhood kids solely in English but watched television and listened to audio books36 in both English and Chinese. Television viewing was limited to two hours per day: one hour in each language, and while audiobooks were available without limits, our daughters tended to listen to them only in the company of a parent. Yuan and I both encouraged reading in any language (including the viewing of picture books).37 Yuan made friends with the local librarians as she would take the girls to the library every week to check out the full limit of books on two library cards. As Jennifer and Jessica grew older, I encouraged reading for pleasure while Yuan enforced reading school-related texts. Together Yuan and I nurtured our girls’ love for games, including both board games and card games, even if the only relation to language was the conversation that surrounds them. We also encouraged riddles and tongue twisters in both English and Chinese. Now, as teenagers, both of our daughters enjoy watching Chinese soap operas–some of which extend to more than 40 hours of drama. They claim that watching the shows (all of which include closed captioning)38 had a significant impact on their acquisition of Chinese characters. Here again, we stumbled onto something that researchers suggest is good for language development. Rodgers,39 for example, found that closed captioning aids 35

Cf. Ameel, et al. (2009) for a tangential but interesting discussion on semantic domain in bilinguals internal lexicons. 36 Cf. Au, et al. (2014) for a discussion of the impact of audio-books on acquired pronunciation in English and Chinese. 37 See Krashen (1993) for discussion on the benefits of voluntary and sustained reading. 38 All Chinese videos are closed captioned so that speakers of the many different spoken varieties of Chinese can understand the dialog. 39 Rodgers (2013)

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English language learners' comprehension of difficult television episodes. Additionally, Winke and her colleagues40 found mixed results as they tracked eye movements of native English learners of Chinese watching closed captioned videos. Winke’s findings may well derive from the unfamiliarity of the written style, the lexical density41 of the Chinese characters, and the difficulty of connecting the written and spoken messages. Jennifer and Jessica, however, approach Chinese videos with aural comprehension and long-term familiarity with Chinese characters. Hence, their use of closed captioning may be more similar to native English speakers’ use of captions with a challenging English language video.42 Despite all the attention to Chinese in our home, our daughters' English remains significantly stronger than their Chinese. Still, they appreciate the benefits of bilingualism to such a degree that both of them are determined to learn other languages as well. Again we stumbled into a fortuitous situation. Our elementary school incorporated German language instruction beginning with the second grade. Even though neither Yuan nor I could interact with Jennifer and Jessica in German, and even though their language instruction was limited to one hour per week, both retain some knowledge of German, and both maintain that this experience had positive effects on their attitude toward formal language learning. They did, however, conspire to use German against us as their secret language in retaliation for our use of Japanese to discuss topics we did not want them understand. During this time, I also introduced them to words and phrases in Spanish, telling them that if they could speak English, Chinese, and Spanish, they would cover the world's three most commonly spoken languages.43 As fate would have it, our school district cut world languages from the middle school curriculum in the year my oldest daughter was to attend, leaving both daughters with a two-year break from German before languages became available again in high school. Both daughters chose to study Spanish in high school instead of German and have excelled in its study. Jennifer has already been to Nicaragua twice on humanitarian trips and plans to return again soon. Jessica is planning a future trip there as well.

40

Winke, et al. (2013) Chinese has a high lexical density because each orthographic symbol denotes its own unique meaning. 42 Kruger & Steyn (2014) explore the impact of subtitles on native speakers viewing of academic lectures. 43 Lewis (2009) 41

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Languages seem to have ensconced themselves in my daughters’ blood. Jennifer is now in college, taking Chinese for Heritage Language Speakers,44 and planning to minor in both Chinese and Spanish. She has not yet finalized a career plan, but is considering an international aspect of Public Policy with related internships abroad in both China and Latin America. Our younger daughter is still in high school, but loves Spanish and plans to take every Spanish class available to her. Her future plans include working for the Department of State at embassies around the world as she continues to add languages to her linguistic repertoire. First on her languages-to-learn-after-high-school list is Japanese; she looks forward to taking away the secret-keeping ability Yuan and I have used so regularly across the years.45 Yuan and I are now considering the study of Esperanto so that we can keep some of our conversations private.

Mixing Languages Do not get the impression that linguistic peace and tranquility reigns in our house. Our home communication modes were in flux 20 years ago and remain complex and jumbled today. Earlier, I described the Japanese Yuan and I used in the early stages of our parenthood as an idiosyncratic pidgin. Today, I would apply the same term to our home language overall. Yuan speaks to me mostly in Chinese. I respond mostly in English, but with a healthy dose of Chinese and a smattering of Japanese. For serious discussions, we still use Japanese to ensure we communicate on equal footing. Both Yuan and I speak to our daughters most often in English. For serious discussions with the girls, or when she is upset (at any of us), Yuan switches to Chinese. Both Jennifer and Jessica generally respond in English to their mom regardless of the language she uses–unless they are upset with her in which case Chinese tends to be their language of choice as well. I rather enjoy speaking to my girls in Chinese, but they often complain that my horrible pronunciation in Chinese hurts their ears. I also use Spanish on occasion and often unintentionally blend Japanese into my

44 Cf. Li & Duff (2008) for discussion of college-level Chinese for Heritage speakers. 45 Cf. Kirsch 2006 for mention of parents employing their knowledge of languages to keep secrets from their children and children's increased desire to learn these languages.

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conversations as well.46 Yesterday, after seeing an annoyed look on Jessica’s face, I stopped to think about the sentence I had just uttered, "ࡉ ࡁࡢfig tree࡜fish water㒔⋑һҶ." In discussing how much my back had healed following an injury, I referred to carrying a five-gallon bucket full of water from our aquarium in the repotting of a fig tree. I started in Japanese: ࡉࡁࡢ (sakino) is used to refer to something that happened before. I then conjoined two English terms with ࡜ (to), the Japanese equivalent of and. I finished the sentence with a Chinese collocation: 㒔⋑ һҶ (dǀu méi shì le), "all no problem."47 Despite my jumbled lexical choices, Jessica got the overall message as she said, “That’s great Dad” with a roll of her eyes. Despite my penchant for jumbling languages (Yuan tends to mix her languages less than I do), neither Jennifer nor Jessica mixes their linguistic codes frequently.48 Still, some nonce blending of Chinese and English is evident in our home. One example appears in collocations like "close the light" instead of "turn off the light." Other more overt language play emerges in Jennifer calling me ⡨⡨ (bàba = daddy) and addressing me in text messages with the numbers 88 which are pronounced bƗba: varying from ⡨⡨ only in one shifted tone on the first vowel. As convoluted as this seems, intentional linguistic play of this sort abounds in our home. Unintentional linguistic variation is much less common in my daughters’ speech. Jennifer and Jessica use English almost exclusively between themselves. Exceptions occur when they are reliving a shared memory from China and when they elect to keep a secret from non-Chinese speakers in their proximity. Both daughters assert that it is rude to speak in languages that others in hearing distance do not understand, but both daughters engage in the activity on occasion, nonetheless. Both daughters also report dreaming in Chinese, and the younger one can sometimes be heard speaking Chinese in her sleep. Today, Jessica has only one close Chinese-speaking friend at school, and they use Chinese between themselves mostly when someone has been rude to them. Jennifer, now in college, has much more exposure to Chinese around campus. She admits to eavesdropping on occasion and finds the reaction of Chinese natives 46 The decision of which language to speak is typically subconscious. See Gumperz (1982) for a discussion of the subconscious nature of language selection by bilinguals. 47 See Myers-Scotton, (1998 & 2001) for close examination of intrasentential codeswitching structure. 48 Genesee (1989) observes that children who are frequently exposed to codemixing nonetheless tend to keep their own codes distinct.

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mildly amusing when she addresses them in their own language because, as she puts it, "they don't expect halfies49 to understand or be proficient in Chinese in any way." She further notes, however, that while it is natural to speak with her mother in Chinese, it is much more difficult in the classroom or with native-speaking Chinese friends.

Applications: From Our Home to Yours While each family situation varies by nature, some elements from our story may generalize to your home. In this closing section, I summarize key points from the chapter and highlight connections with Second Language Acquisition research in the hope that you may find some nuggets of value to apply to your own home situation or even your research agenda. Kirsch, in exploring language use in trilingual Luxembourg, observes that even in that linguistically diverse society, the children in her study were able to make use of "authentic situations of communication [only] if they felt competent, confident, had strong communicative needs and did not feel under pressure to perform.”50 I would echo these sentiments.51 Self-confidence and opportunities to employ skills in real-life situations are strong indicators of success. These alone, however, rarely seem sufficient. Many other replicable factors appear to have contributed to our daughters' bilingualism. First, start early. Research now indicates that mothers' speech during the pre-natal period impacts the manner in which infants perceive sounds.52 Second, intentionally and overtly celebrate language and culture. Parents' use of53 and attitudes toward54 languages impact children's language acquisition. Third, without the formal support of peer-reviewed research, I suggest you exhibit love for languages and cultures worldwide. For my final point, I take issue with Lanza55 who suggests that bilingual parents should carefully control their language 49

Half Chinese, half Caucasian. This is a quasi-translation from Chinese where mixed-blood is used. More polite conversationalists typically use the term ABCs (American Born Chinese) which includes both “halfies” and children of two Chinese parents. 50 Kirsch (2006: 272) 51 And I would echo them not only with regard to language, but with sports, music, and mathematics as well. 52 Kandhadai, et al. (2014) 53 Montrul, et al., (2014); Yu (2014) 54 Montrul (2010); Polinisky & Kagen (2007) 55 Lanza (1992)

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choices in order to limit the mixing of languages in their children's discourse. While Lanza’s findings, completed in the early 90s, were refuted within six years,56 the message remains popular57 and perhaps damaging. In fact, mixing languages is a healthy part of language development for bilingual children.58 Greene and his co-researchers suggest that mingling languages is not only natural for a bilingual individual, but that "[b]ilinguals with lexical access in two languages code-mix as a beneficial strategy to optimize bi-directional knowledge to bridge lexical gaps, provide translation equivalents or implement singleword borrowings."59 For my family, at least, code mixing also enables cross-linguistic play that serves to reinforce language development. While the social forces opposing bilingualism in the United States remain strong, the demonstrated social, cognitive, and long-term health benefits make bilingualism worth the cost. In their seminal text Learning Strategies in Second Language Acquisition, O'Malley and Chamot observe “motivation is probably the most important characteristic that students bring to a learning task.”60 I suggest the same holds true for raising bilingual children. I confess: I stumbled a great deal along the path, but somehow despite our lack of intentional planning, Yuan and I have raised bilingual daughters and look forward to instilling a love for languages in our grandchildren. Perhaps we will introduce them to Esperanto so we can keep secrets together from their parents!

Works Cited Ameel, Eef, Barbara C. Malt, Gert Storms, and Fons Van Assche. 2009. "Semantic convergence in the bilingual lexicon."Journal of memory and language 60: 270-290. Au, Terry Kit-Fong, et al. 2014. "Can non-interactive language input benefit young second-language learners?" Journal of Child Language: 1-28. Bhatia, Tej K., and William C. Ritchie. 2012. Eds. The handbook of bilingualism and multilingualism. John Wiley & Sons. Barron-Hauwaert, Suzanne. 2004. Language strategies for bilingual families: The one-parent-one-language approach. Multilingual Matters. 56

Nicoladis & Genesee (1998) e.g. Mishina-Mori (2011); Yu (2014) 58 Lui (2004) 59 Green et, al (2013: 36) 60 O'Malley and Chamot (1990: 160) 57

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Bialystok, Ellen, et al. 2004. "Bilingualism, aging, and cognitive control: evidence from the Simon task." Psychology and aging 19: 290-303. Chen, Stephen H., Michelle Hua, Qing Zhou, Annie Tao, Erica H. Lee, Jennifer Ly, and Alexandra Main. 2014. "Parent–child cultural orientations and child adjustment in Chinese American immigrant families." Developmental Psychology 50: 189-201. Chua, Amy. 2011. Battle hymn of the tiger mother. Bloomsbury. Cummins, Jim. 1982. "Tests, achievement, and bilingual students." Focus 9: 1-7. Dubois, Betty Lou, and Guadalupe Valdes. 1980. "Mexican-American child bilingualism: double deficit?" Bilingual Review/La Revista Bilingüe: 1-7. Durán, Richard P. "Directions in the assessment of linguistic minorities. 2013. In "Assessment in Higher Education: Issues of Access, Quality, Student Development and Public Policy. Samuel J. Messick (ed.): 193202. Genesee, Fred. 1989. "Early bilingual development: One language or two." Journal of Child Language 16: 161-179. Greene, Kai J., Elizabeth D. Peña, and Lisa M. Bedore. 2013. "Lexical choice and language selection in bilingual preschoolers." Child Language Teaching and Therapy 29: 27-39. Grinevald, Colette. 2003. "Speakers and documentation of endangered languages." Language documentation and description 1: 52-72. Gumperz, John Joseph. 1982. Discourse strategies. 1. Cambridge University Press. Hyltenstam, Kenneth, and Christopher Stroud. 1993. "Second language regression in Alzheimer’s dementia." Progression and regression in language: 222-242. Kandhadai, Padmapriya, D. Kyle Danielson, and Janet F. Werker. 2014. "Culture as a binder for bilingual acquisition." Trends in Neuroscience and Education. King, Kendall A., Lyn Fogle, and Aubrey LoganǦTerry. 2008. "Family language policy." Language and Linguistics Compass 2: 907-922. King, Kendall A., and Alison Mackey. 2007. The bilingual edge: Why, when, and how to teach your child a second language. New York: Collins. Kirsch, Claudine. 2006. "Young children learning languages in a multilingual context." International Journal of Multilingualism 3: 258279. Kovács, Ágnes Melinda. 2012. "Early bilingualism and theory of mind: Bilinguals’ advantage in dealing with conflicting mental representations."

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Access to language and cognitive development, in Michael Siegal & Luca Surian (eds). Oxford: Oxford University: 192-218. Kovács, Ágnes Melinda, and Jacques Mehler. 2009. "Flexible learning of multiple speech structures in bilingual infants." Science 325.5940: 611612. Krashen, Stephen D. 1993. The power of reading: Insights from the research. Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited. —. 1982. Principles and practice in second language acquisition. Pergamon: Oxford. Kruger, JanǦLouis, and Faans Steyn. 2014. "Subtitles and Eye Tracking: Reading and Performance." Reading Research Quarterly 49: 105-120. Lanza, Elizabeth. "Can bilingual two-year-olds code-switch?" Journal of child language 19 (1992): 633-633. Lawless, Laura K. (n.d.). What is Fluency? French Language. Retrieved April 8, 2014, from: http://french.about.com/library/weekly/aa072701b.htm. Lewis, M. Paul. 2009. Ethnologue: Languages of the world 9. Dallas, TX: SIL international. Li, David. 1997. "Borrowed identity: Signaling involvement with a Western name." Journal of Pragmatics 28: 489-513. Li, Duanduan, and Patricia Duff. 2008. "Issues in Chinese heritage language education and research at the postsecondary level." Chinese as a heritage language: Fostering rooted world citizenry: 13-36. Lui, Faniel. 2004. "Language use of a trilingual child in Hong Kong in her solitary pretend play and her interaction with her parents." PhD diss., University of Hong Kong. Malakoff, Marguerite and Kenji Hakuta. 1990. "History of language minority education in the United States." Bilingual education: Issues and strategies: 27-43. Meisel, Jürgen M. 2001. "The simultaneous acquisition of two ¿rst languages." Trends in bilingual acquisition. Jasone Cenoz, Fred Genesee (eds). John Benjamins: 11-42. Mishina-Mori, Satomi. 2011. "A longitudinal analysis of language choice in bilingual children: The role of parental input and interaction." Journal of Pragmatics 43: 3122-3138. Montrul, Silvina. 2010. "Current issues in heritage language acquisition." Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 30: 3-23. Montrul, Silvina, Justin Davidson, Israel De La Fuente, and Rebecca Foote. 2014. "Early language experience facilitates the processing of gender agreement in Spanish heritage speakers." Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 17: 1-21.

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Myers-Scotton, Carol. 1998. "A way to dusty death: The Matrix Language turnover hypothesis." Endangered languages: Language loss and community response: 289. —. 2001. "The matrix language frame model: Development and responses." Trends in linguistics studies and monographs (Rodolfo Jacobson, ed.) 126: 23-58. Nicoladis, Elena, and Fred Genesee. 1998. "Parental discourse and codemixing in bilingual children." International Journal of Bilingualism 2: 85-99. O'malley, J. Michael, and Anna Uhl Chamot. 1990. Learning strategies in second language acquisition. Cambridge University Press. Polinsky, Maria, and Olga Kagan. 2007. "Heritage languages: In the ‘wild’ and in the classroom." Language and Linguistics Compass 1: 368-395. Raguenaud, Virginie. 2009. Bilingual by choice: Raising kids in two (or more!) languages. Nicholas Brealey. Rodgers, Michael Patrick Hindley. 2013. English language learning through viewing television: An investigation of comprehension, incidental vocabulary acquisition, lexical coverage, attitudes, and captions. PhD diss., Victoria University of Wellington. Rodriguez, Armando. 1968. "Bilingual Education." Paper presented at the Conference on Educational Opportunities for the Mexican-American. ERIC Document #: 023 492: 1-14. Ryan, W. 1971. Blaming the victim. New York: Random House. United States Department of Education. 1970. DHEW memo regarding language minority children. Retrieved from http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/lau1970.html. Winke, Paula, Susan Gass, and Tetyana Sydorenko. 2013. "Factors Influencing the Use of Captions by Foreign Language Learners: An EyeǦTracking Study." The Modern Language Journal 97: 254-275. Yu, Shanjiang. 2014. "The Immediate Effect of Parental Language Choice on that of their Children's Language in Chinese Migrant Families." Taiwan Journal of Linguistics 12.

