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One-parent,one-language: A strategy for raising bi- or tri-lingual kids

Here’s a nice story in the Calgary Herald about families succeeding in maintaining their home languages. Here here!

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If you speak a language besides English, should you teach it to your child from the womb on? For some Calgary families, the benefits of raising a child who can speak two, or even three, languages are worth the back and forth it takes to get there.

By Malwina Gudowska, Calgary HeraldApril 23, 2010

Matthew Singh jumps out of the car boiling over with excitement as he’s about to enter a large play area with a multitude of new toys. As he walks into the aptly named

Coffee and S’cream he jumps up and down, nearly bouncing off the walls with excitement. His one-year-old sister Milla stares at him with admiration. While his dad, Chad Singh, pays the $5.71 per child entrance fee, Matthew proclaims: “Ja chcem ice cream!” His mother, Christine Wielezynski Singh, looks down at her son and, in response to his half-Polish, half-English sentence, quickly quashes his demand for ice cream– lody in Polish–by answering him solely in her mother tongue. The translation: “Maybe later you can have ice cream at home.” The child nods and we follow him and his sister into the play area. Matthew hops into one of the plastic kid cars and starts zooming around, much to the chagrin of one of the owners of the N.W. cafe who, moments later, asks him to slow down. Singh goes up to his son and in a calm manner tells him in Hindi that he has to watch out for the other kids. Matthew nods again and continues on his way.

At three and a half years old, Matthew is trilingual. The couple uses a popular language-acquisition method called “one-parent-one-language,” in which the mother always speaks one language with the child while the father always speaks another, whether it’s English or, as in Matthew’s case, a third language.

Read more here.





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