Early Bilingualism Growing Up With Two Languages

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Pedagogy, Literature Studies, grade: 1,0, Ernst Moritz Arndt University of Greifswald (Anglistik/Amerikanistik), course: Proseminar: Contact Linguistics, language: English, abstract: There are millions of children around the world who grow up bilingually or even multilingually. They need to know many different languages to be able to communicate with their parents, their teachers, with the people they buy their groceries from, or with officials who might all speak a different language. For those children, for their parents and the society that surrounds those it is more than normal to be multilingual. Over the past decades the topic of bilingualism has become more and more important in the western part of the world too. There are many families who start teaching their children two and more languages but it is also still a subject that is highly debated between scholars from all over the world. People are afraid that teaching two languages to a child might harm his or her development. They do not want to overburden their children or cause any severe damages. Therefore many parents and caretakers still decide for one language which they will teach to their child(ren). This paper is going to analyse some aspects of the question how children become bilinguals and which difficulties might occur along the way while trying to prove that children are very well able to learn two and even more languages from birth. After starting out with a short personal introduction, the terms ‘bilingualism’, ‘early bilingualism’ and ‘late bilingualism’ are going to be defined. Afterwards types of child language acquisition are explained and two different theses on how children become bilingual are shortly looked at. It is going to be looked at some specialities in child language acquisition and different language characteristics of early bilingual speech are highlighted. In conclusion it is going to be looked at some possibilities to support children in their bilingual development.

The lives of many families involve contact with more than one language and culture on a daily basis. Growing Up with Two Languages is aimed at the many parents and professionals who feel uncertain about the best way to go about helping children gain maximum benefit from the multilingual situation. This best-selling guide is illustrated by glimpses of life from interviews with fifty families from all around the world. The trials and rewards of life with two languages and cultures are discussed in detail, and followed by practical advice on how to support the child’s linguistic development. Features of this third edition include: a dedicated website with new and updated Internet resources a new chapter giving the perspective of adults who have themselves grown up with more than one language a new chapter presenting research into bilingual language acquisition with information about further reading new and updated first-hand advice and examples throughout. Una Cunningham is an Associate Professor in Modern Languages at Stockholm University, Sweden. She and her husband, Staffan Andersson, have raised their four children to speak English and Swedish in Sweden.

This practical and reassuring guide will enable readers to make informed decisions about how to raise their child bilingually.

Growing Up with Two Languages provides a highly accessible account of the stages of language development, describes and evaluates the various systems and strategies that can be adopted and looks at the problems that can occur when a child is exposed to two languages and cultures. Combining research-informed advice and the experience of parents raising children as speakers of a wide range of languages in every populated continent in the world, this book and its associated web material will answer questions, offer tried and tested strategies to keep children speaking a minority language, and provide material to enlist the support of the extended family, teachers and others. The perspective of adults who were themselves raised speaking more than one language is included. New to this edition is a chapter focusing on families raising children as speakers of indigenous and threatened languages as well as chapters for teachers and health professionals who want to know more about multilingual child language development and how they can support parents to continue speaking their language with their children. With new and updated first-hand advice, Internet resources and examples throughout, this book also includes a chapter that introduces important recent research into multilingual children and further reading guides for those who want to know more. This book is for parents who are raising or plan to raise children as speakers of more than one language, and for the teachers and healthcare workers who meet and can support them.

Increasingly, children grow up hearing two languages from birth. This comprehensive textbook explains how children learn to understand and speak those languages. It brings together both established knowledge and the latest findings about different areas of bilingual language development. It also includes new analyses of previously published materials. The book describes how bilingually raised children learn to understand and use sounds, words and sentences in two languages. A recurrent theme is the large degree of variation between bilingual children. This variation in how children develop bilingually reflects the variation in their language learning environments. Positive attitudes from the people in bilingual children's language learning environments and their recognition that child bilingualism is not monolingualism-times-two are the main ingredients ensuring that children grow up to be happy and expert speakers of two languages.

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Pedagogy, Literature Studies, grade: 2,0, RWTH Aachen University (Anglistik), language: English, abstract: The phenomenon of bilingualism is very widespread and a much discussed topic. In reading about it one finds out that there are numerous facets to be considered. While doing research work I wanted to concentrate on childhood bilingualism or “early bilingualism”. When doing so, I found out that I would have to specify my topic for the seminar paper, as even concerning only this part of bilingualism the material I found was overwhelming. My special interest then focused on the aspect of the acquisition of two mother tongues. How exactly does this acquisition take place? How does the child become bilingual? Is it really already in infancy that the child is aware of learning two separate languages or does this awareness rather develop in the process of growing up? Is there a general rule one can refer to when talking about the process of acquiring two mother tongues? These are questions I want to deal with in this paper and to which I will try to find answers. As the acquisition of two mother tongues nowadays is seen as something positive I first want to have a look at the development of this general opinion. In the next section I want to employ some case studies to show the different strategies of bilingual education and compare them to each other in order to find out if there is a favourable one. Section Four then will deal with the question whether there is only one language system or separate language systems in “early bilingualism.” Finally I want to mention some sociolinguistic aspects referring to childhood bilingualism, such as what factors determine the language choice in children or the phenomenon of interference or code-switching, to be able to draw my own conclusions in section 6.

In the first decade of life, children become bilingual in different language learning environments. Many children start learning two languages from birth (Bilingual First Language Acquisition). In early childhood hitherto monolingual children start hearing a second language through daycare or preschool (Early Second Language Acquisition). Yet other hitherto monolingual children in middle childhood may acquire a second language only after entering school (Second Language Acquisition). This Element explains how these different language learning settings dynamically affect bilingual children's language learning trajectories. All children eventually learn to speak the societal language, but they often do not learn to fluently speak their non-societal language and may even stop speaking it. Children's and families' harmonious bilingualism is threatened if bilingual children do not develop high proficiency in both languages. Educational institutions and parental conversational practices play a pivotal role in supporting harmonious bilingual development.

Growing up with Two Languagesis aimed at the many parents and professionals who feel uncertain about the best ways to help children who are in contact with more than one language and culture to gain maximum benefit from the situation.