CHAPTER FIVE A CASE STUDY OF TWO NON-HERITAGE SIMULTANEOUS SPANISH-ENGLISH BILINGUAL CHILDREN IN ALABAMA DAVID ZUWIYYA

As a parent who has assumed the role of minority-language teacher in Spanish, hearing one’s children speak in the majority language— English—sometimes triggers a sense of disillusionment and shortcoming. It is not that they speak it poorly, or that their Southern drawl does not reflect my accent as parent. Quite the contrary, these feelings derive from their perfect native speech in the majority language, with little trace of the Hispanic accent that they possessed during their daycare years (3-4 yrs. old) and which a tutor could relish as proof that his pupils were thoroughly Hispanicized, as far as language was concerned. Both my spouse and I were born and raised in mainstream AngloAmerican culture and work as Spanish instructors. The decision to raise our children in Spanish has been life-transforming for us as Yankee parents and at the same time a harbinger of unpredictability. Foreseen were the awkward moments we would experience with relatives from New York State and Minnesota, and friends from Alabama and Georgia. As non-native speakers of Spanish, we also were aware of our own language limitations and anticipated the need to continually expand our lexicon to cover the objects that fill a nursery whose nomenclature is not covered in formal schooling. More difficult to foresee was the explosion of new knowledge and vocabulary acquired through English that the eldest child would bring home after weeks and months in a kindergarten environment that proved to be as stimulating as the home. We were too ingenuous to see how quickly the schooling would impact our Spanish-language island as its effects influenced the younger sibling through adoration and competitiveness. Around the time the elder child turned six, the dominant

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culture was seeping into our minority-language enclave1 like air through the cracks in our old doors and windows and presented a challenge to our plan, which was to provide a rich linguistic environment in the home that would captivate the children’s attention and one to which they would willingly return after immersion in an English-speaking school setting. We were also unaware of linguistic and developmental dangers pointed out by researchers such as the low self-esteem the children might develop as speakers of a minority language (Montrul, 2013, p. 28); or smaller vocabulary and slower recall of words and objects as mentioned by Bialystok (2010). Moreover, Macnamara (1966) suggested that bilingualism may even impair a child’s ability to solve mathematical word problems. Furthermore, whereas one reads that English-language schooling of bilingual children in the United States quickly makes English the more dominant language (Bialystok, 2010, p.122), it is hard to imagine as a person involved in minority-language parenting how many times one has to pretend not to understand a child’s request or comment because it is made in the “wrong” language. In my role as language tutor, I am aware that the speak-English door must remain closed to keep that linguistic switch from being flipped, even when the effort required seems like piling sand bags against the sea. However, in my capacity as partner, I am conscious that life is fluid and people are not made of stone. So what happens when one parent begins to listen when the child speaks in English (as happened just before the elder child began kindergarten), and in so doing sets in motion a linguistic restructuring of the home from which there is no return? Is there a way forward in the child’s bilingual upbringing or is this the end? We are now seven years into the simultaneous bilingual education of two children whom we will call Chris and Jeff—now five and seven years old, respectively—and who still speak Spanish approximately 20-120 minutes every day. This paper seeks to lay out some of the difficulties we, as English-native parents, encountered in raising our children in Spanish in the USA and to document some of our successes in their minoritylanguage acquisition as they move toward the “critical mass” hypothesized

1

See J. Maher’s comments on language learning in an enclave context, “A Crosslinguistic Study of Language Contact and Language Attrition” in First Language Attrition, eds. Herbert W. Seliger and Robert M. Vago, Cambridge UP, 1991, pp.67-84. Here, p.67. Her comments apply to the subjects of this study, except that nobody in our home is a native-speaker, or has heritage ties to the minority culture.

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by Marchman and Bates (1994)2 and internalize Spanish for lifelong benefits before attrition sets in, because inasmuch as infancy is the perfect time to acquire a second language, it is also the perfect time to forget one (Montrul, 2013, p.220). At the same time, this paper will propose some concrete strategies for success in staying the course. At times, my remarks may seem like obvious parenting norms to those who have raised kids, but language instruction and parenting are arguably very much related.

Method The idea for this study emerged from a conference paper on bilingualism,3 for which I made daily observations of the children’s speech for five months. Although I did not regularly record or videotape our children’s speech, I wrote down their production when certain speech features seemed to mark progress or lack thereof in determined linguistic areas. The strength of the study ultimately derives from the regular contact with the children over a long period of time.

Background Both the children spoke Spanish before English. Their monolingual English daycare teachers expressed concern when they were between 2-3 years old that they did not speak English. But by the time the elder one was three and a half (3;6) his teachers ceased to worry about his knowledge of English. The children also received input in English from monolingual grandparents. Given their exposure to both languages from birth, they would be characterized as simultaneous rather than sequential language learners. The children’s first words were in Spanish: my elder one, Jeff’s was ceite for aceite [olive oil], and Chris’s was avi for avión [airplane]. We also documented the first English words they brought home from the daycare, which they both started at six months. At home the children always heard mamá and papá, but one day the elder child came home with Mommy, and soon after, Daddy (but the author refused to respond to the latter and is still Papá). In the context of the home, the kids receive input from us exclusively in Spanish and we take them to Spain 2 Montrul (2013) states similarly that the monolingual child needs to surpass a threshold of development in his or her mother tongue that will endow the speaker with a degree of cognitive and linguistic maturity in order to stave of language attrition upon entering majority language schooling (p.209). 3 SAMLA, Atlanta, 2013.

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every summer for two to four weeks, which gives them a tremendous Spanish boost. But at home there is also English-language radio, television/media, and their mother has always done bedtime prayers in English. My spouse and I speak to one another in Spanish in the presence of the children, but sometimes when the kids are not around we speak English. Occasionally, when she is playing with the kids, my spouse gets into a mood where she code-switches, such as in “puedes mover tu ‘pawn’” [you can move your pawn] in reference to the chess piece. This brings up an important point: whereas a purist might insist that there is a perfectly good word in Spanish for the chess pawn, a more open mind recognizes that one must respect the partner’s decisions about his/her relationship with the kids. A rather dramatic though predictable example of this came when our minority-language enclave was on the verge of collapse. I say predictable because Montrul and Potowski (2007) explain that after ages three to four, very often language shift occurs in the home as well, such that a family that used a minority language predominantly at home begins to use the majority language more as the children socialize with majority languagespeaking peers and begin to use the majority language with their siblings. This shift in language use can significantly affect the stability of the L1 system acquired in early childhood” (p.303).

About the time the elder child was 5;6, I was in Spain directing a study abroad program, and my spouse arrived to join me after a separation of three weeks. She was flanked on either side with the kids and she warned me that Jeff had begun speaking to her in English. She said that she had tried to resist, but as I understand it, the maternal commitment to give unconditionally to her child was and continues to be stronger than the selfdiscipline needed to play deaf. Pretending not to hear your child when she/he speaks to you in your own language creates an essentially artificial or contrived separation between you and your child. Eventually, my initial fear that our linguistic experiment was over did not materialize because the new pattern became that she continued to speak to them in Spanish, while receiving responses in English. In contrast, I am more hard-headed, and the kids get a resounding “¿qué? ” [what?], which they know very well and which obliges them to repeat themselves in Spanish. We went through a period (elder child 6-7 years old) when this scene played out all the time, every day. They had to be forced to “say it in Spanish.” More recently, (elder child 7;6), there has emerged an understanding that, with Papá, Spanish is a must. Looking forward, I am aware that maybe one day the children will get tired of repeating themselves and find it easier to not

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speak to Papá at all. To avoid this potential alienation, the adult should always endeavor to have things to say that are worthwhile. So what kind of language skills do these simultaneous, semi-bilingual, non-heritage, enclave speakers have? I will concentrate on Spanish, because they both have been in an English-only school environment since they were six months old, and their teachers indicate they speak English as well as or better than their peers.

Agreement in Gender and Number I have observed no problems with number agreement. Spanish’s plural markers are easy and similar to English. With respect to gender, my children rarely make mistakes of gender agreement between articles, adjectives, and regular nouns that end in “o” or “a.” For example, Chris at 4;8 comes running inside and says “El halcón está y quiere comer la gallina vieja. Yo la intenté poner dentro para que no puede4 cogerla” [The hawk is outside and wants to eat the old hen. I tried to put her in but I was unable to catch her]. Or referring to a letter on the keyboard, Chris asks “¿Esto es una ‘p’?” [Is this a “p”?], which demonstrates that he is aware that the letters are feminine. With other noun-endings such as –ión, sometimes my younger one will not make proper agreement, as in “¿Oíste mi canción? Es muy largo”5 [Did you hear my song? It is very long; 4;10]. In the same context, when prompted, my older one says “esa canción es muy buena” [That song is very good; 6;10]. At the same age, my little one also confused gender in English, as he did not distinguish between “he” and “she.” My older one is also better at nouns that require a different article than predicted: el sofá, el agua, la radio, whereas with these words, I have heard his brother say la sofá, la agua and el radio (but he does say la mano [the hand] as in “Papá, no señalaste con la mano” [You did not give a hand signal] when I was biking.) He also knows that la bici is feminine as in “Ahora estoy acostumbrado a esta bici” [now I am used to this bike]. The degree to which my older child possesses a genuine awareness of gender is demonstrated by the fact that one day he corrected me: I said, “Dame otro” [give me another one] referring to a galleta [cookie], and he said, “No papá, otra, es una galleta.” If the role model produces irregular gender agreement on occasion, a bright child can potentially surpass him in mastery of this function of language.

4 5

Correct here would be “no pudiera”. The correct form here would be “larga.”

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Verbs Indicative-Subjunctive My seven-year-old learned the subjunctive when he was three by virtue of pure intuition. I remember him seeming to make mental notes of the verb sounds after para que, hasta que, a menos que, cuando etc. With a somewhat different personality, to this day my younger one (5;6) rarely produces the subjunctive, despite my repeating it back to him over and over. However, I noted that at 5;3, referring to his favorite teaching assistant at preschool, he said correctly: No le digas eso cuando entremos [Don’t tell her that when we go inside]. And just recently, he was tired of walking and told his brother: Busca una mesa que tenga silla [Look for a table with a chair]. On this occasion, they code-switched to Spanish because we were in an entirely Spanish-speaking environment. Their usage of the present subjunctive is not surprising because Pérez-Leroux says that by age 3;3 Spanish native children have “no problem utilizing the subjunctive to refer to a past or a simultaneous event” (589). Other examples that I have documented from my older child at 6;10 are: .

Quiero que vengas conmigo [I want you to come with me] Quiero que estés conmigo (Compared to his younger brother at 4;10: Quiero que estás conmigo) [I want you to be with me] Cuando venga mamá [When mom gets here] Hasta que sea noche. [Until nightfall] En cuanto llegue [As soon as she comes] Also at 6;11, Jeff used the subjunctive in reference to a loose tooth. He observed that: Lo mejor es esperar hasta que caiga [It’s best to wait until it falls out]. At seven years old and immersed in an English-language environment in Alabama, he still uses the subjunctive appropriately, but not 100% of the time (as in one day at 6;11, he said: antes de que vienen [before they arrive]). Both kids produce the past subjunctive in its function of expressing what should have been done, as in Chris telling me: te hubieras puesto las botas [you should have put your boots on] because parents tell their kids what they should have done all the time. However, broadly speaking, these two kids do not use the past subjunctive regularly. Silva-Corvalán, in her study of two bilingual children of ages 5;1 and 5;6 also found that her subjects never produced the imperfect subjunctive (pp. 380-381). But there is hope because Silva-Corvalán suggests that it is possible for children in a

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context where they speak Spanish at home and English in kindergarten to display acquisition of subtle verb forms including the subjunctive, when they receive a wealth of input in the target language (p.381). She also stresses how important it is for kids to acquire complete systems of tense, mood, and aspect in Spanish by the time they are about to start kindergarten, to stave off the onset of language attrition once they confront the dominant language head-on in kindergarten (p.381).6 Imperative The language exchange between adults and children by nature includes a disproportionate number of commands when compared to other verbal moods. So it is not surprising that my kids consistently produce correct informal command forms in Spanish. Ven aquí [Come here]. Pásame la pelota [Pass me the ball]. Dámelo [Give it to me]. Mira [Look]. Abre [Open]. Toma [Hold this]. Also negative commands, No vengas [Don’t come], No me mires [Don’t look at me], which I noted when I caught my older child lying at 3;11. Chris to me: No le digas eso cuando entremos [Don’t tell her that when we go in; 5;3]. However, it should be mentioned that neither of my children has any mastery of formal imperatives, or formal language whatsoever. A thorough review of written notes and candid memory suggests that we have never heard either of them say Usted, which is the formal form for “you”, even though I sometimes use Usted with them when I am angry. Infinitives The relationship of the child to the infinitive is basic because with the infinitive the child gets what he or she wants. Thus, it is a verb form mastered early on and with deep roots. The examples I documented between 4;8-4;10 for Chris and 6;8-6;10 for Jeff follow: Chris: “Papá, ¿qué vamos a hacer ahora?” [Dad, what are we going to do now?] 6

For a review of the literature on the acquisition of subjunctive in L1 and Bilinguals as well as foreign language learners, see J.G. Collentine, "Development of Subjunctive and Complex-Syntactic Abilities among FL Spanish Learners." In B. Lafford and R. Salaberry (Eds.) Studies in Spanish Second Language Acquisition: the State of the Science. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2003.

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Chris: “Papá, ¿me puedes abotonar?” [Dad, can you button me up?] Chris: “Papá, es tu turno para vestirme.” [Dad, it is your turn to dress me.] Chris: “Papá, quiero medirme.” [Dad, I want to measure my height.] Chris: “Papá, estoy listo para salir.” [Dad, I am ready to leave.] Chris: “Vamos a ver qué pasa.” [Let us see what happens] Jeff: “Sshh, no puedo oír” [Quiet, I cannot hear.] Jeff, in response to my prompting him with, “Jeff, ¿qué vas a hacer? [Jeff, what are you going to do?] said: “Jugar” [Play]. Little difficulty with infinitives. Reflexives In conjunction with the Spanish imperative, the reflexives are an integral part of the linguistic discourse between parents and children. Sécate el pelo [dry your hair]. Lávate los pies [wash your feet]. Cepíllate los dientes [brush your teeth]. Vístete [get dressed]. Ponte los zapatos [put your shoes on], etc. It is no wonder that children assimilate these forms quickly. As an example of the degree to which the Spanish reflexive is internalized, I note the following example from Chris at 4;9: I say, “¿Quién sabe por qué no tocamos animales muertos?” [Who knows why we do not touch dead animals?] Chris responds: “Porque tienen enfermedades y te puedes enfermar.” [Because they have diseases and you can get sick.] Preterite and Imperfect According to Montrul (2002), most studies suggest that the preterite tense is in theory the default tense in Spanish, and is acquired first among the past tenses. L1 learners produce it for events associated with accomplishments and achievements early in language development; it appears in their speech initially before three years old. The imperfect tense emerges somewhat later in the context of description of activities and states (p.40). Whereas by 5;6, an L1 speaker uses both tenses, the application of the preterite to stative verbs7, and likewise the imperfect to

7

A stative verb is one that describes a state of being (such as “to sit”, “to stand”, “to see”, “to know”, “to be”, etc.), in contrast to a dynamic verb which describes an action.

