In preparation for our addition to the family, my husband and I have switched to speaking Spanish to each other nearly all the time. We even text in Spanish. This is a pretty big break from our pattern of communicating in English with each other and Spanish only with the other native speakers in our life.

I have always known that it’s difficult for me to use Spanish when I’m upset, angry, or otherwise emotionally out of sorts. However, I didn’t anticipate how hard it would be to have intimate daily conversation with my husband in my non-native language. No matter how well I can get across the details of the matter at hand, it’s the feeling that is sometimes missing.

When we have an argument, I hear myself repeating the same vocabulary over and over, but in a different tone of voice. I don’t feel that I have the breadth of word choice to really explain myself. When I’m trying to be funny or sarcastic, the result is not as funny to me as it would be in English. Worst of all, when I’m trying to comfort my hubby after a long day, I’m never 100% sure that I said the right thing.

What’s amazing to me is that no matter how long I’ve been speaking Spanish (over a decade now), I continue to find limits that I did not expect. I assume that everyone who learns a language after early childhood runs into a similar dilemma, but I still wonder what it feels like to be bilingual or multilingual from birth and feel a native level of comfort with more than one mode of communication.

In a way, this is what excites me about raising bilingual kids… but it also makes me feel disconnected from them, because I’ll never be able to use Spanish with the children in the same way I can use English with them.

Does your emotional connection to each of the languages you speak affect your ability to use it in varying circumstances?

{Image by Claire Burge}

I began to learn Spanish a bit in grade school, and then in high school began the typical Spanish classes an hour a day. When I was a freshman, I traveled abroad for the first time to Peru with my dad to bring home my newly adopted brother and sister. This trip changed my life in uncountable ways: experiencing and living the language in bustling Lima and magical Cuzco cemented my love of Spanish and Latin culture.

In college, I changed my major to Spanish in part so that I could study abroad — not once, but twice (Spain and Ecuador). Most of my friends were Spanish-speaking, and I became very fluent. At the same time, I met my future husband — an exchange student from Mexico. I became a Spanish and ESL high school teacher, and we traveled frequently within Mexico, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Spain.

Evaluating my education and experiences, it would seem that raising bilingual kids would be a piece of cake. I am a huge advocate for multilingualism; I have multiple degrees in second language teaching and education; my Spanish is as near-native as it can be; I have many friends raising bilingual children; half of our family lives in Mexico and communicate almost exclusively in Spanish; plus, I love Spanish.

And yet… I still struggle. My kids answer me in English. And (voice dropping to a whisper) there are days that are so hectic and distracting that I admit I speak more English than Spanish. Much more. With my husband working long hours, using the OPOL (one parent one language) method cannot work for our family.

I have tried to step back and analyze what it is that inhibits me from communicating solely in Spanish. I enviously observe several successful friends in my exact situation who do an amazing job of maintaining a monolingual (Spanish) home environment, and I wonder why I am different?

The only answer I can provide is that as our family has grown and taken on more activities, and a fuller schedule, I have very slowly gotten out of the habit of sticking to Spanish. This is the first challenge: when I am in a hurry, or trying to do 10 things at once, or disciplining… what naturally comes out of my mouth is English.

My second challenge has to do with my own feelings of ineptness. When they were babies, I would play, and sing, and read to my kids in Spanish— but in the presence of anyone that spoke English I would switch. As our lives became more “social,” I found myself speaking more and more English. I then became hesitant to speak Spanish with the kids in front of anyone Latino. No one has ever said anything to me, but I have this tiny worry that I may use the wrong grammar or pronounce something wrong, or forget a word and have to mutter in Spanglish… I guess I worry that people will judge me?

With chagrin, dismay and deep-rooted guilt, I am admitting that I have put my own anxiety in front of my children’s need to hear more spoken Spanish.

I don’t mean to appear pessimistic. We are still a bilingual family. We still practice reading in Spanish, watch movies in Spanish, are spending the summer in Mexico, play with Spanish-speaking families, and my daughter loves to text my husband in Spanish. They really do understand 99%, and when they are with Spanish-speaking relatives, they participate in the conversation and play with their cousins.

The reason for this confession is to soundly proclaim (if only to myself) my New Year’s resolution. I am determined to turn a corner in our language journey, and adhere to a Spanish-majority home environment. My goal for 2013 is to help my 4 children develop oral proficiency by being a proper role model. How can I ask them to speak Spanish, when I am modeling English? Henry Ford once said “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t — you’re right.” I think I can — I know I can — and I will do my best to speak Spanish with my kids this year. This is going to be the year that I transform our family language system from OPOL (one parent one language) to mL@H (minority language at home).  Who’s with me?

