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Six dos and don’ts for raising bilingual children in France

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to raising a bilingual child. That said, there are things you can do to encourage your child’s acquisition of both languages. The Local turned to an expert on the subject to bring you six dos and don'ts for raising French and English-speaking kids.

Published: 27 February 2020 09:24 CET
Six dos and don’ts for raising bilingual children in France
Photo: The Tall Photographer: Charlie Budd

“There are no hard and fast rules about bringing up bilingual children because every situation is different,” says Derek Ferguson, Director of Roaming Schoolhouse, a language school offering after-school classes and holiday camps in Paris and Lyon for English-speaking children. 

That being said, there are methods you can try to improve your child’s language acquisition, Derek says.

DO: Speak in your native language to your children

If you’re living in France, it’s more than likely your child’s majority language is French. This makes it tempting to speak to your child in French, even if you're a native English speaker. Derek recommends sticking to English even if they speak back to you in French. Persevere, he advises, “as they will understand.”

There are many ways to bring English into their daily lives: bed-time stories, trips to English-speaking countries, arranging regular video chats with grandparents, audio books, or – as a last resort – watching videos in English..

Register now for Roaming Schoolhouse's holiday camps in April:

In Paris

In Lyon

 

Photo: The Tall Photographer: Charlie Budd

DON’T: Panic if it takes your bilingual child longer to start speaking

It might take longer for your child to start speaking in either French or English, but Derek says that this is perfectly normal. Bilingual children may develop each language at a slower pace because there’s more to take in. 

The quality and quantity of language exposure can influence language acquisition so parents should speak and read to their children in their native languages as often as possible. Sending them to after-school English lessons can help them improve their English as they get more regular exposure to the language.

You should also consider holiday camps like those run by Roaming Schoolhouse, that can help to build their English language skills in a fun and non-traditional setting. Camps are an immersive experience, each with a unique theme and comprised of an intensive week of activities, including drama, sport, art, science and, of course, English, for children aged 4 to 14. 

DO: Trust yourself

There’s no definitive manual for raising bilingual children. What works well for some families may not work for others. The best thing you can do is trust your instincts and go with what you think will work best for your situation.

“You understand your child better than anyone,” says Derek. “There are plenty of people out there with an opinion, most of whom have never raised a bilingual child: doctors, teachers, and well-meaning grandparents, for example. By all means listen to them, but go with what you think is right. And if your situation changes, re-asses and change your language options.”

DON’T: Try to influence siblings

Whether your children choose to speak English or French with each other is up to them. Bilingual children use their languages for different purposes and with different people. Their relationship with you is one area of their lives but their relationship with each other is another. Try not to steer them; leave them to decide which language they would prefer to communicate in. 

DO: Let them mix the two languages

There’s an oft-repeated myth that mixing languages should be avoided. But that’s precisely what it is: a myth. In fact, studies have shown that ‘code mixing’ can be a demonstration of flexibility and interpersonal skills. Bilingual kids need to learn two sets of vocabularies and two lots of grammar which means that, when trying to express themselves, they often pick the word or the expression that comes easiest. It’s a normal part of language acquisition says Derek. “If anything, it shows the flexibility of the brain. And being flexible in your language skills is a good thing” 

With more exposure to the minority language comes more facility with vocabulary and syntax. Roaming Schoolhouse's after-school classes, which currently run in Paris with plans to launch in Lyon in 2020 or 2021, and the holiday camps (in Paris and Lyon) are a great way to expose your child to English and a more varied English vocabulary than they might use at home.

Photo: The Tall Photographer: Charlie Budd

DON’T: Correct every little thing

Bilingual children commonly mix up grammatical structures, it’s part and parcel of learning two languages at once. Avoid correcting every little mistake as this may damage their confidence; likewise, try not to correct them in front of other people or if they are trying to tell you something important. Rather, use the correct expression, modelling the appropriate language when you respond to them or wait for them to ask you if they have said something correctly. Building up their confidence in their minority language is the first step to helping them master it.