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verbs expressing achievement comes with cognitive maturity a year or two later.8 The subjects of this study use the preterite and imperfect in line with these expectations. As early as 3;0, Chris announced from the bathroom, “Papá, ya terminé” [Dad, I am done]. I have noted that both kids prefer the simple preterite that is characteristic of American Spanish rather than the present perfect preferred in Peninsular Spanish in this context, which would be “He terminado” [I have finished]. When prompted with “¿Te has cepillado?” [Have you brushed] we hear back ¡Ya me cepillé![I already brushed]. In response to “¿Has hecho pipí?” [Have you gone to the bathroom?] we get “Ya hice” [I already did]. However, I did document on one occasion Chris (4;11) stating, “He comido todo, ¿puedo tener mi postre?” [I have eaten everything, can I have my dessert?] and more recently Jeff (7;9), “Lo oyes, una gallina ha puesto un huevo” [Can you hear that? A hen has laid an egg]. Most often, though, despite my repeating back to the kids in the present perfect, they are firmly grounded in a simple preterite vein, which I probably use more than I realize. Other examples are: Chris (4;9) “Mami, ¿qué es lo que hiciste con tu teléfono?” [Mom, what did you do with your telephone?] Chris (4;8): “Pensé que íbamos a la piscina” [I thought we were going to the pool]. Chris telling me he declined candy (4;10): “Le dije que no quería” [I told her I did not want any]. As an example of the use of the Spanish imperfect for indirect discourse, I cite Chris (4;10): “Papá, Mamá dijo que yo podía comprar esa bici con mi propio dinero.” [Dad, mom said that I could buy that bike with my own money]. Again here, with this language function, reporting what one parent has said to another, the child assimilates it easily by repeated use in the daily activity of the home and a vested interest in making a good argument. 8

For an in-depth discussion of the relationship between the preterite and imperfect tenses in Spanish, see Montrul (2002), pp.40-44. Compare also the results of the study of verb morphology pertaining to Spanish preterite vs. imperfect in SilvaCorvalán (2003: pp.386-390). The stages of acquisition of preterite vs. imperfect according to the Aspect Hypothesis are nicely summarized and commented in Costello and Shirai (p. 469) in W. Costello and Y. Shirai, "The Aspect Hypothesis, Defective Tense, and Obligatory Contexts: Comments on Haznedar, 2007." Second Language Research 27.4 (2011): 467-480.

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In the same way that L1 learners in a majority L1 context make errors with irregular verbs, these two L1 enclave learners make similar errors based on the tense patterns. They will say “La poní” instead of the correct form “La puse” [I put it] in reference to inserting a particular letter when spelling a word on the keyboard. Occasionally, I hear hací instead of the correct form hice [I did or I made]; “Podí” instead of pude (“no lo podí hacer”) [I was not able to do it]. Also “ya los traí” instead of los traje for bringing the chicken eggs, and no cabió for no cupo [it did not fit]. While we sometimes hear the correct preterite forms for irregular verbs, the regular patterns of conjugation are deeply ingrained and these young language learners do not seem inclined to abandon their mental templates just to please their parents. It may be that they need more reinforcement in the form of writing and peer feedback in a majority Spanish-language context. Pluperfect Due to the cognitive and linguistic complexity of compound tenses and the relative infrequency with which they occur in the input, U.S.-born bilinguals growing up in minority enclaves are slow to produce tenses such as the pluperfect, and in fact, may never produce them without formal instruction or immersion in a Spanish-language majority culture, as SilvaCorvalán suggests (p.395-396). It is not surprising then that I do not recall the subjects of this study ever producing the Spanish pluperfect.

Colloquial language Colloquial expressions make speaking the language fun and should be taken advantage of in the household. Hearing the children repeat them back is often quite entertaining: Chris (4;9): “Hombre, ¿qué dices?” [Dude, what are you saying?] Chris (4;11): “Papá una gallina está muerta, ¡de verdad!” [Dad, a chicken is dead, really!] Jeff (6;9): ¿Vas a estar con tus composiciones todo el santo día? [Are you going to be correcting compositions all the live-long day?] Jeff (6;11): (in reference to his brother’s status in karate) Ni pasó a cinturón verde todavía [He did not even move up to green belt yet]. Chris (5;0):(in reaction to my eternal search for the perfect car) Estoy hasta la madre con papá y los coches [I am fed up with Dad and his cars], and on another occasion, Hasta el techo con papá y los

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coches [I have it up to here (the ceiling) with Dad and his cars], and again, Estoy hasta el cielo con papá y los coches [I am fed up from here to heaven with Dad and his cars]. They are frighteningly quick to pick up cuss words: esta pinche cosa [this damn thing]. ¡Coño! [Fuck!] One must be extremely careful. But the good thing is that they also quickly forget the cuss words because they live in an enclave and do not hear them outside of the house. I have also noticed Chris using metaphoric language on occasion: With respect to his inability to put on his socks, Chris (4;4) said, Yo soy un iPhone Uno porque soy muy lento [I am an iPhone One (i.e., the 3G model), because I am so slow].

Pronunciation Neither of my children pronounces the Spanish rolling –rr- , despite the fact that my wife and I both have prompted them to pronounce it. Other consonants such as the elle [e.g., llamar], the eñe [e.g., niño], the yod of hierba, ya, llévame do not give them trouble. I remember Jeff started to pronounce the “h” as in mi habitación, which he heard somewhere. This erroneous pronunciation persisted for a long time and, as a frequent instructor of Spanish Phonetics, it irritated me to no end. On the whole, natives with whom they speak understand their speech, and one would say that their pronunciation is better than what you would expect from two simultaneous language learners growing up in a family unit enclave in Alabama. Other aspects of language, such as pronouns and prepositions, do not give these two subjects difficulty, probably because they hear them frequently in context. On the other hand, relative pronouns when they follow a preposition are linguistically complex and elude them, perhaps due to confusion from English (see below). However, I documented Chris (4;11) saying, Mira papá, son las horas puntas, por lo que ves allí [Look it is rush hour, because of what you see there], i.e., we see a long line at Papa John’s pizza.

Language Interference and Code-Switching Frequently, we hear sentences in which the children insert a recent acquisition in English, corroborating Volterra’s assertion that the context in which children learn the word first strongly influences the child (pp.317-318). For example,

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Chris (4;8): Ese Big Papi Ortiz va a pegar un homerun [That Big Papi Ortiz is going to hit a homerun, instead of Spanish jonrón]. Jeff (6;10): Vamos a escuchar música [Let’s listen to music] with an English ‘mew-si-ca’ pronunciation, just after leaving school. Jeff (6;11): Pones tus battleships en la tabla y el otro tiene que adivinar donde están [You put your battleships on the board and the other guy has to guess where they are]. Sometimes English interferes with the boys’ Spanish sentence structure, such as when Chris asked (4;10), Papá, ¿Qué es esto para? [Dad, what is this for?] Here the preposition should have been placed at the beginning of the sentence. Similarly, Chris asked (4;11), No es eso lo que quería hablar de [That is not what I want to talk about.] In this case, the preposition belonged before the relative pronoun. However many times I repeat back to them the sentence with proper syntax, it does not sink in. They will likely need formal instruction to overcome this syntactic barrier. Similarly, we notice that Spanish corrupts the boys’ English9, as in the following examples: 1. Chris: (4;7) Mami can you acuest me, please. (acostar=put to bed) 2. Chris: (4;7) The hip of my bike is broken (confusing cadena=chain for cadera=hip) 3. Jeff: (6;9) Mom, hurry up and arranc the car (arrancar=start up) 4. Chris: (4; 11) Mom, did you go to the bank to get the tickets to pay for the bike (confusing billetes= bills/cash for billete=plane ticket) Inserting words from a second language into a speech utterance is one manifestation of code-switching, and according to Poplack (1980), codeswitching is an integral part of bilingualism. She says that the degree to which the inserted word(s) is integrated phonologically, morphologically, and syntactically into the base language characterizes the depth of knowledge of the speaker in both languages (p.584). In the terminology put forward by Volterra, these types of lexical exchanges, errors, and interference are characteristic of Stage Two bilingualism, where the child can “generalize his/her lexicon and switch between languages” but not move between the languages with the same fluidity at the syntactic level (p.320).

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I have not documented cases of this occurring when they are with their friends, but I suspect their English speech is similar in that context as well.

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As simultaneous language speakers, the subjects must decide which language to use when speaking to someone. When we are abroad in Spain, the kids have little difficulty in addressing people in Spanish. I remember walking with my older son in the street in Madrid when he (7;6) commented that “todo el mundo habla español aquí” [Everyone here speaks Spanish]. He was contrasting what he experienced in the USA, where some people speak Spanish, with the overwhelming Spanish presence in the Spanish capital. In the home, the children speak to their mother in English and their father in Spanish, for the reasons discussed above. With my Hispanic colleagues in the office, they have sufficient sensibility to speak to them in Spanish. With non-Hispanic colleagues who also teach Spanish, the children have to probe to find out which language to use, as in the case in which Chris (4;11) asks a non-Hispanic colleague: “What did you have for lunch?” Failing to catch what the boy said, my colleague responded, “What?” Chris switched to Spanish: “¿Qué comiste tú para el almuerzo? [What did you have for lunch?].

Techniques that work and behaviors that do not The process of gathering examples of your children’s speech causes you to become self-aware and reflective about your relationship with your children. In my case, I recognize that the transition from being childless to father-of-two is slow with many lapses into selfish behaviors that must be abandoned in favor of an orientation that is child-centered. My old self desires to be involved in goal-oriented projects: to lay tile, to build a shed, to build a chicken coop, to plant apple trees, to till the garden, to fix the bikes. My kids always start out interested in these projects and participate with me, but then, as I need to make progress, to get something done, the kids get in the way. Soon they hear “No”, then get distracted, and wander off. So what begins as the perfect father-son project ends with papá standing in the yard alone, which is maybe what an over-achiever really wants. But my completion of home projects does not lead to Spanish language skills, because no longer do my kids speak Spanish with their mother, or to each other. If they are to maintain and grow in their Spanish, it has to be with me. Thus the time I have to dedicate to projects is limited. Besides home improvement, another pastime of mine has been to listen to news and radio talk shows on NPR, which has always kept me very well informed and engaged in the world, and generally happy. However, an Oye, baja la voz quiero escuchar esto [hey, quiet. I want to listen to this] does not help to bridge the gap between my world and my children’s world. Hence my radio is often silent now.

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As I began to gather my data for this study, I realized that the only way my kids would continue to maintain their Spanish was if I found more ways to engage them beyond serving breakfast, getting them dressed, bathing them at night and reading a story before bed. And passive input such as from Spanish-language television, movies, and music would not be sufficient. The responsibility was both frightening and empowering. I realized that the act of carrying out a study to document their language proficiency would require me to be more present in my children’s lives. The double effect would be that I would be closer to them, and their speaking skills would become stronger. In order to broaden their knowledge of Spanish beyond the mundane vocabulary associated with the kitchen, the bedroom, and the bathroom, my first intentional language-learning task was to teach Chris (4;9) Spanish related to vaccination through dialogue as we prepared to go for our seasonal flu shot: he got la vacuna [vaccine], la gripe [flu], la jeringa [syringe], la inyección [injection], etc. And we shared this with his brother (6;9), and his interest too was piqued. They were drawn in because the flu had hit them hard the previous year, and their personal investment in the topic helped them to assimilate this new vocabulary in context. Furthermore, not just the words, but the concepts came to them in Spanish before English, which should provide long-term mastery of the words. Subsequently, I came up with the crazy idea to involve the kids in resolving a pest control issue in our home: we had a mysterious invasion of flies. In this case, I had to reset my normal reserved personality in order to fully grab the kids’ attention. There were dozens of flies congregating in a corner of the kitchen. My plan was to catch the flies one-by-one, tag them with fingernail polish, release them outside, and study whether or not they were re-entering the house. Both kids were very enthusiastic about speaking Spanish, because if Spanish means catching flies and painting fingernail polish onto their backs, then Spanish is fun. This fun thing becomes a theme. The fly mystery had what I call “spill over” meaning that the child feels closer to the parent into the near term. In this case, the next morning Jeff sat down with me at breakfast and spoke to me in Spanish, which at that time was not common. But to what extreme lengths must one extend his or her imagination to capture a child’s attention! Another day, I presented a detective case to investigate what happened to a dead opossum on the running trail. It showed signs of being victim of attack by a larger animal. We talked about gato montés [bobcat], mapache [raccoon], coyote, perros [dogs] and their ability to use garras [claws] and caninos [fangs] to tear up an opossum. At the same time, we talked about why we never touch dead animals, and I told the story I heard on NPR

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about the kids in Colorado that contracted Bubonic Plague by coming into contact with a carcass when camping. Despite a healthy dose of fear, the kids still enjoy going with me to that trail. Soon afterwards, I talked with Jeff at breakfast about an innovative medical venture: using scorpion venom to create glow-in-the-dark canceridentifying molecules that float through the body. He enjoyed this and asked me to accompany him out to the chicken coop to get eggs. Again, I noticed that one moment of positive contact led to another. However, it is worth pausing to say that one has to be informed via the radio, or internet, or it is not possible to share updates on cutting edge technology. So one does have to sneak in the NPR program or read elpais.com to gather bits and pieces of life to share with the children. For my wife and I, reading the story in elpais.com in Spanish initially helps to assimilate the vocabulary we ourselves will need to share it later with our kids. Besides reactive techniques, such as waiting for an interesting piece of news or a moment that is propitious to language building (e.g., stumbling upon an opossum), one can also be proactive. For example, another day I noticed the kids piloting a jetfighter on the iPad, so I sat down with Jeff at breakfast and mentioned that Obama was going to speak that day about an imminent attack on Syria. I said he was going to use cazadoras [jetfighters], the type of plane Jeff was just flying on the iPad. Surprisingly, Jeff had heard that the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad had used malas armas [bad weapons]. We went over how the cazadoras would strike Damascus. The vocabulary encompassed words such as portaaviones [aircraft carriers] and destructores [destroyers] that were common to the US military build-up in the Mediterranean and to the iPad game. In all, we spoke for a few minutes in Spanish—yes, sometimes it takes considerable effort just to get a few minutes of speech from your child. I also note that in order for this father-son morning conversation on the bombing of Syria to be possible, I had to put off having my breakfast until a later time. Whereas I used to eat my breakfast alone as soon as I woke up while listening to the radio, now I try to wait and sit down with Jeff, and I skip listening to the radio. Another proactive technique is to remove the child from the home setting. For example, during the time of an important local tax referendum, I took the kids driving around to count the signs for and against. We learned the word encuesta [poll], sondeo [survey], aumentar [to augment], impuestos [taxes], and related vocabulary. It was fun, but the success was only partial because the signs were in English and there was a tendency for the kids to speak English to one another in the back seat of the car.

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A more effective technique is to separate the siblings. One day, I enticed my younger one to accompany me to the swimming pool by bribing him with a promise of pizza for lunch. We had comfortable Spanish conversation the whole time, nearly an hour and a half (!), especially while sitting across from one another at the pizzeria as he ate his giant slice of pizza. In short, as parent, in order to cross into my children’s space to get them to speak Spanish I have to be both physically and mentally present. To catch their attention, I find it effective to share the most fascinating parts of my world. There are constantly new developments in technology, new discoveries in flora and fauna, geological events such as volcanos, weather phenomena, and medical discoveries that children enjoy. One can reinforce one’s own explanations with Spanish language videos available on YouTube. I remember a very well-done video on the rattlesnake from Mexico that my kids watched over and over after we saw a dead snake near home. Introducing your children to what is essentially adult news not only expands the child’s sphere of knowledge beyond the playroom, to what is going on in the world, but also does it in Spanish first. So that the identity they establish between word and object/concept is native, not translated from English. In order for children to assimilate adult input, one has to somehow relate it to their world, through a common experience such as a flu shot, or the transition from a floating Lego boat to the wrecked Costa Concordia off the coast of Italy. And sometimes it comes at expense, as when I taught Chris the names of tools while he was taking a tricycle apart into a thousand pieces that I knew would never go back together again. From where does the time come to not only inform oneself, but also to inform one’s kids and on their own terms? I have in my notes that one day I specifically abandoned the correction of student compositions to engage my children. There are consequences at work—your class receives their grade a day or two later—but you have to make that decision, if you want your kids to speak a second language in an enclave setting.

What to do about schoolwork in English? Every day, my first grader brings home a story and a list of vocabulary that the parent must sign off on after going over it with the child. My approach is to let Jeff read it in English, and to use single word corrections in English if he pronounces the word incorrectly. When necessary, longer explanations of errors are in Spanish. For his stories, we do the pre-reading and post-reading activities in Spanish, and he seems to like these. One

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post-reading activity that generated a lot of conversation before bed involved theories as to why dinosaurs became extinct. To supplement his assigned readings from school, my wife and I do other bedtime readings. We have a modest collection of children’s literature both in Spanish and English. Regardless of which language the book is in, we always read to them in Spanish.

Recognizing one’s shortcomings At the same time, one must recognize one’s own failures. One day, as I rode home from work with Chris and meditated on ongoing events and concerns in the department, I realized that I was ignoring my child. I had lost an opportunity to engage my child because I was obsessing about work. If I want to be close to my child, I need to leave work at the office. Another day, I sent my child to his room because he disobeyed me. He was not happy, and I realized that from that point forward without good communication between us there was no language growth happening. When I raise my voice, or get mad at my child, I am destroying the bridge that allows language to flow between us. Discipline needs to be verbally measured, executed with a cool temper, and preferably delivered by kneeling down to the child’s height and speaking directly into his or her face. If the child cries or whines, then a parent may have to wait until after time out for quiet explanations. This rationalism can help to convert discipline into a learning experience with language building possibilities, especially if you are one of those people who feels comfortable talking about emotions and behavior.