{photo by  SanShoot}

Editor’s note: For a long time now, we’ve been hoping to bring the dad perspective to raising bilingual children. While we were in Miami in September for our Bilingual is Better book launch, we met Ryan Pontier, the author of the guest post below. We were immediately impressed by his commitment to bilingualism — particularly because Spanish is not his native tongue. Ryan, however, hasn’t allowed that to stop him in his journey to raise his baby girl Anna bilingual. ¡Bravo!

I love to take my daughter grocery shopping with me because I find it to be an excellent opportunity to use language. I tell her what aisle we’re on, where we’re headed, and how I plan on using each of the ingredients we are searching for in a future recipe. As I approached the cashier last week, I made sure to carefully place each of the items in my cart on the conveyor belt, briefly discussing each one in an effort to narrate the experience for my 8-month-old daughter Anna. “Éstas son las zanahorias — largas, de color naranja y crujientes. Luego ésta es la espinaca. Es verde, es una hoja y la usamos en la ensalada.” The charade continued this way until I had neatly ordered all of the groceries while simultaneously balancing Anna in the Baby Bjorn. Because I noticed that the two women in line in front of me were engaged in a conversation in Spanish with the cashier — and because I am the Spanish language model with Anna —I greeted her informally in Spanish. She glanced quickly at me and proceeded to respond to me in English. This situation is one that I experience at least twice weekly here in Miami.

I love Miami for its culture and its languages, but I feel that I constantly have to prove to others that I speak Spanish. Although I may not seem it at first glance, I am, in fact, a fluent Spanish speaker. I am a white male who grew up in a rural, monolingual English town, but Spanish became my second language and my passion as soon as I was allowed to take a foreign language in seventh grade. My interest grew until college, when I had the opportunity to study in Madrid, Spain for an entire academic year and live with a host family. After graduating, I moved to the Texas-Mexico border and taught reading and language arts in Spanish at a bilingual elementary school. Two years later, I moved to Miami to be closer to my [now] wife. We have been here together for six years, and we are proud to be raising our daughter here.

My wife and I have decided to use the one-parent/one-language (OPOL) approach to raise our daughter bilingually. This means that I am the Spanish language model. As such, I am responsible for providing her with rich and varied language experiences that invite and allow her to hear and practice using Spanish, my second language. This is a daunting task at times since I am the only Spanish speaker on both sides of my family. Also, because I use English for social and academic purposes, I am admittedly more proficient in English. Luckily, my neighbors are friendly, I have great dictionaries, the internet is a pure blessing, and I know I can simply use an English word or phrase as a placeholder until I learn to say what I need to in Spanish. I am always learning, and it has yet to be too stressful, because I know that I am giving my daughter a gift by raising her bilingually.

So, after glossing over the conventional pleasantries of interacting with the cashier, I enjoy making a comment about the weather, the amount of people in the store, or something about Anna to show that my Spanish abilities go beyond the few stock phrases that most of us learned in Spanish class in middle and high school. This way, I demonstrate the value of Spanish for Anna, provide her another context in which to hear (and eventually use) Spanish, and self-indulgently prove to the world that I am a proud and capable Spanish speaker.

{photograph courtesy of Ryan Pontier}

Ryan W. Pontier is the proud papi of a curious and babblingly loquacious 8-month old bilingual daughter. He grew up in Central New Jersey as an English speaker and excitedly learned Spanish as a second language after years of classroom foreign language study and a life-changing year in Madrid, Spain. A former bilingual elementary school teacher, Ryan is currently a Ph.D. student studying language and literacy learning in multilingual settings.

When my twins were 18 months old, and I was waiting for them to turn babble into words, I still wondered: would they say agua or water? Más or more?

Thinking back, it was a preposterous thought. My husband Adrian and I had spoken only Spanish to them since they were three months old. Having English-speaking toddlers was a linguistic impossiblity.

Yet I, an Irish-American who learned Spanish as a second language, doubted whether I could really pull this whole bilingual thing off — even with a native Spanish speaker for a husband.

Of course Spanish was the twins’ first – and four years later still their dominant – language.

But the journey hasn’t been easy, and I wanted to share some insights on raising bilingual kids for parents just starting out.

While many of these are lessons for parents for whom, like me, Spanish is a second language, some will resonate regardless of your fluency level.

Here’s what my family has found:

It didn’t take long to adjust to speaking to our kids in my second language

I had lived abroad, and conducted business, friendships and courtships in Spanish…but I’d never uttered a word of Spanish baby talk. I didn’t even have the vocabulary for it. So even though we had both decided we wanted to raise our kids to be bilingual, we had a late start. My husband Adrian, a Cuban-American who grew up in a bilingual household, hesitated too. We had a hard time committing, until a friend who was raising her kids bilingual in Chile made it pretty clear: “If you want them to be bilingual, you have to start now. And don’t stop.” I started imitating my in-laws’ baby talk. It took three weeks of awkward starts and stops to fully adjust, and we’ve never looked back. Now it’s awkward to speak to the kids in English.

