My wife Deni and I are trying to raise our daughter to speak three languages. My wife only speaks in Turkish. I speak in Spanish, and eventually her environment will teach her English. Right now, we have her in daycare on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. Obviously, she gets little exposure to Turkish or Spanish on those days. My wife and I have been debating if it makes more sense to have her in day care three days in a row, or if for the purpose of trying to immerse her in our languages, it makes more sense to break it up. Right now, she’s exposed to Turkish and Spanish: Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, and mostly English on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Would it make more sense to have her in day care every other day, like Monday, Wednesday, and Friday? My sense is this doesn’t make a big difference. What do you think? Any other advice for trilingual families? Take care, Mario
Dear Mario and Deni,
This is an interesting question—that we could easily debate all day. If you have a choice, should you try to avoid a 3-day gap when your daughter will hear less of your home languages and will hear mostly English?
I don’t think principles of language learning will decide it for us. As I tried to make clear in my book, there are many, many different ways to arrange your family’s language landscape to help your child learn your languages—and they all can work, provided they’re relatively consistent and give the child strong motivation to use the different languages when she is exposed to them.
For me, the important question is “what is your daughter’s temperament?” How does she react to changes? I remember my son as a toddler. It was hard to get him to stop what he was doing to go somewhere. Then once I got him there, it was just as hard to get him to leave! If your daughter is like he was, she’ll take precious time away from today’s language by making a slow transition from yesterday’s language. If so, she may do better with larger blocks of time before changing, as you currently have it.
Most likely, though, your daughter will accept whatever system makes the most sense for you and your work schedules. We have lots of examples telling us we can associate each language with a person or place, not a time. If you stay with your current system, I’d be careful during her daycare days to make sure I stayed in my language and didn’t also follow her to English. After all, you don’t mean for them to be “English days,” just a day when she hears more English in the mix.
The key is to watch your daughter’s reactions–as I’m sure you are doing anyway. Does she show any distress when people change languages? Is she slow to follow? You don’t say how old she is, so we don’t know if she can tell you what she is feeling, but I think this aspect of temperament is evident in behavior from very early on.
Remember, too, that what you decide today can be modified later if you feel the need. In my experience, language changes take about two months to take hold, so I don’t recommend flip-flopping. But most children, like most adults, are amazingly flexible.
This is a good question to open up to other people who have been in your situation. What do other Spanglishbaby readers have to say about Mario’s question?
Best wishes,
Barbara
Barbara Zurer Pearson, Ph. D. – A bilingualism expert with over twenty years of research experience in the fields of bilingualism, linguistics, and communication disorders, Pearson is the author of the informative and extremely useful book Do you have a question for our experts? Remember no question is too big or too simple. So, to send us your question, please click here or leave a comment below. Thank you!
In my experience, preschool is the devil.
My nephew – who spoke Bengali, Spanish and English equally readily until he got to preschool – after the first few weeks started refusing to speak anything but English. He could, he just no longer wanted to. And that’s in a diverse pre-school in an ethnically diverse city.
My daughter – who only ever had Spanish and English poured into her ear – came back from her not-so-diverse preschool in a regrettably undiverse small town saying, “Don’t speak to me in that language.” It got so bad after she’d been in preschool for a month or so that she’d turn off Sesame Street if she heard any characters speaking Spanish.
I’m sure there are some preschools out there that are fully bi- or multi-lingual, and I’m sure the experience of those is completely different. But until I hear lots of great stories about them, I’m afraid every preschool I visualize has horns, a spiked tail and carries a monolinguist’s pitchfork.
Hola Mario—
I don’t think that the days in which your child attends daycare/preschool really matter. If you and your wife are consistent, your child should learn both languages.
My husband and I are raising our sons using the OPOL method. I speak to them in Spanish and he speaks to them in German. The kids get English by living in the U.S.
See if the preschool has any Spanish speaking teachers. Both of my sons have teachers that speak to them in Spanish. The one teacher speaks four languages and is a firm believer in raising children in more than one language. I have donated bilingual books, CDs of Spanish music, and Spanish books on CD. The teachers are always happy to receive and use new materials. The one teacher even had my husband teach the class a song in German.
There may come a time when your child refuses to speak Spanish and Turkish, but it is probably just a phase. I have not had this experience yet, but my mother-in-law said that both my husband and his brother started to answer her in English. She continued to speak to them in German, and now, as adults, both my husband and his brother can speak the language.
The best way to increase exposure in the minority language is by joining a playgroup. We belong to a Spanish one and a German group. I post monthly on this website and will be posting regarding activities for playgroups next month. I’ll also be addressing how working parents can be involved too, so hopefully I can give you some other ideas too.
Good luck!
Susan
Hola Tocayo… Para empezar, “Spanglish” no existe en forma “oficial” eh, pero, si queremos tocar el tema de como ayudarle a la siguiente generacion a enfrascarse en la lengua “natal,” tomemos en cuenta lo siguiente…
I can speak to the importance of speaking in one’s native tongue to the budding linguist. I have two adult daughters who learned to speak, read and write Spanish at home. I myself, as I’m sure you may have, learned Spanish in a similar fashion — mom and dad spoke only Spanish at home, and English was picked up outside of the house, e.g., school, neighborhood kids, etc.
My adult daughter is married to a Dutch speaking husband, and their infant daughter has already immersed herself in the English language nicely, and at the early age of three years old! I remind my daughter to speak to her daughter in Spanish, however, papa doesn’t speak Spanish, so the biggest challenge is how to get daughter to speak English, Dutch or Spanish, when the common language at home, on the street, at school MUST BE ENGLISH! It is tough, and I can appreciate how tough that may be, especially when in order to understand each other at home, English is the norm.
My approach was to read stories in Spanish, talk Spanish, expect and “demand” from my growing children to speak Spanish (and reward that at all times), have them read from the Spanish books I would buy, also teach them Spanish from grammar books I bought — the whole series from 1st grade through 6th grade, and at the end of that exercise, both my daughters became proficient in both languages.
It is a life-long process, and as frustrating as it can sometimes get, if you persist, it’ll happen. Oh, and don’t expect that it will continue that way once your children have grown, because, when you think about it, if we’re here in the States, English is the norm. And now, at this stage in life, my two adult daughters, while they’re comfortable speaking Spanish, speak only English — even to me!
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