Conclusion It is possible for non-heritage L2 speakers to raise kids to be bilingual in a minority enclave setting, i.e., for two English natives who learned Spanish as adults to speak to their children from birth in Spanish in the Southern USA. At this point, with the subjects of this study entering kindergarten and second grade, respectively, both of them speak, not perfect, but fluent Spanish as described above. Given the contrived setting, it would seem that contamination from the majority language in the home environment is inevitable, especially once the kids return home after a day at an English-speaking school. In the face of the overwhelming thrust of the majority language, it can be very difficult for both parents to ignore their kids when they address them in English. Indeed, we have seen that if one parent listens to the kids when they speak English, the dynamic in the

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house changes and English quickly imposes itself. But as long as both parents speak to the kids in the target language and one parent requires the kids to speak in the target language to elicit a response, the kids will maintain and grow their language skills in the target language, albeit at a slower pace than if there were only one language in the home. However, it is imperative to maintain a firm barrier between parent and child when the child speaks in English, even in the presence of third parties such as friends, neighbors, and relatives, or the minority-language enclave will disintegrate. As the only parent with whom my children speak Spanish, it is necessary for me to speak to the kids as much as possible, and to encompass diverse topics to enrich the input they receive to avoid an incomplete acquisition of Spanish, as described by J. Maher (p.396). Does being bilingual mean that the child can ask for food, get dressed, and practice basic hygiene in a second language, or that he or she can talk about all aspects of his/her world and delve into the adult world? This idea of speaking to your kids really means educating them, and educating requires thoughtful organization and planning, which will inevitably take considerable time away from other aspects of adult life. As minoritylanguage tutor and educator, I continuously look for techniques that will get my children to speak Spanish, because without me, language attrition will quickly set in. The approach to getting kids to speak in the target language sketched out in this study is more personal than universal. My observations will hopefully draw attention among researchers to a gap I perceive in studies pertaining to non-heritage bilinguals. At the same time, the language skills that the subjects of this paper possess in Spanish may serve to reassure other parents that the experiment can work, and to show them that it is necessary to transform oneself from being self-centered to being childcentered for the purposes of educating your child. Not surprisingly, if one is a better parent, his or her kids will be more proficient in the second language. Each family will have to find its activities, but certainly the minority language needs to be fun, be full of new ideas, and grow with the child. For the children, it is hoped that bilingualism will help to shape their mind along the course of development and provide some of the life-long benefits described by J. Morales in terms of literacy and numeracy (p.188), working memory (p.199), and cognition (p.200).

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Works Cited Bialystok, Ellen and Xiaojia Feng. 2011. Language Proficiency and Its Implications for Monolingual and Bilingual Children. Language and Literacy Development in Bilingual Settings, 121-138. Macnamara, John. 1966. Bilingualism and Primary Education. Edinburg: Edinburg University Press, Marchman, Virginia A. and Elizabeth Bates. 1994. Continuity in Lexical and Morphological Development: A Test of the Critical Mass Hypothesis. Journal of Child Language 21: 339-366. Montrul, Silvina. 2013. El bilingüismo en el mundo hispanohablante. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. —. 2002. Incomplete Acquisition and Attrition of SpanishTense/Aspect Distinctions in Adult Bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 5: 39-68. Montrul, Silvina and Kim Potowski. 2007. Command of Gender Agreement in School-Age Spanish Bilingual Children. The International Journal of Bilingualism 11: 301-328. Morales, Julia, Alejandra Calvo and Ellen Bialystok. 2013. Working Memory Development in Monolingual and Bilingual Children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 114: 187-202. Pérez-Leroux, Ana Teresa. 1998. The Acquisition of Mood Selection in Spanish Relative Clauses. Journal of Child Language 25: 585-604. Poplack, Shana. 1980. Sometimes I’ll Start a Sentence in Spanish y Termino en Español: Toward a Typology of Code-Switching. Linguistics 18: 581-618. Silva-Corvalán, Carmen. 2003. “Linguistic Consequences of Reduced Input in Bilingual First Language Acquisition.” In Linguistic Theory and Language Development in Hispanic Languages (eds. S. Montrul and F. Ordóñez): 375-397. Sommerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. Volterra, Virginia and Traute Taeschner. 1977. The Acquisition and Development of Language by Bilingual Children. The Journal of Child Language 5: 311-326.

CHAPTER SIX PERIODS AND POCKETS OF IMMERSION: FOSTERING FUNCTIONAL BILINGUALISM AERIN BENAVIDES

My first chore as a mother was to intentionally choose a bilingual name for my baby boy. He was born in Peru, where my husband, Diego, was from. I chose Martin; in Spanish he would be Martín, (mărtƝn), in English Martin (mărtƱn). I had an implicit vision, an idea, that he would grow to live in both his mother’s and his father’s worlds seamlessly, as did we. We moved to the United States when Martin was one year old; we often had visitors from Peru, visited Peru, and even lived there again for a few years when Martin was a teen. Not long ago, Martin, as an adult, asked me to speak Spanish to his baby boy when he was born, and he speaks Spanish to his baby named Diego, even though they live in New York City, and the dominant language is English. The cycle of raising children in the United States to be bilingual adults begins again for our family. As young adults, all three of my children are highly functional bilinguals and use Spanish professionally in an English-dominated world in the United States on a daily basis. As a reflective study of how this came about, I explore who my children are, my actions, my children’s thoughts, and share our family story. Our story is rich in shared cultures. My husband and I had an underlying acceptance and expectance that our children would be bilingual. It was never even discussed. We just were bilingual. I took it for granted they would be too.

Martin, Annick, and Cristina Today Martin speaks Spanish with a linguistic purity that mimics any native Spanish-speaking Peruvian; and he speaks English fluently without any hint or trace of the fact he also speaks Spanish. His full fluency and

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proficiency in both languages may be due to the fact he had more Spanish immersion at ages 0-7 than his younger sisters did; he was forced into more conversation in Spanish from the time he began talking with his babysitter and grandmother visiting from Peru; and as the oldest child he spent many more hours watching Cartoon Network on TV when we lived in Miami with the SAP button flipped to Spanish than his sisters did. “At Jack’s house the cartoons are in English,” I remember he said one day returning from a play date in preschool. “Ah!” I remember answering something like, “How weird,” as if watching cartoons in Spanish were the norm. And somehow I got away with it for a year or two more, until he learned that there was a SAP button on the TV set below the screen that controlled language. Once he learned that, he chose to watch TV in English. Martin works today teaching Marine Science and Marine Biology. He also teaches it in Spanish by choice for Spanish speakers in a class that was supposed to be taught in English. He decided to teach in high school after finishing graduate school at the Stony Brook University of New York (SUNY). His Master’s degree is in Marine Science. Through his participation in the NYC Teaching Fellows in New York City, he obtained a second Master’s degree in Education, and an unforgettable experience— the first school he worked at was declared a failed school and closed. He taught a second year in the Bronx, and a third near Bushwick in Brooklyn, both in low income/high crime areas. By his own initiative, he added on a New York state licensure for bilingual instruction. He made this decision partly because he found he was already teaching in Spanish for Spanishspeaking students for whom their second language was English, even though no school he taught at was officially a bilingual school. Literacy in a first language has been found to promote higher learning in a second language (Cummins 1979) but his students were not officially receiving instruction in Spanish literacy. Some of his Spanish-speaking students had lived their whole life in New York City without developing a proficiency in their minority language—English—and therefore they were still considered English as Second Language (ESL) students in high school. The school administrations knew he was fluent in Spanish and had many Spanish-speaking ESL students in his classes. He is now teaching Marine Science and Marine Biology at the high school level, with many bilingual students, in a challenging school situation in Brooklyn, New York. Annick has a slight hint of the native English speaker’s accent in Spanish, and it is noticeably her second language. Her fluency is boosted by her academic use of Spanish as an Art History scholar specializing in Peruvian colonial art. She uses a sweeter, softer tone of voice when

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speaking Spanish than she does in English. Her voice in Spanish reminds me of Jacqueline Kennedy’s voice I heard once on TV when she was giving a tour of the redecorated White House as our First Lady. I named Annick after my host family mom in Bordeaux, France, whom I loved and greatly admired. I met my host family during my college junior year of study abroad. When I named my first baby girl Annick, I imagined she would travel to France one day to meet her namesake. I did, and do, remain in very close contact with my host family by phone and email, even though we have had few opportunities to be together over the years. I maintain my French by my close contact with them. I assumed Annick, my daughter, would learn French in addition to Spanish so she too could be a part of our international extended family. And she did; and she is. Annick works today as a museum director at the Museo Pedro de Osma in Lima, Peru, having just finished her Master’s degree work at the University of New Mexico (UNM) in Art History. She initiated public school visits and incorporates her area of expertise, the native Peruvian perspective of colonial art, in school visits. This helps all visitors discover the native Peruvian culture in the European style colonial art at the museum. With deliberation, she speaks publically, conducts research, publishes catalogs of the museum artwork, and reads in Spanish; she collaborates internationally, studies, publishes, and presents research in the United States (U.S.) naturally in English. She is a fully functional bilingual adult—actually she has a strong working knowledge of two more languages as well. Annick studied Italian during her semester abroad in college (as it was included in her scholarship funding at Williams College) and French because she chose to take an intensive college-level French course while visiting Bordeaux in the summer. Learning a third language has become a common phenomenon and is a relatively new area of study considering the recent importance of learning English worldwide. Knowing a second language fluently when learning a third, while a complex phenomenon to study, was found to influence learning a third language (Cenoz, Hufeisen, and Jessner 2001). Fluency in a second language may have influenced her learning a third, and fourth, and made it easier for her, especially since Italian and French are both romance languages and share Latin roots with Spanish. My youngest daughter, Cristina, was named by her father. He told me that I named the first two, and now it was his turn. Although he chose the Spanish spelling of her name, it is a name that blends in seamlessly in both Peru and the U.S. with the same pronunciation in both Spanish and English. Although we never discussed it, I wonder if the usability of the

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name in both cultures was a factor in his choice, as it was a factor for me in my choice of Martin’s name. Our baby, Cristina, fought a speech disorder as a preschooler, and after a year of speech therapy in Kindergarten, she was able to learn to speak English intelligibly with deliberate and slow wording by the time she was in first grade. Sometimes she whispered out sounds, practicing them before using them in a spoken word. She speaks Spanish with the strongest ”gringa” accent of the three, but she is fully functional in Spanish. I did not find research on first language speech impediments and the subsequent learning of a second language, except in the case of English Language Learner (ELL) students. However, they may not be properly diagnosed with a speech disorder or given speech therapy because any speech impediments may be attributed to the fact that their pronunciation in English would naturally have an accent because English is a second language for them (Paradis 2005). She does well in her second, and third and fourth languages. This speaks highly, in her case, of the effectiveness of her speech therapy in English in Kindergarten. Cristina’s fluency in Spanish may encourage other parents who may worry whether or not a child with a speech disorder has a chance of learning a second language. She also speaks French fluently and well— not like her mother, according to my host family in Bordeaux. She is actually better educated in French than Spanish. Cristina also studied Arabic; both during her college semester abroad and when back home. She currently works for AmeriCorps in Brooklyn, New York, as a community organizer for high-needs preschools and elementary schools with the recent immigrant parent population who speak Spanish, Arabic, and Chinese. She told me she wished she spoke Chinese. She majored in Political Science and minored in Philosophy at the undergraduate level at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington (UNCW) and has a passion for fighting for social justice. This passion, she often explains, began when she saw abject poverty for the first time when we lived in Peru. She will still work with a Spanish-speaking population in Brooklyn when her year is over with AmeriCorps, as a legal aide at a non-profit that helps families facing foreclosure on their homes. Now she is in the process of taking the LSAT test and applying to the City University of New York (CUNY) law school as well as the Peace Corps. We are not sure where she may end up for the next few years. It was perhaps my own passion for learning about the world that fueled my efforts to maintain both Spanish and English for my children and encourage other languages for them as well. Their father spoke English to them, and to me. We always spoke English at home. My husband

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attempted Spanish at home once, but stopped after 30 minutes. “It doesn’t feel natural,” he told me after trying it, “I fell in love with you in English.”

Start at the Beginning—Martin in Peru his First Year The journey to bilingualism for my children began with my husband, Diego, a naturalized US citizen born in Peru and me. I spoke English to my son, Martin. When he was born, we lived in Peru. I spoke English to him in Peru even though by then I was fluent in Spanish. Diego spoke Spanish around him sometimes (especially when he was angry about something), but otherwise always English to him. Martin was one year old when we moved to the United States. Then the language tables turned. I began to take efforts to maintain his Spanish, as his father and I spoke to each other in English. Diego was bilingual because he had gone to primary and secondary schools in Lima at a Catholic school run by Jesuit priests from the United States, where English was the main language of instruction. He went to college in the United States (as a punishment for not taking his Peruvian university courses seriously enough). That is where we met. As he claimed he wished to continue speaking in English because he fell in love with me in English, with such an argument, how could I pressure him to change languages at home?

Bilingualism Support by Contact with Family, Location One of the most wonderful aspects of raising our children with the implicit expectation that they would be bilingual adults was the contact with the family. This gave them both instruction in Spanish and practice speaking Spanish. A first cousin who lived nearby in Miami had a live-in housekeeper, Sabina, who had come with her family to the U.S. Sabina and Diego’s family were our only babysitters, and they only spoke Spanish to our children. Family often visited us in Miami, as it is a hub for travel from South America. The culture of Spanish speakers in Miami was welcoming to bilingualism. So, there’s a point to consider. Where you live in the United States can make both the language and the family more accessible. New York City, for example, is a hub for world travel and easily accessible to Europe. Los Angeles is easily accessible to Asia, etc. Another plus in Miami was that there was an SAP button on the TV that I could just switch to one side, and Cartoon Network was entirely in Spanish. But with Internet access today providing both media in other languages and face-to-face video

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communication with family, the computer can supply this from any city in the U.S.

Supply of Learning Spaces—Pockets of Immersion I was concerned when Martin turned five years old because he was not speaking Spanish. I discussed this at length with his pediatrician, who told me that, from his experience in Miami, children at this age wanted to fit in with the English-speaking culture and often chose not to speak Spanish, even at home when alone with parents who both spoke Spanish. He felt this was common in Miami. But Martin was forced to speak Spanish with his babysitter Sabina, because she did not speak English with him at all. For Martin this is a vivid memory of having to speak Spanish, being with Sabina. I bought books in Spanish to read to my children, and, at the time, instructional tapes or VHS cassettes for children in Spanish. I even went so far as to design, develop, and teach an immersion preschool Spanish course at the Winhold Montessori preschool my daughter Cristina attended. This may seem a bit extreme for the ordinary housewife, but if one is determined to sustain a heritage language for a child, one may go to extraordinary lengths. My daughter Cristina’s best friend Brooke was in my weekly Spanish class at their Montessori school. Her mother reported to me near the end of the first year of Spanish class that they were eating out and the family at the next table spoke Spanish. Her daughter, Brooke, was able to carry on a conversation with them, entirely in Spanish! She was amazed! One afternoon or evening a week organizing a class or fun play group immersed in another language at a very young age is something a parent can easily make happen if s/he is truly dedicated to the idea, and in this way other children can be exposed to the language too.

Pressure from the Majority and Creating Safety/Pride My son Martin’s good friend Max’s mom is German and spoke to them in German when Martin would play at their house. It got tough for Max though at that middle-school age when his buddies who had overheard his mother call him “Maxi-shun” (her term of endearment) started to call him that tauntingly. Ah, well, Max too is a success story and now an executive at Google travelling the world, so his trilingualism (his father was Cuban, and Max is also fluent in Spanish) has served him well at work.

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It’s just that at the moment it can seem as if the world is crashing for a parent if other children make fun of her child for speaking another language. Looking back, I realize that my children did not complain of this. Annick did write a letter to her high school newspaper in defense of speaking Spanish, and in defense of the Latin American immigrant population as a whole, but she was responding to another letter to the newspaper. I found that, for our family, pride in the minority language is fed by pride in culture. I found our children needed this “cultural comfort” to accompany language in order to sustain the voyage to bilingual adulthood. Luckily Diego was quite good about sharing his pride in his culture and made a point of sharing Peruvian and world history, economics, and politics as the subject of discussion at the dinner table, just as his family does in Peru. We purposefully decided what we would talk about at the table. We avoided homework talk, chores talk, or giving permission for any requests during meals. We made meals moments to educate our children. This was actually his idea, and we still do this as a family, although I think it was a bit of a shock to my daughter-in-law from North Carolina at first when dining with us as Martin’s high school girlfriend. She was silent and a bit shell-shocked as we debated the fate of the world over a meal! No subject was off limits, not religion, not politics . . . not socially “correct” behavior in the South where we were living at the time.