Having a committed partner helps

I’m lucky that Adrian and I were equally committed to this. On those rough parenting days, I’m sure I would have given in to English if he weren’t there to keep me on track (and vice versa.)  In fact, when I get really mad at the kids, I resort to English from time to time. I’ve needed his support to stick with it.

Don’t underestimate the effect of your decisions on other family members

My parents, who only understand basic Spanish, are fully in support of our plans for raising the kids bilingual. That said, the process hasn’t been easy on them. For a good year, between the time the kids started talking and when they began to fully understand English at preschool, my parents struggled at times to communicate with the boys. I didn’t acknowledge that properly at the time. It was hard to realize it as it was happening, and I was so focused on the long-term goal.

I can’t control what languages other people speak to my children – not even my in-laws!

Isn’t that a universal truth of life and marriage – that you can’t control other people? Of course! But somehow, in my pre-kid, deluded head, I thought that if asked, they would unequivocally speak to the kids in Spanish. I failed to take into account that my in-laws are most comfortable speaking in both languages – simultaneously – starting a sentence in one and ending in another. I had to stop being such a control freak – and learn to cherish the Spanish poems and songs my father-in-law continues to teach them.

Don’t be afraid of your accent and grammatical missteps

I know the native-Spanish speaking moms at my preschool notice when I struggle to find the right word to say in the morning, or have a conjugation fail (which is often  – who invented the subjunctive anyway?)  But you know, despite my less than Giselle Bundchen-like body, I spend the summer at the pool in a bathing suit too. I let my flaw flag fly. The research is on my side, too, showing that more exposure to the language – even with the missteps – is a benefit.

Exposing them to English isn’t a bad thing

I went into this as a purist, considering any exposure to English as toxic. I tried to remove it from my bookshelf and my radio dial, even looked (unsuccessfully) for a bilingual preschool I liked. I was adamant. I didn’t really have to be. By surrounding them with spoken Spanish at home, we’ve been able to make it work – even with an English-language bedtime story from time to time.

Be prepared for ignorant questions

I’m lucky; I live in Miami, where raising bilingual kids isn’t exactly a novel idea. Se habla español pretty much everywhere. I’m still surprised, though, by the number of ignorant questions I get when people hear me talking to the kids in Spanish. My favorite: But how will they learn English?

Um, at their monolingual school in the U.S. of A?

I laugh at that last one, but I also know that the kids are approaching a critical moment in their language development. In January, the boys will be five. Kindergarten awaits, and the more time they spend in school, the more friendships they make in English, the harder it will be to maintain their Spanish.

I’m bracing myself. I hope in five years, I’ll be able to write again about how we made it work, but I can’t be sure.

Adelante, Adelante, Adelante. 

{Photo via sonderborgdk}

“Should I speak to my child in a language not my own?”

I have a question that is similar to the June 1st week question – “Should I speak to my child in a language not my own?” however, my situation differs slightly, and so perhaps the answer will be too:  My daughter, Zaya, was born in Brazil a year ago and grew up among her father’s family and community hearing Portuguese.  At home, her father and I spoke mostly English to each other (my native language), and to Zaya, we each spoke our mother tongue. Now, at 13 months, Zaya is living in the United States and her father is still in Brazil. There are very few people in her life who are speaking to her in Portuguese except for the occasional Skype phone calls.  I would like to continue to use Portuguese words while building her vocabulary, since she already knows and responds to them.  I would also like to speak to her in Portuguese, even though it’s not perfect and I’m sure I’m making some mistakes. But I would hate for her to return to Brazil in a year to visit and not understand what her relatives are saying to her.  Do you have any advice?

Thanks,
Carly

Hi Carly!

This is such an excellent question, and one that plagues me and other non-native speakers of languages who would like to pass their languages on to their children.

I think the answer to your question: “Should I speak to my child in a language not my own?” warrants the timelessly frustrating response: “it depends.” It depends on your goals. If you are interested in exposing your child to the language, keeping the language fresh, maintaining a connection to the sounds and syntax of the language, then I think sí!, by all means speak to her in Portuguese.

However, your child will likely only develop a similar proficiency to your own, though likely not greater. You can supplement your child’s acquisition of the language (once she gets a little older, perhaps) with online resources like videos, podcasts and other web-based tools in Portuguese. Here are some good examples for kids:

• MidiSegni – coloring pages, games, activities using basic vocabulary in Portuguese.
• SoccerLingua – games and fun exercises to learn new phrases in five different languages: English, French, Portuguese, Swedish, and Turkish.
• ClubPenguin – a fun and safe virtual world in which kids take on the persona of a penguin and travel to different areas to play games and “meet” other penguins.

