Job Discussion Forums

[naturegirl321]

[Gordon]

[naturegirl321]

Do they go to public schools or international ones? They don't get any racism thrown at them because they're not Japanese, do they? My husband are thinking of doing the same, but with China. Only problem is finding a job where he could teach Spanish.

[MELEE]

History repeats and repeats, My husband is in the same situation of not speaking his mother's native language, execpt he grew up in the 80s. His mother faced linguistic discrimination as a child so she thought she was doing the right thing speaking to her children in Spanish. Now he is struggling to learn a difficult tonal language when he could have grown up bilingual. He deeply regrets it. Sherri, I hope this is not to personal, but I think you should have a heart to heart with your husband and explore what is behind him not wanting them to be bilingual and bicultural, and maybe find some literature about language loss for him to read. I think the majority of adults who grew up in a situation like your children, regret that one parent (or both like in naturgirl's mother's case) did not transmit their language and culture to them.

[Sherri]

[Gordon]

[misterbrownpants]

i speak english to my baby plus baby talk...spanish to my husband (because he doesnt speak english) and my husband speaks spanish to our baby

i tried teaching him english.. but does anyone else find it difficult to te?each their spouse?su
any suggestions??

[naturegirl321]

[misterbrownpants]

i was trying to teach him too.. and i have books and everything its just so darn difficult! we even tried to speak one whole day a week only in english i always loose after maybe 30 m!

[MELEE]

I help my husband with his English, and for the first 5 and half years that we knew each other he was in a 5 day a week English class. If he needed help with his homework or clarification on something I gave it to him. Many of his textbooks in his BA and 95% of the books he used during his MA were in English and two of his MA professors, who are Eastern European, used English to teach their classes.
My husband speaks more English to me than I do to him. He's really motivated to learn. I'm usually the one who subconsiously slips back into Spanish, not him.

I work with a teacher who's wife is Chinese, and she gives him a Chinese class each day. (She is not a language teacher by profession)

[merlin]

I speak English, my wife speaks English to me and Czech to my daughter, and my daughter speaks Czech to my wife and English to me. All our conversations are billingual. A person will literally hear a sentence in one language and respond in another, and the third will pick it up in the original language.

Makes it kinda difficult for others to keep track of our conversation, so if there's a person present who doesn't speak English I address them in Czech.

[spiral78]

I once watched a conversation between two little girls (5 or 6) in Prague. One had an English mother and a Czech father, and the other had the opposite - Czech mother and English father.
Each one spoke her mother's language consistently, but they carried out this long conversation using both languages - clearly understanding the 'father tongue,' but preferring to use 'mother language.'

I have no idea how common this is - it would be an interesting study; or perhaps it's been exhaustively studied already and I just don't know it!

But I think it's a fantastic advantage to grow up bilingual. Lucky kids.

[MELEE]

Spiral,
There has been some studies done, but it is an area that needs more study. Especially in the developing world. Most of the studies of bilingual families are very Euro-centric and where both of the languages are fairly high-prestige languages. But it is estimated that as much as 50% of the world population is bilingual to some extent but most of those people know one high prestige language and a low prestige one. In many cases the low prestige languages are endangered and the speakers are not aware of the benefits and desirablity that first world academics put on being bilingual. There is an extreme lack of scholarly research on bilingual children, families, communities in these conditions (large parts of Africa, Asia, especially India, and Latin America) if anyone out there is looking at a linguistics degree (not TEFL) the world would benefit from you studying this!

BTW, my own children are dominate in their father's tongue at this point, but right now I'm really the only native English speaker they have contact with and I work full time.
I also have a very interesting summer nanny this year. She is from my mother-in-law's village, where Mixteco is the community language, but all but a few of the older women are bilingual. Her mother, however is a monolingual Spanish speaker (from another village) She and her siblings claim to only speak Spanish, their mother's mother tongue. (But I've witnessed them following a conversation that was held in Mixteco. )

[spiral78]

Very interesting.

I think that you could spread the high/low prestige language issue to parts of Europe. Czech is certainly not a high prestige language, there being only 10 million Czechs (plus or minus). I agree that children speaking English/Spanish or English/German or English /French would be speakers of relatively equally prestigious languages. I suppose these relationships have been more extensively studied for a few reasons: both economic (Europe has had the financial resources to fund studies) and in terms of the governmental interest over the past few decades about language teaching/learning in Europe.

It would also be interesting to compare speakers of two or more 'high-prestige' languages with speakers of one 'high' and one or more 'low' languages.

Some of my Angolan students really grew up speaking as many as five languages. They made astounding gains in English proficiency, in very short periods, all outside the boxes of age/formal education/motivation and other factors that are studied in my work environment.

Well, the results of such studies would be interesting beach-reading someday. I hope the next generation of applied linguists will apply themselves to this. I'm unfortunately not personally in a position to follow up, regardless of my interest in the processes and outcomes of growing up bi + lingual.

[MELEE]

I guess I wasn't clear on what I meant by high prestige languages. Czech, being the national official language of a country is definately considered a high prestige language regardless of the number of speakers. The two little girls you mentioned were in that country and the other language the each spoke was the language with the highest prestige in the world at the moment.
Low prestige languages usually don't have any mass media in that language, the government does not use them, and speakers can not recieve information about services or government programs in their native language, often times people are embarrassed to speak them in public among other language speakers, sometime school teacher prohibit students from speaking them to each other, the speakers are taunted or belittled. Here in Mexico for centuries the mainstream culture has even denied many of the indigenous languages the very lable "language". I always ask my first year students if any of them speak any other languages, when some volunteer that they speak, Mixteco, or Zapateco, or Trique or Mixe, there is always some kid who says---"But those aren't languages." I make sure to set him or her straight and let the bilingual students know how special they are to be bilingual and that they will probably have an advantage over the monolinguals when it comes to learning English.