Choice of Educational Spaces We as parents do not want our children to be hurt or suffer academically for learning another language. When my children were small, I was aware that educators used ideas about bilingualism that were generated from research done long ago (Darcy 1953) on populations in the United States that were perhaps poorly educated recent immigrants. So I took any talk about a second language being harmful with a grain of salt. After all, my husband and his whole family did fine with literacy in two or more languages; why shouldn’t our children too? This is why I sought out international schools, magnet schools in the public school system in Miami, ones that incorporated language in their instruction from the beginning. I almost convinced Diego to buy a house in the Sunset Elementary School district in Miami that had a great international program, but it would have been a downgrade across from the dumpsters of an apartment complex. He wasn’t so interested in that. I wanted public schools for our children that encouraged and understood the concept of bilingualism. He convinced me to look closer to home, even

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though Cristina was accepted to the French magnet immersion program at Sunset, and I could have driven her miles away to get there each day. So I found a new school near us just starting up. Annick and Cristina were some of the first students in a new pre-International Baccalaureate elementary school near our home in South Miami. I put Cristina in French because the Spanish was too low a level for her in first grade, and Annick was in the Spanish program. They each received one hour of good quality language instruction a day. In French, there were many happy songs and Cristina loved to sing. Singing is a pocket of immersion, and she loved it. There was a lot of homework, but since I had by this time outlawed TV on any school night, including Sunday, this was doable. This is another technique I used; I cut TV time to Saturdays only. I felt the bombardment of the English language, and not much of it useful to my children in terms of their academic growth, was more harmful than good. I took that on/off button and kept it off during the week. I feel this was a great part of our success in educating our children. In this way the music – or in those days VHS cassettes – I chose to put on in Spanish or French had, I believe, a greater impact. These forms of entertainment had no competition from American TV. Today, parents have online streaming of radio stations from all over the world. I listen to the radio in Bordeaux to hear what’s going on there and often hear international news that is not on the radio in the United States. This online radio is easily available from the computer or even a smart phone.

Choice of Community, First by Parents, Then by Children Getting involved in the bilingual community and having friends who were bilingual set an example for the children. Not all of our friends were bilingual, but many were. Perhaps I naturally seek out people who come from somewhere else because I can travel the world by hearing their stories. It is always interesting to me to hear about life beyond my borders. This passion for learning is something I often spoke of and encouraged in my family. In truth, the fact that all three of our children use Spanish in their work, study, and everyday lives while living in the United States is something I expected, and it was not something I ever thought would be absent from their lives as adults. This vision of mine may have helped them along in some unspoken form. Certainly, having lived immersed in Spanish in Peru for an extended period of time was instrumental in their proficiency in Spanish. Asking them why they are functionally bilingual, they tell me it was due in great part to living four years in Peru.

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Immersion in the Culture and Language Because of the high cost of my husband’s medical care as a quadriplegic on a ventilator the last eight years of his life, we went to Peru for his last five years to afford his nursing care at home, with a lot of help from his family. Being in a country that speaks a heritage minority language is something that not all families encouraging bilingualism in the United States can do. But my college roommate did it for her family; she rented their house out and went abroad. She, her husband and her three young sons lived a year in a small town on the southern coast of Spain. The two youngest went on to do “gap” years abroad before going to college, sponsored by the Rotary Club, one in Argentina. And while living abroad does not guarantee bilingualism, giving a child every opportunity for immersion in the minority language and culture is something my children think encouraged them to be bilingual and to want to work as adults using their Spanish language in a place where the majority language is English. The positive effects on second language learning through immersion are well researched and documented (Cummins 1998). Martin, Annick, and Cristina were also immersed in English while living in Peru. Their school was the American school in Peru, and most of the day, except for one hour a day, their classes were in English. We watched cable TV more due to their father’s condition, and as a family we would watch movies a lot—in English. And we spoke English at home. Still, they were immersed in Peruvian culture and the Spanish language every time we stepped out of the house or outside of school. Martin’s Peruvian accent in Spanish was that of a native speaker, and he chose friends that were Peruvian. Annick, with a slight secondlanguage accent in Spanish, chose a group of friends who were also bicultural, or who were Latin American but had been raised in the United States. She chose friends who had a similar cultural situation to her own and is still friends with the girls she met those few years we were in Peru. Cristina chose friends for whom their only common language was English, as they were children of U.S. and foreign diplomats, children of international corporation executives—and her group of friends was of many races and cultures. These children who live abroad with their parents, often parents of differing cultures, are sometimes called third culture kids (Useem and Downie 1976). They are raised outside of their parents’ cultures, and they may only briefly or never live in their parents’ heritage cultures. As they travel the world and live in many different nations they meet other children who may know their former classmates from other countries in an interwoven system of international American

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schools. It was interesting to me that my children chose their friends differently at the American school in Peru, and that their choices corresponded with their fluency in Spanish when we arrived to live there.

In Conclusion Our experience as a bilingual family has opened up career options for my children using Spanish on a day-to-day basis, and they consider their bilingualism as a character strength. While being in Peru is something they all felt was instrumental in their bilingualism, as a new father, Martin is now realizing that his parents did take efforts to encourage Spanish and wants to do the same. He recognizes the importance of the years in the U.S. during which he was raised bilingually. He had a native Peruvian accent when he arrived to live in Peru, and that came from somewhere. Empirical evidence supports the idea that learning a second language very early in life promotes higher proficiency levels in that second language, and that learning at a more advanced age encourages a deeper understanding of language learning (Muñoz 2006). Martin had both. Now he has decided he wants to encourage Spanish for his son, Diego, while living in the U.S. and has asked his mother and sisters to speak only Spanish to baby Diego. He and his wife, a native English speaker, are hoping to find a babysitter that will speak only Spanish to their baby, and the cycle of encouraging a minority language in a majority English culture begins once again for us. I encourage parents who wish to pass on this wonderful gift of a heritage language to create periods and pockets of language immersion for their children. I encourage parents to pass on their own rich and glorious history, their fascinating culture, and to create a space in their child’s life to build a relationship between what their child knows and sees in the U.S. and their own family heritage. Force discussion to form a global perspective. There is so much more to speaking a language than pronouncing words.

Works Cited Cenoz, Jasone, Hufeisen, Britta, and Jessner, Ulrike, ed. 2001. Crosslinguistic Influence in Third Language Acquisition: Psycholinguistic Perspectives. Volume 31 of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters.

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Cummins, James. 1979. Linguistic Interdependence and the Educational Development of Bilingual Children. Review of Educational Research 49: 222-251. —. 1998. “Immersion Education for the Millennium: What Have We Learned from 30 Years of Research on Second Language Immersion?” Edited by M. R. Childs and R. M. Bostwick. Learning Through Two Languages: Research and Practice. Second Katoh Gakuen International Symposium on Immersion and Bilingual Education. Japan: Katoh Gakuen. Darcy, Natalie. 1953. A Review of the Literature on the Effects of Bilingualism upon the Measurement of Intelligence. The Pedagogical Seminary and Journal of Genetic Psychology 82: 21-57. Muñoz, Carmen. 2006. Age and the Rate of Foreign Language Learning. Great Britain, Cromwell Press LTD. Paradis, Johanne. 2005. Grammatical Morphology in Children Learning English as a Second Language: Implications of Similarities with Specific Language Impairment. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 36: 172-187. Useem, Ruth Hill, and Downie, Richard D. 1976. Third-culture Kids. Today’s Education 65: 103-105.

CHAPTER SEVEN SUFFICIENT EXPOSURE AND BEYOND: CREATING MINORITY-LANGUAGE CONTEXTS VERA LEE-SCHOENFELD

How do we acquire language? When my 5½-year-old son Dominik hugs my pregnant belly and enthusiastically sings the Power Rangers theme song (“Go, go, Power Rangers”), I tell him how nice it is of him to establish a connection with our soon-to-be-born baby boy but that he should really be speaking only German around the baby because English is all around him in this country, the U.S., anyway. There are not many people here who can help expose the baby to German, my native language, but Dominik is one of those who can, and I need to make sure he does. Having been told this logic, Dominik looks at me and says, “But, Mami, he has to learn German first!” This kind of response is worth thinking about, not only because it is cute and because it nicely showcases the thinking of a 5-year-old but also because it actually reflects a misconception that many people, including adults, have about language acquisition, namely that our first (native) language is learned just like a second or third language, and that this learning process involves explicit teaching or instruction. One of the most typical responses I get from people who notice that I speak another language with my children and whom I tell about my native language is, “Oh, great, so you're teaching them German, too!”, implying that parents in the U.S. teach their children English and that, in rare cases, they are in the fortunate position to be able to teach their children a second or third language. I appreciate the positive feedback, because I am glad that the people I talk to these days seem to agree that bi- or multilingual upbringing is a good thing rather than something that is unpatriotic or confusing for the child, but, at the same time, I cringe and want to tell people how language acquisition really works. Language learning and

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language acquisition are not the same thing. While learning requires a conscious effort, acquisition is an automatic process that we are not aware of. Generally speaking, we talk about acquiring a native language as a child but learning a foreign language as an adult (Krashen 1981, also see Napoli and Lee-Schoenfeld 2010, chapter 1). Whether it is one language or more, the language(s) spoken by a child’s parent or caregiver are acquired (not learned) by the child. If there are two languages, as in my family’s case, then the child has two native languages. As a linguist working in the theoretical framework developed and still led by Noam Chomsky, transformational generative syntax, described best by the name “Principles & Parameters,” I believe that all languages have in common certain universal principles and are only distinguished by their lexicon and by a number of parameter settings regarding their structure.1 Thus, I share the widely accepted assumption that language development in humans is innate and follows certain universal stages. Since the human brain is equipped with a language faculty, also known as the language acquisition device, consisting of the principles of Universal Grammar, children are prewired to acquire language. Regardless of the culture surrounding them or their personality, talents, and general intelligence, children acquire the language(s) primarily spoken by their parents or caregivers within their first few years of life and are fluent speakers of the language(s) by about age 5. And, again, this happens without explicit instruction. Even in cultures where adults hardly ever address babies and young children directly because they do not treat them as partners in communicative interactions,2 children become fluent native speakers within roughly the same amount of time and go through similar stages as children in other cultures, as long as they are at all exposed to the target language by adults or older children.

Excursus: My family situation In addition to my background in formal linguistics, I will draw on my experience of being a native-German-speaking mother raising her children My thanks to Paul Lee for the many fruitful discussions we have had about the content of this chapter and to Victoria Hasko for her reference suggestions. A big thank you also goes to editor Iulia Pittman whose detailed feedback was invaluable. 1 See e.g. Cook and Newson 2007 for an introduction to Chomsky’s Universal Grammar. 2 See Ochs and Schieffelin’s (1995) discussion of the cultures of Kaluli (Papua New Guinea) and Western Samoa.

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bilingually with her native-English-speaking husband in a small college town in the southeast of the U.S. My children are Niko, who just turned 8, and Dominik, who is 5½. Both were born in the U.S. By the time this writing is published, there will be a third little boy (the one to whom Dominik likes to sing the Power Rangers theme song). I came to the U.S. right after completing high school in Germany more than 20 years ago and have been thoroughly integrated into the American way of life. The transition was quick, easy, and a happy experience for me. I wanted to be closer to the young man who is now my husband, so moving to the U.S. and speaking English more and more fluently were a dream come true. At the same time, I have always had an unusually close relationship with my parents. Even before I had children, my parents flew out from Germany for regular visits, and I have been going back to Germany frequently as well. My ties to Germany and thus to my native language and culture are quite strong, both personally and professionally. I have been Assistant Professor of Linguistics in a German department since 2010, and I integrate examples from German into all of my (English) linguistics classes. Now that going back home involves flying with my husband and two (soon even three) kids, the trips to Germany are less frequent and are dependent on funding I get for doing work abroad as part of my research.

How do acquisition and maintenance of a second native language work? Given the Principles & Parameters perspective of language acquisition discussed in the first section of this chapter, we might conclude that all it takes for children to pick up languages other than English (i.e., minority languages) in the U.S. is exposure to these other languages during their first few years of life. Is this correct? Well, yes and no.

Acquisition during the earliest stage(s) of the child's life The answer to the above question is “yes” in the sense that consistent use of a minority language around the child by a native speaker—in other words, sufficient exposure to the minority language—is all the child needs to acquire the language initially, that is, during the first months or years of life. This is a time when either the child is not yet immersed in the majority language (English) outside the home, or the child is in daycare but is too young to be able to respond to caregivers and peers. In the latter case, the child may be in daycare already as a 6-week-old baby, but as long as there is at least one minority-language-speaking parent at home

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who consistently talks to the child in his or her native language, acquisition of the minority language will take place. This part of introducing the minority language into the child's life seems easy enough. Consistent use of a language by a parent who speaks this language natively should be second nature (or first, actually) for him or her. Unfortunately, in the U.S., consistent exposure to the minority language even during this early stage of the child's life is not always easy to provide. As soon as parent and child are in the company of a native English speaker, even if it is the other parent, the minority-languagespeaking parent has to deal with the potentially uncomfortable situation of excluding others. The fear of coming across as rude or selfish makes the minority-language-speaking parent often switch to English. Here, I maintain that it is possible for the minority-language-speaking parent to avoid making the other parent or other English-speaking people that happen to be around (in the store, on the playground, etc.) feel excluded without speaking a word of English to the child. The key is to have a positive attitude (a friendly smile goes a long way) and to readily switch back and forth between the minority language (with the child) and English (with the English speakers). I only ever speak German to my children, regardless of where and in whose company we are. To keep those around us in the loop, I quickly explain to them in English what the kids or I just said. Or, if I am having a conversation with someone in English, and my kids interrupt me (even if they do so in English), I switch to German when responding to them. This might involve quite a bit of mental gymnastics but is something one can certainly get used to, and it makes an impact from the early months and years of the child’s life on. Even if the child does not yet speak in complete sentences, the parent’s consistent use of the minority language when addressing the child is vital to this stage of bilingual development. The reader may ask whether it would not be better to have a family situation where “the other parent” speaks the minority language, too, even if he or she is not a native speaker. Of course, it is true that the more exposure the child gets, the more certain one can be that acquisition will kick in and be successful, but, from my experience, it is not necessary for both parents to speak the minority language. If it feels more natural for the parent who is not a native speaker of the minority language to stick to English when addressing the child or the spouse, then stick to English is what the parent should do. It is a perfectly acceptable situation even when the goal is to have a bilingual family. Again, as long as one parent consistently speaks his or her native language around the child (and spends a significant amount of time with the child every day), this language will

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trigger the innate acquisition process in the childಬs brain, so that the child develops the lexicon and grammatical structure of both English and the minority language in parallel.

Maintaining the minority language during later stages of the child's life The answer to our earlier question (whether exposure to the speech of the minority-language-speaking parent is enough) is “no” when it comes to what children need to maintain a minority language once they are old enough to actively participate in social settings that completely immerse them in English on a regular basis. While language does not equal thought, we use language to organize thoughts and make sense of them (see e.g. Napoli and Lee-Schoenfeld 2010, chapter 4). So, when we experience something in an Englishspeaking setting or context, putting this experience into words will generally be easier in English than in another language we may have in our repertoire. Thus, regardless of how consistently a parent uses the minority language around the child, if English is at all an option in the household (as, for example, in the situation of one English-speaking and one minority-language-speaking parent or of siblings who go to a traditional monolingual American school together), the child may find it easier to talk about most things in English and not respond to the parent in the minority language. This is only natural and hard to prevent. In fact, judging from my experience, it should probably not be prevented because it is important for the child to be allowed to organize his or her thoughts in the language that provides the context for the way those thoughts came into existence. Therefore, when my children tell me their stories from school or summer camp in English, I still respond to them and ask questions in German, but I do not force them to switch to German. Usually, they integrate some of the German words I used in my question and switch to German for a moment when they respond, but then they continue in English. Discussing the child’s English-based experiences in the minority language is, of course, a great way of reinforcing the minority language. But, in order to avoid getting the child frustrated, a good strategy for the minority-language-speaking parent is to let the child express what he or she wants to say in English, at least initially, when the

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child is just being picked up from school, still reliving the experience, and excited to tell the story exactly as it happened.3 One of the most common complaints I hear from parents about their bilingually raised children is that their children understand the minority language just fine but refuse to speak it. The use of the verb “refuse” makes it sound like children make the conscious, perhaps even defiant, decision not to use the minority language. Is this really what is happening? Once again, I would like to suggest that the answer is both yes and no. When children are first immersed in an all-English-speaking context at day care or school, I believe the answer is “no.” They simply come home from the all-English setting and talk about the day’s events using the language in which they experienced these events. All they are doing is organizing their thoughts using the language that provided the context in which their thoughts came into existence. This is natural, not defiant, behavior.4 On the other hand, the answer is probably “yes” when the situation is such that the parent asks the child in the minority language about his or her day, the child answers in English, the parent interrupts the child urging him or her to switch to the minority language, and the child continues in English or, worse, stops talking to the parent. Given that my children are happy speaking German with me and based on research that supports my experience,5 I conclude that defiance may come into the picture when the parent insists on the minority language being spoken in situations when it does not feel natural to the child to do so. Such situations then may cause 3

This strategy is in line with what Barron-Hauwaert (2004) includes in her key points concerning the “One-Parent-One-Language (OPOL)” approach for the twenty-first century: “When school starts, OPOL may need to be modified to take account of homework / friends / peer group pressure. Parents can be less strict on language use, accept situational switching and translate if necessary" (p. 196). 4 See Saunders’ (1988) discussion of “contextual triggering”: “This type of triggering is not brought about by a particular word or expression … but rather by the context of the situation. A certain activity or situation is closely associated with a particular language and this may trigger a switch to that language, a switch which appears to be more or less unconscious” (p. 89). 5 The following is stated by Barron-Hauwaert (2004), who cites Baker (2000: 75): “It’s often impossible and usually unwise to compel a child to speak a language… Unless this is handled tactfully and skillfully, the result is that children learn that language is an imposition, a part of an anthropological power.” Barron-Hauwaert adds that “if parents can simply influence language use ‘latently’ rather than impose a language strictly, they may have more long-term success” (p. 38). Similarly, Bialystok (2001) explains that “the language we speak is instrumental in forming our identity, and being required to speak a language that is not completely natural may interfere with the child’s construction of self” (p. 5).