And the best way for your daughter to speak and understand Portuguese well, is for you to keep your proficiency level high. I also think it’s good for her to see “mamãe” learning Portuguese alongside her daughter! Here are some resources for maintaining your own proficiency:

• ieLanguages podcasts in Brazilian Portuguese.
• LyricsGaps music videos with gap activities.
• BBC Languages – vide-based language-learning tools online.
• LanguageGuide – visual picture dictionary in Portuguese organized by themes.
• Hello-Hello – learn English, Spanish, French and Portuguese in an interactive online forum from native speakers.

Boa sorte, Carly!

I have spent my professional career teaching Spanish to high school-aged students and older. However, now I am working with a few friends’ children; their parents want them to be exposed to Spanish and to become possibly bilingual. I know the latter is nearly impossible since none of the parents speak Spanish and the girls have little exposure to it outside of their time with me. There is a chance for a babysitter to attend to their needs but the majority of the parents are looking for a more academic approach to their learning.

My concern and question is:  what do you think the best approach is for me during my one-hour a week with them? They enjoy games but become frustrated when they are losing because of language and they refuse to use Spanish during the competition (they are 5, 6, 7, 8 years old). Their competiveness spirit is not helping them use the language. Songs are not their thing. We have used art to describe and speak but I believe they are getting tired of that as well.

Second, do you think one hour is enough since they are not hearing Spanish outside of my time with them; should I recommend time with bilingual families?

Again, I am at loss and a bit frustrated. Any guidance?

Thank you.
Andrea Romano Vespoint

Hi Andrea

“Language acquisition” is “developmental” in nature. The children and adults go through a “process” in order to eventually speak a language. The “learning” or the “speaking/production” is the eventual outcome of a long process.

It is not clear how long you have had your students for but it seems that they might have just started this summer and if that is so it is important that you allow them go through the “comprehension” stage of language acquisition, which is the first step in this developmental process, first and without any rush. Remember when your children just listened to you and everyone around them for about 15 months or more before they said anything at all? Expecting your students to be speaking and describing pictures is rather pre-mature at the moment and obviously a frustrating experience for all of you.

Your main goal at the moment should be to make the language comprehensible and fun for your students and be sure that as long as they understand you, changes are happening in their brain and that eventually all will make sense and “results” will be seen. Your belief in the developmental nature of language acquisition, your patience and loving guidance are keys for this to be a successful experience.

It is true that this long and sometimes painful process could be shortened if the children could be immersed in many hours of language at a time; please note that language acquisition would still happen however slowly when the amount of language immersion is not intense but relevant.

I do agree that you have a particular challenge trying to keep everyone interested and engaged. The five year old and the eight year old do not “experience” life in the same way and they have different skills and abilities also. It is also challenging to have a five year old and an eight year old together in one group because the five year old is an “unconscious” learner and the eight year old might already be a “conscious” learner. The way each student learns is different and also each student’s expectation of the “learning experience” is different.

My approach would still be more about giving the children the opportunity to “experience” the culture and the language rather than trying to “teach” the language in spite of all your challenges. Somehow “teaching” and “learning” are tied to the expectation of immediate results and they negate “the process” the children have to go through before they actually achieve “knowledge”.

It is very important that the students have fun while they are with you and “experience” the language. It is also important that you have fun interacting with them.

The students should also be engaged at all times; however, their engagement should be about showing their comprehension of whatever it is that you are presenting to them.

As far as appropriate activities for them, I would cook with them , do crafts with them; please note that when it comes to art and crafts you should make sure to keep in mind the needs and the abilities of both age groups present in your class. I would also do cultural games with them. I would be very expressive and use gestures to make my communication comprehensible. I would also do activities with them where they would have to jump, run, dance, clap etc. Lots of TPR; I am sure you do that with your high schoolers also.

I would stay away from games where the students have to express themselves at this beginning stage of their learning…knowing very well that this would only frustrate all of you. Also no “competition” please since your five and even 6 year olds are just not into “competition” and hate the idea of losing even though the seven and the eight year olds can accept both winning and losing. Frustration should never be part of a language experience program. It is important that everyone be very relaxed and stress free.

You could suggest to the parents to have the children watch a DVD or video in Spanish every day for 10-15 minutes; even if they don’t understand anything in the beginning; this would do an absolute miracle over a long term. Another suggestion would be to allow them to hear Spanish songs around the house and in the car; especially more youthful and contemporary ones. May be you can direct them to some You Tube songs or record a CD for them. The third suggestion would be to look for friendship with other hispanic children and spend time at their house where they would experience further the language and the way of life.

I would like to invite you to one of our “Fundamentals For Teaching Children Foreign Languages” workshops for further understanding of how children learn foreign languages .

Lena Sisson.–Director and Curriculum Developer at Lingua Natal is a mother, wife and life long educator. She speaks five languages, has taught for thirty years and her love of cultures, diversity and people have led her to travel extensively and be of service to many communities around the world.