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the child to dislike the minority language. So, the parent’s actions could have an effect that is the exact opposite of the desired outcome. I too frequently urge my children to switch to German when they talk to me, but I have learned to reduce my urging to situations that do not involve purely English-based thoughts in my children’s heads. When it is just us, that is, when my husband is not directly involved in the conversation, and we are not talking about something the boys just experienced in an all-English setting, I expect them to speak German and am quite adamant about it. Especially when we are listening to German music or watching a German DVD, I will not let them go on in English. Instead of constantly telling them that they should speak German, I often get them to switch by restarting in German the sentence they just started to say in English. Also, when they want to tell me something and begin by saying “Mom, …” in English, all I usually say is “Mami, …” in German to remind them indirectly that this is a time when I will only respond to them if they address me in German. This technique does not always work but is still a nice alternative to constantly saying “Auf Deutsch, bitte!” (In German, please!). What else can parents do if they wish to maintain a minority language at home and raise children who not only understand but also produce the minority language? Given what we know about language being used to organize thoughts, it logically follows that the key is to provide contexts in the minority language for the child to develop some of his or her thoughts. In other words, this key to bilingual success can be described as providing intrinsic motivation for the child to use the minority language. The idea is that, when the setting naturally triggers the minority language in the child’s brain, he or she does not have to be told, forced, or bribed to use it; the child switches languages automatically.6 What might minoritylanguage contexts like this consist of? The answer to this question will differ from family to family. Here, I focus on what has worked for mine.

6

This idea is also the reason that foreign language instruction in schools and universities has become much more content or theme-based than it used to be. Rather than mainly relying on rote memorization, successful language instructors and textbooks immerse the learner in authentic foreign language contexts, so that learners are intrinsically motivated to use the foreign language when talking about the content of what they have learned or read (see e.g. Krashen 1985, Lee and VanPatten 2003, Baker 2006, and Lightbown and Spada 2013).

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What kinds of contexts can be created to intrinsically motivate the bilingual child to use the minority language? And how? I will start by addressing an issue that factors into the latter question (how bilingual families manage to create minority-language contexts), and this issue concerns the amount of support the minority language gets from the native-English-speaking parent. I have met many German moms in the U.S. who stopped trying to maintain their native language in their German-American families because speaking German at home and visiting family in Germany had put too much strain on the marriage. In my case, my husband made the effort of taking some German classes in college and spending a summer doing work in Germany as part of a college program. This allows him to be able to communicate (at least at the survival level) while in Germany and understand the gist of what the kids and I are saying to each other in German. As a consequence, he does not feel excluded when German is spoken around him. This, in turn, makes it relatively easy for him to agree that switching back and forth between two languages as well as going on long and expensive summer trips is worth the trouble. For us, the advantages of raising children who are fluent in two languages and feel at home in two cultures outweigh the disadvantages. Aside from the benefits that bilingualism has for our children’s future in today’s multicultural society and global economy, their ability to communicate and joke with both my husband and me in our respective native languages makes us more complete people, helping us maintain our respective cultural identities and at the same time uniting us in a beautiful way. Seeing our children embody a combination of our native languages and cultures makes us embrace, adore, and laugh about our differences rather than notice them as something negative. This, to us, is priceless and worth every effort it takes to maintain German as a second native language in our children’s lives. Given a supportive family situation like this, it is not at all that difficult to create minority-language contexts. The following sections provide four examples of such context creation.

Exposure to and interaction with minority-language media Providing German contexts with the help of popular media— magazines, books, CDs, DVDs, and internet—is a crucial strategy for me. My husband and I take turns reading to (or with) Niko and Dominik at night, so that every other night they are immersed in a German story with

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me. We also play German music CDs for them to fall asleep to. And when it comes to watching TV, they are allowed only a limited amount of American kids’ programming. After a couple of shows, if they still want to watch something, they need to pick either an episode of a German show that is available online7 or one of our many German DVDs. Disney films, for example, are great for the whole family, available in many languages, and, even better, they inspire people to sing along and therefore, actively engage them with the language and content of the film. Singing along is an excellent way not only to listen to useful vocabulary, commonly occurring phrases, and idiomatic expressions in the minority language but also to produce and, with the help of a pretty melody, internalize them.

Minority-language-speaking babysitters Of course, interaction with the minority language via audio and visual media is not as effective as interactions with other minority-languagespeaking people. A great alternative to all-day daycare or an after-school program is a babysitter who speaks the minority language. Ideally, this babysitter is a native speaker, but even a very advanced second-language speaker may be a good additional source of minority-language input.8 Living in a college town, my family has had access to both undergraduate and graduate students as babysitters. Since students typically do not have time to babysit every day of the week, we have had as many as four different babysitters during the semester (some of which were German speakers) in order for Niko and Dominik to be taken care of during weekday afternoons and certain evenings when my husband and I want a night out. As colleges and universities often have faculty members who speak the minority language natively, the teenage children of those faculty members can also make for excellent babysitters. Even if they are better speakers of English than of their other native language, once they are old enough to have realized how important it is for them to maintain their parents’ native language, they are usually eager to use only the minority language around the children. Judging from my experience, it is crucial to speak only the minority language when introducing the children to 7

As for German shows available online, my family’s favorite is “Sendung mit der Maus” (http://www.wdrmaus.de). 8 If it is a babysitter who spends every day with the child, like a nanny would, I strongly recommend a native speaker over an advanced second-language speaker because immersing the child in the minority language spoken non-natively can lead to the child adopting non-native features into what should be another native language for him or her.

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babysitters that are advanced second-language or heritage speakers of the minority language, so that it seems like English is not even an option to use around them. In fact, Niko and Dominik usually speak German with our German-speaking babysitters more readily (that is, with fewer reminders to do so) than with me when they are at home playing. My guess is that this has to do with the boys having gotten used to my speaking English at home with their dad, so that my presence in the house puts them in at least a partial English-speaking context. In contrast, with a German-speaking babysitter, they simply accept that German is the language they use to communicate, regardless of what the topic of conversation is. Our babysitters thus need fewer props and tricks to trigger German in my children’s heads, and this is a refreshing break for me.

Playgroup meetings Another way to create minority-language contexts with the help of other speakers of the language in the area is seeking out or organizing a playgroup. Even if it is just one other minority-language-speaking family that is available to have regular meetings with, it will be well worth it. The children will probably not always speak the minority language amongst each other, but when the parents are engaged enough in what is happening at the playgroup, so that they can provide for an all-minority-language setting, the children will indeed get more exposure to and more opportunities to use the minority language than they do at home with just one minority-language-speaking parent. If siblings are involved, even two parents may not provide enough of a minority-language setting because, in my experience, siblings naturally speak to each other in the language that surrounds them in school. So, joining a playgroup or, if there is not already one in the area, starting one, is something I highly recommend. To give a concrete example, because I wanted to create an environment in which only German is spoken, I started a German playgroup focusing on field hockey. Having grown up with the sport in Germany, and having also been involved with it for many years while in the U.S., I wanted Niko and Dominik to learn the sport anyway. Since there is no field hockey in the town where we live, I felt it was the ideal sport to pick as an allGerman theme for our playgroup meetings. My boys and I meet with one to three other German-speaking families who have children between the ages of 3 and 12 on Sunday afternoons at a local park with nicely mowed grass fields. I bring all my field hockey gear (sticks, balls, cones, etc.), we make sure we separate our little group from the playground where English-speaking children are playing, and I give the children all warm-up

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and drill instructions in German. The younger children need to be kept entertained on the sidelines, and often even the older children lose focus and start other activities. This is where I need one or two other parents to step in and come up with ways to keep the children engaged within a German setting, so that they stick with German when they speak to each other. Sometimes, our actual field hockey practice only lasts 15 minutes, but when everyone helps out, even that is enough to set the stage for allGerman interactions. After about an hour, we usually have to give in and let the children run to the playground where they are exposed to English again. Still, as long as there are not too many English speakers, and our playgroup parents continue to address their children in German, we often manage to keep everyone in the German mode for a little while longer.

Visits with extended family A playgroup or minority-language-speaking babysitter is especially useful if reunions with the minority-language family (either in the U.S. or in the minority-language parent’s country of origin) are hard to organize. It seems that the easiest way to maintain a minority language and culture is to have not only close ties but also frequent interactions with the minoritylanguage-speaking extended family. If children are regularly around their minority-language-speaking grandparents, for example, and they do not at all associate English with them, then this type of interaction nicely immerses them in a context that intrinsically motivates them to use the minority language. They will organize and naturally want to share the thoughts they form in this context in the minority language. The ideal situation seems to be one where the bilingual family spends a significant amount of time (for example, every summer) with the extended family in the minority-language-speaking country. Not many families can make this work, however. I know a couple of families where both mother and father are academics and can combine their summer research projects. This allows them to get enough funding to spend the whole summer, year after year, with or at least near their minority-language-speaking extended family. Since summer break seems to be shorter in many countries than in the U.S., they can even send their children to school in the minoritylanguage-speaking country. In my family’s case, long summer trips to Germany (including participation in school or kindergarten) can be arranged for some years but certainly not for every year, so I try to get my children to interact with their German grandparents in other ways. Their Omi and Opi (grandma and grandpa) take turns flying out to visit us in the U.S. about once a year

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each, and every time they come, they bring German books, CDs, DVDs, and clothes, so that Niko and Dominik have little pieces of German culture and language to get involved with. Since these pieces stay with them long after Omi or Opi have to leave, we can extend the German influence beyond their short visits. The key here is actually not the frequency or the length of the visits but the fact that these visits create memories associated with the minority language. As soon as such memories are created, the minority-language-speaking parent can regularly bring up the events forming the content of these memories and therefore easily trigger a minority-language mindset in the child. Although it has been a year, for example, Niko and Dominik still talk about the ice cream pops they like to order at the Kiosk (snack bar) on the playgrounds near their grandparents’ house in Germany—at one playground they like a Pirulo, whereas at the other one, they like a Flutschfinger. And when they talk about this, they speak perfect German. My parents nicely reinforce these memories by bringing up the boys’ favorite summer moments whenever they have a chance to get them on the phone.

From a strong bond between parent and child to a bilingual future Clearly, a lot hinges on the specific situation of a minority-languagespeaking parent wanting to raise his or her children bilingually in the U.S. Especially the minority-language-speaking parent's connection to his or her native language plays an important role in bilingual success.9 To me as a native speaker of German, for example, it feels completely unnatural to speak a language other than German to my children or even to other people's babies or to cute little animals. As discussed in Napoli and LeeSchoenfeld 2010 (chapter 15) and Barron-Hauwaert 2004 (p. 25), the kind of speech we direct to young children, which is called “motherese” or “baby-talk register,” is normally produced in one's native language. But this may not be the case for all speakers of a minority language who have been living in the U.S. for a significant part of their lives. The connection to the minority language may not be as deeply ingrained anymore. If they

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What I say in this section holds for the common bilingual family situation of the minority language being spoken natively by one of the parents. Of course, as discussed in other chapters of this volume, a second native language can also be introduced into the family situation by a parent who is a near-native speaker of that language.

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do not instinctively speak their native language around their children, maintaining the minority language will be more difficult. But, I believe that if the minority-language-speaking parent does have a deep connection with his or her native language and is enthusiastic about maintaining it, and if there is a strong bond between child and parent, there is also a natural connection between the child and the minority language. As long as the bond between child and parent that forms during the child’s early years of life can be maintained as the child gets older—in my case, this is possible thanks to job flexibility allowing me to spend many hours a day with my children—the child should feel an intrinsic connection to the minority language. Minority-language contexts may be more and more difficult to come by or create because children’s interests change as they get older, and perhaps the minority language seems to the child to be incompatible with those interests. But the intrinsic connection to the language through the parent should always be a minority-language source to fall back on. Thus, even if the child goes through phases of not using the language very often and seems to have forgotten a lot of it, a strong bond between child and parent can be counted on to pull the child back into a minority-language mindset, at least during certain special moments between child and parent. And these moments might just be enough to keep the language alive until the child is old enough to realize how valuable the minority language and culture are to him or her. At that point, conscious self-motivation kicks in, and the child makes it his or her own priority to maintain the language. At least, this is what I am hoping for my own family’s bilingual future.

Works Cited Baker, Colin. 1995. A Parents’ and Teacher’s Guide to Bilingualism. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters LTD. 2nd edition published in 2000. —. 2006. Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters LTD. Barron-Hauwaert, Suzanne. 2004. Language Strategies for Bilingual Families: The One-Parent-One Language Approach. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters LTD. Bialystok, Ellen. 2001. Bilingualism in Development: Language, Literacy, and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cook, Vivian, and Mark Newson. 2007. Chomsky’s Universal Grammar: An Introduction (3rd edition). Malden: Blackwell Publishing. Krashen, Stephen. 1981. Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning. Oxford: Pergamon Press.

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—. 1985. The Input Hypothesis: Issues and Implications. New York: Longman. Lee, James, and Bill VanPatten. 2003. Making Communicative Language Teaching Happen. (2nd edition). New York: McGraw-Hill. Lightbown, Patsy, and Nina Spada. 2013. How Languages Are Learned (4th edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Napoli, Donna Jo, and Vera Lee-Schoenfeld. 2010. Language Matters: A Guide to Everyday Questions About Language (2nd edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ochs, Elinor, and Bambi Schieffelin. 1995. “Language acquisition and socialization: Three developmental stories and their implications.” In Language, Culture, and Society: A Book of Readings (2nd edition), edited by Ben Blount, 470-512. Prospect Heights: Waveland Press, Inc. Saunders, George. 1988. Bilingual Children: From Birth to Teens. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters LTD.

CHAPTER EIGHT BUILDING BILINGUALISM IN COMMUNITY: A CASE STUDY OF ISLA’S FIRST YEAR AS A SPANISH LANGUAGE HERITAGE PROGRAM RACHEL NORMAN AND AERIN BENAVIDES

“Es racismo. Es puro racismo,” María said. María immigrated to the United States from Colombia over twenty years ago; she married a Mexican immigrant here and had four children who have grown up exclusively in the U.S. She brings the two youngest children to Immersion for Spanish Language Acquisition (ISLA), a Saturday school in Chapel Hill, North Carolina for Spanish-English bilingual children to learn to read and write in their heritage language. While the children are in class, their parents work on their English as a Second Language (ESL) skills, raise funds for the organization, and discuss parenting strategies. On this particular day, ISLA volunteers and teachers had been role-playing parentteacher conferences with the parents during the ESL hour, and the topic of speaking with children’s teachers had carried over into the parenting class. María had told a particularly maddening story, although it quickly became clear that hers was not an isolated incident of racism. Many of the other parents had similar stories. María had received a letter from her son’s school notifying her that the fourth grade was being split into two sections, and her son would now be in fourth grade “B”. When her son told her he’d been moved because he was Latino, and all the Latino kids were being put in the same class, she was suspicious and a little angry. A few days later she went in to speak to his teacher. The teacher explained that having ESL students in her classroom presented difficulties, and it would be easier on everyone if the bilingual children received separate instruction. María explained—in no uncertain terms—that her son was not an ESL student. He had lived his

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entire life in the United States and spoke English fluently. That didn’t matter, the teacher told her. He was still bilingual, and bilingual children learned more slowly than monolingual children. If he were allowed to stay in the regular class, he would slow them down. Not satisfied with this answer, María took her complaint to the principal and threatened to take it to the school board. Her son was switched back into the other section. Several more parents whose children attend ISLA shared similar stories. Although María was the only parent whose child had been moved due to being bilingual, many of the parents explained that they had been instructed by their children’s teachers to stop speaking Spanish at home. The teachers, they said, had told them that it would delay academic progress. Most of the parents said that they had not challenged the teachers on this. Unlike María, most of the parents who bring their kids to ISLA do not speak English very well, and in the moment, they had deferred to a perceived authority figure.

Responding to María’s Story: ISLA’s Beginnings and Mission ISLA (Immersion for Spanish Language Acquisition) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization in Chapel Hill, North Carolina that provides a safe and nurturing environment for native Spanish-speaking children with the purpose of promoting literacy in the language of Spanish. Borrowing classroom space from a local Catholic Church, ISLA began in 2012, with 13 students aged 4 to 6 years. Through ISLA’s instruction, students are able to transfer the foundational literacy skills gained in Spanish to English and improve their readiness to learn and perform in the public school system. In addition to classes aimed at lessening the academic achievement gap for Latina/o bilingual students, ISLA also offers space for the students’ parents to learn English, talk about the difficulties of parenting and enjoy arts and crafts. Because the program is free of charge, ISLA asks parents to stay and contribute to the parents’ group at least one Saturday a month. ISLA fosters a sense of pride and love for their native culture and language in both parents and children. Rather than leaving parents to encourage their children’s bilingualism in the privacy of their homes, ISLA encourages and promotes bilingualism and biculturalism by creating a community of immigrants who wish to see their children master English and retain Spanish. The program provides resources and an established structure for parents who may not otherwise have the means to research and implement a plan designed to maintain a minority language for their child.

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Although the benefits of bilingualism are supported by research findings, maintaining a minority language is difficult for many of the new immigrant parents ISLA works with, most of whom are from Mexico. The formal classroom teachers’ resistance to bilingualism on the grounds that speaking multiple languages can have detrimental cognitive effects reflects a common belief in the United States, but one that is not entirely accurate. Research on bilingualism in this country has gone through several iterations, with early research in the 1920s leading researchers to believe that bilingualism caused developmental delays in children. The delays were explained as the over-taxation of a brain being asked to function in two languages. The findings of these early 1920s studies found that nonAnglo-American ethnic groups commonly scored lower on IQ tests, compared with “mainstream” middle class, Anglo-Americans. Experiments conducted by Frank Smith and D. J. Saer in the 1920s first linked bilingualism to intelligence in this way, due to the fact that a large portion of their “ethnic” group was composed of bilinguals. Later, in the 1960s, much of the research done in the 1920s was reviewed and questioned because of its flawed methodology. Lack of experimental controls was the main cited critique, as reviewers discovered that the definition for bilingualism varied wildly from study to study, and occasionally was so poorly defined that speakers within the same study had wide ranges of ability. Most of the tests had been administered in English, and considering the lack of care taken in selecting bilingual speakers, some reviewers questioned whether poor performance on the tests could simply be a result of the test subjects not understanding instructions. Further, researchers such as Daniel Wagner suggest, “standardized tests almost always discriminate against those (i.e., most ethnic groups) who were not part of the standardization sample” (Wagner 1980, 33). But, by the time the 1920s studies were reviewed in the 1960s, the idea that bilingualism would result in cognitive deficits had already taken root, and it has proven exceptionally difficult to eradicate. This neatly packaged explanation has made its way out of academia and into mainstream thinking, and despite more recent research suggesting otherwise, it continues to be a popular belief. Working to overturn the “bilingualism causes deficits” assumptions, researchers in the 1960s hypothesized that bilingualism may actually make speakers more intelligent, as switching between languages could potentially contribute to mental agility. In the 1970s, articles appeared that challenged and even disproved this earlier idea of a deficit as a result of the interference between the two languages. Scholars began to reposition bilingualism as the situational breeding ground for “cognitive flexibility”

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and “creativity” (Lambert 1977). Werner Leopold (1949) was an early proponent of the “bilingual advantages,” claiming that a child who can operate in two languages would be more adept at abstract thinking at an earlier stage than a monolingual peer. Similarly, Anita Ianco-Worral (1972) found that 4-to-9-year-old bilinguals are more likely to categorize words semantically, rather than phonetically like their monolingual peers. Perhaps not surprisingly, a review of the literature produced in the 1970s suggests that researchers had a vested interest in demonstrating that there are no deficits associated with bilingualism, and that it is in fact an advantage. Designed in the face of anti-bilingual sentiments, these studies attempted to reverse public opinion about language that was feeding into anti-ethnic prejudices. Today, most linguists see the relationship of bilingualism and intelligence as much more complex than either of the above models posits. The relationship is a subtle one. Neurolinguists, such as Michel Paradis (2001), suggest that there is a cognitive system, independent of a bilingual’s two languages, that provides the original input. Once this “input” (the abstract idea of a table, for instance) is put through the bilingual’s languages (in the case of ISLA students, English and Spanish) it will emerge as either “table” or “mesa”. Each of the languages, then, is a subset to a larger brain system. Interference between the two languages does occur, sometimes resulting in small deficits that must be overcome. However, transfer occurs also, allowing bilinguals to learn particular skills more rapidly than their monolingual counterparts because they are able to transfer what they already know in one language to the other. Bilinguals can distinguish between the same semantic concepts in words from both their first and second language where the meaning of the words are equivalent, but the phonetic representation is different (Correia et al. 2014). Bilingualism has also been directly correlated with better performance on cognitive task switching, or the ability to quickly shift attention between tasks and efficiently adapt to different situations (Gold et al. 2013). Ultimately, functioning as a bilingual child is a complex task, and one that presents both advantages and disadvantages. Despite the more nuanced understanding of bilingualism being uncovered by researchers, public attitudes towards bilingualism have changed little over the last 50 years. As ISLA’s parents have witnessed firsthand, learning a minority heritage language in a culture dominated by negative views towards bilingualism can be a difficult process. But, there is no fluent-or-not binary, and ISLA strives to place an emphasis on the fact that language acquisition is an ever-evolving process. The Spanish immersion curriculum used at ISLA is based on the most current research

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on bilingualism. Our curriculum developers recognize that language acquisition takes place along a continuum and that the process of maintaining a heritage language can result in a variety of outcomes, including incomplete acquisition of the heritage language, attrition, or proficiency in a contact variety of the language. If children lack academic instruction in Spanish, and especially if that lack of academic instruction is coupled with limited Spanish spoken in the home, the result is incomplete acquisition of the heritage language. As heritage language children enter into the public school system at 4 or 5 years of age, they quickly adapt to the new linguistic context and begin to adopt the majority language: English. Without a strong Spanish presence, their education in English will dominate their linguistic functions, and their Spanish may suffer attrition. Lacking a dynamic environment to use Spanish on a regular basis, they may lose what they learned before entering the school system (Potowski et al. 2009). ISLA attempts to guide its Spanish-speaking students through this process and provide the structural support necessary to ensure minimal loss of the heritage language.

Responding to the Research: ISLA’s Attempts to Create a Heritage Language Program Scholars have called for further study of the process of Spanish language acquisition for native and heritage Spanish speakers in the United States as it relates to the education system. Guadalupe Valdés voiced this concern in a 2005 article on bilingualism and heritage language learners: “What needs to be explored is how these different systems [of heritage Spanish language learning in the U.S.]—if indeed they are different—might be reshaped by formal instruction” (417). Valdés, along with scholars Joshua Fishman, Rebecca Chávez, and William Pérez, have challenged the view that English should be the only language spoken in the United States. Despite the recent legislation against bilingual education in California and elsewhere, many Latino immigrant parents want to preserve their culture, and see bilingual education for their children as an avenue to doing so (Farruggio 2010). Even in places where bilingualism in the education system has not specifically been legislated, policies mandated through No Child Left Behind made it difficult for many public schools to offer bilingual education (Ray 2008). This dearth of adequate programming in public education creates a need for rigorous heritage language programs, such as ISLA, to subsidize heritage language proficiency and bilingualism (Valdés 2005; Potowski et al. 2009; Farruggio 2010). These programs strengthen

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heritage-language communities, form social capital for new immigrant populations, and promote educational achievement (Zhou and Kim 2008). The ISLA program curriculum is similar to comparable Chinese and Korean models, two heritage languages that have seen a modicum of success with supplemental academic language programs. In a 2008 study, researchers Min Zhou and Susan Kim found that in Los Angeles almost two thirds of Chinese and over three fourths of Koreans spoke English at home, and that the structure provided by the supplemental educational programs in Chinese and Korean helped the communities maintain culture, build social capital, and form social groups. Parents involved in the programs shared a common culture acquired in childhood, even if they did not know each other personally growing up. They cooperated and shared information on parenting, tips on how their children can get into the best universities, or even how to invest in the stock market. During ISLA’s first year in operation, we saw a similar community form amongst the Latina/o parents. Parents shared discipline strategies, coupons for free kickboxing lessons, and sympathy for newcomers who were struggling to adapt to life in the United States. Above and beyond building social communities to help new immigrants survive, these supplemental language programs studied by Zhou and Kim provided many more benefits. The programs opened an avenue to educational excellence for their children through supplemental instruction, in part because the curriculum did not merely repeat what was taught in school; it added to it. The mission statements of these programs emphasized heritage language learning, but when interviewed, both principals and students recognized other, more far-reaching benefits. Students and parents networked and socialized in their native language, supporting each other in ways mainstream U.S. society will not. These supplemental academic programs acted as community centers for both students and parents, often by helping parents navigate the educational system in the U.S. and by providing cultural activities for families as a social group, such as celebrations of Chinese New Year (Zhou and Kim 2008). For students, the programs provided an alternative space where they could explore and express what it means to be Chinese or KoreanAmerican in positive ways that affirmed their heritage. In contrast to the high levels of English being spoken in the Chinese and Korean-American homes found by Zhou and Kim, the same study found that little more than one fourth of Mexicans in Los Angeles spoke English at home. Not speaking English at home is often perceived by mainstream Anglo-American society as a lack of desire to integrate and succeed. As a result, an amputation of heritage, such as the act of

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switching to speaking English at home, occurs as ethnic groups attempt to counteract these assumptions. Further, non-native speakers’ perceived lack of drive to assimilate is often publicly and academically couched in terms of “deficit”. Current research, however, does not support this correlation between language and success. One study found that on average Hispanic youths in the United States scored lower on tests, had lower grade point averages, had parents with less education, and had lower socioeconomic status than all other ethnic groups. However, the Hispanic immigrant group was not found to be the lowest scoring in knowledge of English (Portes and MacLeod 1996). As an organization, ISLA is still in its infancy; however, since its inception it has fought against this kind of “deficit” thinking. The assumption that a culture is “deficient” implies that it is unable to adapt to changing needs. Drawing on the recent research demonstrating the benefits of bilingualism, ISLA offers our Hispanic community the structural support necessary to resist this characterization and to take pride in their heritage culture.

Guiding Our Kids: ISLA’s Curriculum The goal of the ISLA Saturday school program is for students to reach a level of proficiency in their heritage language to equal proficiency levels required in Latin America for their age group. ISLA provides its participants with a worldview curriculum from the perspective of Latin America, rather than Spain. Hispanophone immigrants in the United States are from a variety of regions in which different dialects of Spanish are spoken. These new immigrants are often judged in formal language programs in the United States against a standard set by the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), an official institution in Spain that oversees the Spanish language. When evaluated against a standard written for a different dialect, these speakers are seen as deficient simply because they speak their own country’s variety of Spanish (Showstack 2012). In addition to a perceived academic deficiency in spoken Spanish in the United States, children of first-generation Latin American immigrants may have incomplete language acquisition of their heritage language. Although they speak and hear it spoken in the home, their formal education is in English. These children may receive no formal instruction at all in Spanish, and therefore are literate only in English (Valdés 2005). Many of ISLA’s students come from family situations similar to those described by Valdés. Some speak exclusively Spanish in the home, but do not use it in academic settings, some speak a mix of Spanish and English

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in the home, and others speak primarily English. As a result, ISLA children often have a wide range of levels in Spanish literacy and content knowledge, and instruction is designed to meet them at their current knowledge level. Upon matriculating, all students are assessed and a specialized plan is developed to help each child progress in the areas most needed. By employing customized constructivist study plans for students, ISLA provides the content and skills needed in an individualized way. These plans include concrete, sensory (hands-on) exploration, allowing each child to question and construct knowledge through a series of exchanges of ideas with facilitators and peers (Piaget 1988). Our staff facilitators and teachers are native Spanish speakers or fluent in Spanish and are not allowed to speak any language other than Spanish during class time. This combination of individualized instruction and immersion in the child’s heritage language has yielded impressive results. At the end of the first year of ISLA, one parent commented that her daughter had learned more, and at a faster rate, in Spanish than she had in English over the same time period. This is despite the fact that the ISLA Saturday school is only three hours a week, and her formal schooling is all day, Monday through Friday. ISLA has drawn from a variety of academic and real world sources to inspire its curriculum. In addition to basing the curriculum on the constructivist theories of Piaget (1988) in which children are seen to construct their own knowledge, and emulating the Chinese and Korean heritage language program models (Zhou and Kim 2008), ISLA is inspired by the Peruvian national curriculum and the Spanish curriculum for Spanish speakers used at the Roosevelt School in Lima, Peru. As a result, the ISLA curriculum contains a worldview similar to that of the International Baccalaureate (IB) Swiss educational program guiding the Roosevelt Spanish curriculum. Further, ISLA mindfully aligns skills assessments with those required by local state academic standards in the United States so that students are not only prepared for a bilingual life, but a bicultural one as well. The Roosevelt School was chosen as a model due to its successful bilingual Spanish-English language program that serves a complex population, including native Spanish speakers being raised in Peru, U.S. based heritage Spanish language learners living in Peru temporarily, and international students residing in Peru. The school teaches most courses in English and has an excellent program in Spanish for Spanish speakers. Most of these native Spanish speakers had formal education in Pre-K and Kindergarten in only English, even though they speak Spanish at home. As it is a private school and Roosevelt students’ families are quite affluent,

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the children frequently have books read to them in English, watch television in English, or play video games in English before taking an entrance examination of English literacy skills and beginning preKindergarten. Approximately half of the student population at Roosevelt is Peruvian,1 and the school has to meet all the national curricular needs of Peruvian citizens in only one hour a day of elementary school Spanish, and without any formal Spanish literacy instruction before first grade. By the time Peruvian students in Roosevelt finish their first semester of their senior year in high school, they have met national curricular requirements and can apply to go to college in Peru, or finish the senior year and apply to attend an English speaking university abroad. They graduate functionally literate in both Spanish and English and are able to continue their academic studies in either language. Although the well-crafted curriculum designed by the Roosevelt school was developed with a different motivation, we found it matched some of the needs of our own students. ISLA also serves a diverse student population with different Spanish literacy levels in any one age group. While most ISLA children are immersed in Spanish at home, in their community, and with Spanish speaking media and advertising surrounding them, a few (usually third generation immigrants) are partially or even almost fully immersed in English at home. Roosevelt’s program serves varied needs in one classroom for both native and non-native speakers and they must meet the national Peruvian curricular requirements in only one hour a day. Ultimately, they have to squeeze a lot of material into a short amount of time, and so do we. Four main conceptual units guide our supplemental Spanish immersion program at ISLA. These basic conceptual units in the curriculum encompass: Our Culture, Ourselves, Our Systems, and Our Natural World. We honor and celebrate the indigenous languages, stories of childhood, and the cultural histories of our community. The appropriate content for curricular concepts is used for each age group. For example, “Our Systems” in Kindergarten means learning about carreras (careers), and it encompasses the impact of economic activities on the environment. Learning about “Ourselves” encompasses understanding using our senses to gain knowledge of the world around us and is incorporated into artistic explorations. Important to the program is the inclusion of science content in the exploration of the natural world. This can mean exploring the 1

Students at Colegio Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Lima, Peru come from 37 countries, with approximately 23% from the United States, 53% from Peru, and 24% from other countries (see http://www.amersol.edu.pe/who-we-are/schoolprofile/index.aspx).

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schoolyard as a biologist with a Spanish speaking volunteer who may be a science major from the nearby university, drawing plants, and noticing traces of animals. As students mature, this intimate knowledge of the natural world around them will help them understand and appreciate the larger world and the environmental challenges the world faces. Spanish is taught at ISLA as it is taught in Latin America, with a global outlook. When inside the classrooms, children often work in small groups with activities integrating multiple subjects, while using Latin American culture and history as a context for learning. An example of this at our Pre-K level is learning colors by coloring in a flag of a Latin American country, playacting in Spanish with dolls that look like the children and are dressed in traditional Mexican costumes, making music with instruments from the jungle of Peru, or putting together a puzzle of the map of South America. An advantage of having students in these small working groups is being able to divide them up by ages and abilities and challenge them at their various levels. We also challenge each child at his or her own level while engaging the child in conversation. When blowing bubbles outdoors, for instance, we ask students to describe what they see happening. This way, students not only practice their own verbal skills, but they can also listen to each other answer. Doing so allows us to guide the development of each individual child’s literacy and verbal vocabulary in Spanish as needed, simply by what we choose to ask or say to them. Students also help shape ISLA curriculum. We now spend, by student request, and weather allowing, an average of an hour each Saturday outdoors exploring the natural world. We have an overgrown forest area on the campus where our classes are housed. Students keep science journals and use binoculars, magnifying glasses, books in Spanish, and iPads to observe and learn with, and then they record their discoveries. In addition to captivating students’ interest, this space outside of the classroom gives us a secondary setting in which to expose children to vocabulary. The students expand their vocabulary in an organic way, as they search for the words to describe what they are seeing around them. This learning time outdoors is missing from their formal education Monday through Friday, and at the end of our first year of ISLA, this was what the students liked best—time outdoors. We responded and increased time and lessons outdoors in 2013-2014. Additionally, these outdoor activities and the positive response from the students have sparked a commitment on the part of ISLA to augment the amount of natural sciences already being offered. ISLA took field trips to the local botanical gardens where students could explore and learn about flora and fauna indigenous to North Carolina, in Spanish. We also

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had a bilingual science teacher lead the group through our state museum of natural sciences in Spanish. Without the aid of the Spanish-speaking teacher, students would not have been able to experience the museum in Spanish, since the displays were strictly in English. These displays are indicative of the sort of relentless, systemic exposure to the dominant language that causes children to abandon their minority heritage languages. By providing an alternative, ISLA helps to counteract the pervasiveness of the dominant language and to create access to these spaces in Spanish. Interestingly, we crossed paths with a Korean heritage language group with the same agenda while we were in the museum. Another significant aspect of ISLA’s curriculum design is parent involvement in the classroom. A Latin American cultural component is interwoven throughout all the lessons, and every Saturday class culminates with a parent presentation. In these weekly presentations, parents tell stories of their childhood, explain their history and culture, and bring in artifacts, such as costumes or crafts, from their country of origin. Parents have helped students build Panamanian pyramids with blocks, presented posters on the Day of the Dead, cooked tamales, shared hand-embroidered costumes, and read aloud in a disappearing indigenous language. Beyond their weekly presentations, parents also help shape ISLA’s curriculum. During the time leading up to Mother’s Day, the parents mentioned a special dance the children do in Mexico to honor their mothers. Responding to this conversation, the teachers helped the children practice and perform the dance during the ISLA “Fiesta del Día de la Madre” (Mother’s Day Celebration). The dance honored the mothers in a familiar way, evoking joyful memories from their own childhoods. By giving cultural presentations of their own design, and because their requests are taken seriously, parents have the power to help shape the ISLA cultural curriculum. During exit interviews, over half of the children mentioned things they learned during these parent presentations, and we never know what wonderful new cultural treasures the parents may bring to ISLA that the children will remember and cherish.

A Success Story: Learning Results in ISLA Over the course of our inaugural year, we used a variety of methods to perform assessments. In addition to traditional assessments, such as administering Spanish language reading assessments developed by Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell (2011), we also determined the individual needs of each student through regular parent-teacher conferences and consulted with students’ Monday-through-Friday classroom teachers to

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gain information on literacy and skills competency in the formal classroom. For some students, we coordinated our efforts on Saturdays with their needs in the formal classroom to address academic challenges common to English and Spanish literacy. To help determine the effectiveness of our Spanish literacy program and assess student skills, staff or trained volunteers from local universities and high schools wrote down observations during class time, or asked students to perform certain tasks, recorded the students’ abilities and tracked their progress. Over the course of the academic year, our inaugural class (2012-2013) showed significant literacy gains. The class was composed of 5 four-yearolds, 3 five-year-olds, and 5 six-year-olds (ages at the time of the end-ofyear skills assessments). We measured their Spanish reading level in the fall and the spring using leveled readers, and out of 13 students in our ISLA-Ed study the first year of our program, all students except those who were 4 years old (our pre-readers) showed gains in literacy and were at level 1 or 2 in reading by the end of the school year. One six-year-old student improved by 3 reading levels in one school year. The order in which literacy skills are taught in Spanish can vary slightly from the order in English, with the different curricula placing emphasis on different skills. Because classrooms in Spanish-speaking countries introduce vowels before the other letters in the alphabet, one of the most important literacy skills in Spanish is the ability to identify the vowels without the aid of pictures. At the end of the year, the ability to identify the vowels was a skill that all students had mastered, even the four year olds, see Fig. 8-1. In addition to the progress made by students, ISLA saw tremendous growth in the parents’ group. The parents are a large part of the ISLA program, and a central aspect of ISLA’s mission is to create a space where parents feel empowered and informed about their child’s education. Part of our program is to have a discussion with the parents of each student in the fall and in the spring to report on skills assessments and performance overall. The parents value understanding what their child is learning, and they feel a sense of power when discussing their child’s progress in Spanish, their native language. Beyond just their interest in their children’s educations, though, the parents have formed a social structure in ISLA. They have found an alternative communal space, where they share memories of their heritage with each other and work together as presenters or assistants in the classrooms. Together the parents find meaning and significance in their ethnicity as they reshape their identity to negotiate life in the United States, and watch their children flourish in a bilingual and bicultural environment.

Building Bilingualism in Community

Fig. 8-1 ISLA-Ed Spanish Literacy Skills 2012-2013 Graph

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Count and Identify Numbers 1-5 Count and Identify Numbers 6-10 Identify Transportation Vehicles Identify Body Parts Identify Shapes Identify Basic Food Identify Rainbow Colors Identify Months of Year Identify Days of the Week Identify Vowels with Pictures Identify Vowels without Pictures Range of Capital Letters Identified Range of Lower Case Letters Identified Identify All Letter Sounds Identify/Read Syllables Identify How Many Syllables in a Word Segment Words into Syllables

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18 19 20 21 22 23 24

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Can Rhyme Identify Initial Syllable Identify Ending Syllable Sound Decipher when to use A or a Read Consonant Blends Can Read Frequent Words List #1 Can Write Legibly

Table 8-1 Key: ISLA Spanish Literacy Skills Assessments Chart

A Plan for the Future: ISLA’s Goals Talking to ISLA’s parents about the importance of raising their children bilingually is a little like preaching to the choir. The parents who choose to spend their Saturdays at the school so their children can receive instruction in their native language are already a self-selected group. Our hope is that by supporting these parents and giving them the confidence and the vocabulary to talk about the benefits of bilingualism, they will become ambassadors to the larger Latina/o community in the area. ISLA concentrates on the advantages of bilingualism for students, and a core component of our mission is the belief that the social advantages far outweigh the small potential disadvantages. The advantages gained for children raised to be proud of their heritage cannot be measured, and the economic advantages for someone who can navigate in two linguistic worlds cannot be predicted. This year (2013-2014) we expanded to two classes, and as word of mouth spreads about ISLA, we hope to continue to expand, adding a new class of students every year. As a result, in twelve years we will have formed a full-fledged Spanish immersion program promoting bilingualism, and those original kindergarten students will be ready to graduate from high school and enter the larger world with proficiency in both English and Spanish. We can only accomplish this, though, if María and her fellow parents have the knowledge and the confidence to question the authority figures that tell them not to raise their children bilingually.

Acknowledgements We are grateful for the research support and guidance of Dr. Ye He at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and the unending enthusiasm of the ISLA staff and volunteers for bilingual education.

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Works Cited Correia, JoƗo, Elia Formisano, Giancarlo Valente, Lars Hausfeld, Bernadette Jansma, and Milene Bonte. 2014. Brain-based Translation: fMRI Decoding of Spoken Words in Bilinguals Reveals Languageindependent Semantic Representations in Anterior Temporal Lobe. The Journal of Neuroscience 34: 332-338. Darcy, Natalie. 1953. A Review of the Literature on the Effects of Bilingualism: ‘The Measurement of Intelligence.’ Journal of Genetic Psychology 82: 21-57. Farruggio, Pete. 2010. Latino immigrant parents’ views of bilingual education as a vehicle for heritage preservation. Journal of Latinos and Education 9: 3–21. Fountas, Irene and Gay Su Pinnell. 2011. Sistema de Evaluacion de la Lectura, Grados K-2. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Gold, Brian, Kim Chobok, Nathan Johnson, Richard Kryscio, and Charles Smith. 2013. Lifelong Bilingualism Maintains Neural Efficiency for Cognitive Control in Aging. The Journal of Neuroscience 33: 387-396. Ianco-Worrall, Anita. 1972. Bilingualism and Cognitive Development. Child Development 43: 1390-1400. Lambert, Wallace. 1977. “The Effects of Bilingualism on the Individual: Cognitive and Socio-Cultural Consequences.” Bilingualism: Psychological, Social and Educational Implications. New York: Academic Press. Leopold, Werner. 1949. Speech Development of a Bilingual Child. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Paradis, Michel. 2001. An Integrated Linguistic Theory of Bilingualism (1976-2000). LACUS Forum, XXVII. Piaget, Jean. 1988. Où va l’éducation. Paris: Denoël/Gonthier. (Reprint of Où va l’éducation, by Piaget, 1948, New York, NY: U.N.E.S.C.O.) Portes, Alejandro and Dag Macleod. 1996. Educational Progress of Children of Immigrants: The Role of Class, Ethnicity, and School Context. Sociology of Education 69: 255-275. Potowski, Kim, Jill Jegerski and Kara Morgan-Short.2009. The Effects of Instruction on Subjunctive Development Among Spanish Heritage Language Speakers. Language Learning 59: 537-579. Ray, Juliet M. 2008. Building the Bridge as you Walk on it: Didactic Behaviors of Elementary Teachers in a Dual Language Program. Teaching and Teacher Education 24: 1658–1671. Saer, D.J. 1923. The Effects of Bilingualism on Intelligence. British Journal of Psychology 14: 25-38.

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Showstack, Rachel Elizabeth. 2012. Symbolic Power in the Heritage Language Classroom: How Spanish Heritage Speakers Sustain and Resist Hegemonic Discourses on Language and Cultural Diversity. Spanish in Context 9: 1-26. Smith, Frank. 1923. Bilingualism and Mental Development. British Journal of Psychology 13: 270-282. Valdés, Guadalupe. 2005. Bilingualism, Heritage Language Learners, and SLA Research: Opportunities Lost or Seized? The Modern Language Journal 89: 410-425. Valdés, Guadalupe, Joshua A. Fishman, Rebecca Chávez, and William Pérez. 2008. Developing Minority Language Resources: The Case of Spanish in California. Language Problems and Language Planning 32: 73-76. Wagner, Daniel. 1980. Cognitive Perspectives on Bilingualism in Children. Applied Psychology 29: 31-41. Zhou, Min and Susan Kim. 2008. Community Forces, Social Capital, and Educational Achievement: The Case of Supplementary Education in the Chinese and Korean Immigrant Communities” Harvard Educational Review 76: 1-29.

CONTRIBUTORS

AERIN BENAVIDES is a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro School of Education Department of Teacher Education and Higher Education. She is also a Director and President of the Immersion for Spanish Language Acquisition (ISLA) a non-profit heritage language program in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Her research interests are in science education, specifically environmental and sustainability education, and she is an advocate for Spanish heritage language education. Her instructional design innovation is the framework for the ISLA Spanish heritage language program, which includes many quality science and environmental education components. She has published articles to do with field science education and herpetology, as well as the instruction of advocacy in preservice teacher education. CHRISTINE JERNIGAN is Christine Jernigan holds a Ph.D. in Foreign Language Education from the University of Texas at Austin and trains ESL instructors at North Carolina State University. Her research interests include language learning motivation and childhood bilingualism with non-native parents. She has contributed to the book, Essential Competencies for English-medium University Teaching to be released in December of 2015. Her own book, Family Language Learning: Learn Another Language, Raise Bilingual Children will be released January, 2015. Find videos on sample chapters at www.youtube.com/getbilingual. DAVID MARLOW serves as Associate Professor of English, ESOL, and Linguistics at the University of South Carolina Upstate where he has been teaching at the graduate and undergraduate levels since 2004. He holds a PhD in English with a concentration in Applied Linguistics, an MS in Information Science, and an MA in TESOL and has taught ESOL in Japan, China, and the US. His primary research interests revolve around linguistic difference and diversity and strategies for leading students into deep connections with course concepts. Dave also conducts ongoing teacher training and research in a rural community of Nicaragua and he serves on the board for the international humanitarian service organization, 516NOW. Dave has published on such topics as Gender and Abusive Language in Chinese and English, Employing Technology to Meet the

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Global Demand for English Instruction, and Using a Personal Response System to Encourage Grammatical Thought. At the core of all his endeavors, Dave seeks to make a meaningful difference in people’s lives. RACHEL NORMAN is a doctoral student in the Comparative Literature Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she specializes in multi-ethnic literature in North America, sociolinguistics and critical race theory. She works in English, Spanish, French and Arabic, and her dissertation examines Arab-American literature in Anglophone, Hispanophone, and Francophone North America. She was the first volunteer at ISLA (Immersion for Spanish Language Acquisition) a successful Spanish Saturday school located in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. There, she established the parents’ group as a way to provide support to the parents while encouraging them to stay involved in their children’s education. IULIA PITTMAN is an Associate Professor of German and Linguistics at Auburn University. A native of Romania, she grew up in a HungarianRomanian bilingual household. Her research interests include bilingualism, code-switching, pronunciation issues in foreign language learning, dialects, and technology in foreign language teaching. She has presented extensively on these topics at local, national, and international conferences. Her publications include the book The Romanian Accent in English and an article on trilingual code-switching that appeared in the International Journal of Multilingualism. Works published on pedagogical issues cover topics such as phonetic transcription, using technology to teach phonetics, and language and culture in the Business German course. ALEXANDER SAGER is associate professor of German at the Department of Germanic and Slavic studies at the University of Georgia (Athens). He specializes in medieval German literature and culture. He is the author of Minne von maeren: On Wolfram’s Titurel (Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2006) as well as articles and essays on medieval romance, biblical narratives, and courtly love poetry. He is currently working on a translation of the late thirteenth-century romance Der jüngere Titurel as well as co-editing a volume of essays entitled Triangular Readings in German Literature and Culture. He runs two blogs, one dedicated to podcast-type recordings of medieval Germanic languages (http://www. sagemaere.libsyn.com/), and another documenting personal experiences in raising a bilingual child (http://piggypedagogy.blogspot.com/). The latter takes up where the essay in this volume leaves off.

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VERA LEE-SCHOENFELD, Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic & Slavic Studies and the Linguistics Program at the University of Georgia, is primarily a theoretical linguist focusing on German syntax, in particular on constructions involving possessor datives and the distribution of (non-)reflexive pronouns in sentences with embedded infinitive clauses and other clause-like phrases. Some of her work on these topics was published in the Proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (2014), Linguistische Berichte (2012), and Syntax (2008) as well as in her John Benjamins book Beyond coherence: The syntax of opacity in German (2007). In other work, she has investigated how syntax, semantics, information structure, and prosody come together to constrain German verb phrase fronting. Covering more general topics in linguistics, including language acquisition, her second book, coauthored with Donna Jo Napoli, was published by Oxford University Press and is titled Language matters: A guide to everyday questions about language, Second edition (2010). DAVID ZUWIYYA received his doctorate in Hispanic Literature specializing in the medieval period in 1995 from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Currently, at Auburn University in Alabama, he teaches all genres of Spanish literature from the earliest lyric poems called “jarchas” beginning in 11th century to the novel in dialogue known as La Celestina from 1499 published on the cusp of the Spanish Renaissance. His research has focused on Aljamiado and Morisco literature, as well as on the medieval legend of Alexander the Great, especially the HispanoArabic versions, about which he has published numerous articles. He has published two books about Alexander, one an edition and translation of an Andalusian text from medieval Arab Spain, and another a collection of essays on the medieval Alexander Romance from across the language spectrum.

INDEX C challenge, 3, 38, 50, 68 Chinese, 2, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58, 60, 61, 90, 118, 120 code-switching, 54, 77, 78

L language acquisition, 5, 7, 62, 68, 99, 100, 101, 116, 119 Latino, 113, 117 loss, 7, 117

D delay, 5, 114, 115 F first language, 2, 7, 38, 56, 88, 90 G German, 19, 20, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 30, 32, 40, 59, 92, 99, 100, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110 H heritage, 3, 8, 13, 44, 50, 55, 56, 57, 68, 71, 83, 84, 92, 95, 96, 108, 113, 116, 117, 118, 120, 123, 124 Hungarian, 11 I immersion, 6, 45, 68, 76, 88, 92, 94, 95, 96, 116, 120, 126 input, 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 26, 56, 69, 73, 76, 80, 82, 84, 107, 116 J Japanese, 8, 42, 49, 51, 52, 54, 55, 59, 60

M maintenance, 3, 4, 8, 101 minority language, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 68, 70, 84, 88, 93, 95, 96, 101, 102, 103, 104, 106, 107, 109, 110, 115 multilingualism, 2, 50 O OPOL, 7, 8, 104 P Portuguese, 11, 35, 36, 40, 41, 44 proficiency, 3, 6, 8, 12, 13, 53, 56, 80, 88, 94, 96, 117, 119, 126 puppet, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32 R Romanian, 11 S second language, 6, 7, 20, 35, 49, 50, 51, 69, 78, 82, 84, 88, 89, 90, 93, 95, 96, 116

134 siblings, 5, 11, 20, 57, 70, 82, 103, 108 Spanish, 2, 35, 37, 39, 40, 49, 51, 59, 60, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93, 94, 95, 113, 114, 116, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 126

Index support, 2, 3, 8, 11, 91, 106, 117, 118, 119, 126 T triangulation, 23, 31 trigger, 41, 103, 105, 108, 110