Most of all, DO take advantage of the opportunity for your children to explore the world bilingually and biculturally while they are young, it really is a pleasure; and DON'T panic: half the world is bilingual.

Register now for Roaming Schoolhouse's holiday camps in April:

In Paris

In Lyon

 

This article was produced by The Local Creative Studio and sponsored by Roaming Schoolhouse.

EDUCATION

‘Multilingualism is an enrichment, not a deficit’: raising bilingual kids in Germany

There was a time when bilingualism was regarded suspiciously. But experts point out far more benefits than disadvantages for children raised with more than one language.

Published: 4 January 2018 16:28 CET
‘Multilingualism is an enrichment, not a deficit’: raising bilingual kids in Germany
Children at a German-Italian school in Hamburg. Photo: DPA

Years ago, when my children still wanted to go to playgrounds, I spoke to my son, dangling from the jungle gym at a Berlin playground, in my native English language. An elderly woman sitting at an adjacent bench said to me in German: “You should speak to him in German, otherwise he'll get confused.”

As my gut instinct suspected, the woman was not only nosy, she was wrong. Language experts agree that children are capable of learning more than one language without being confused – this was one of the first conclusions in a Florida Atlantic University study on multilingualism in children's language development.

Another conclusion from the study was that immigrant parents should not be discouraged from speaking their native language to their children.

“Children in immigrant families who can speak their parents' heritage language have better family relationships and stronger ethnic identities than those who cannot. Good family relationships and strong ethnic identity are positively related to other desired outcomes, including academic achievement,“ write the study's co-authors Erika Hoff and Cynthia Core.

Advantages of bilingualism

Bilingualism may have been considered a disadvantage many moons ago, when the woman on the bench had small children of her own, but today bilingualism is widely considered among experts to be a great benefit to children who are lucky enough to be raised with two languages.

In Germany, every ninth child born in 2015 was binational, according to the Federal Statistical Office.

“Multilingualism is not a deficit, but an enrichment,” Claudia Maria Riehl, director of the German as a Foreign Language Institute at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich told the Goethe Institute in an interview.

“We know from neurology that the brain areas required for a certain language are more compactly organized in multilingual children. This basically means that for each newly learned language, fewer brain areas have to be activated. Moreover, multilingualism seems to favour the ability to control attention. Multilingual children are better able to 'switch' between different requirements because they practise this mechanism by constantly switching between two or more languages.”

Ellen Bialystok, a cognitive neuroscientist who has spent nearly 40 years researching bilingualism's effect on the brain, calls bilingualism “brain exercise.”

“If you have two languages and you use them regularly,” Bialystok told The New York Times in an interview, “the way the brain networks work is that every time you speak, both languages pop up and the executive control system has to sort through everything and attend to what's relevant in the moment.”

Bilingualism – the norm?

Eleven years since the playground incident, and with my children attending a bilingual school, I barely flinch when I hear various languages inserted into one family's conversation. Denglish can be heard in my house and around the school; nowadays most of the children we encounter are truly bilingual.

Other families at our school juggle with even more than two languages.

Middle-schooler Toninho, who has an American father and a Japanese mother, speaks both English and Japanese fluently. He also speaks German since they moved to Berlin in 2012.

“He'll have to start taking French or Spanish soon,“ says his father Tony Laszlo, an American author who speaks Japanese and Mandarin, as well his native English, of the school's curriculum.

“To help prepare him for that journey, we have exposed him to Esperanto, a constructed language largely based on Latin, in a simplified form.”

“He has gained fluency quickly, mostly by playing card and board games, learning how to solve the Rubik's cube and to juggle. For fun, I had him take a short Latin quiz recently. He did surprisingly well, so I suspect that the Esperanto is helping him along.”

Practical tips  

Tanya Lucas, a Berlin-based speech therapist who works with bilingual children and has three bilingual children of her own, says there are some basic approaches to follow to make raising young children with two or more languages easier.

  • OPOL

“Stick to the one person one language rule: OPOL. Children will sometimes choose to reply in only one language – this is normal. Bilingualism develops in a dynamic way depending on input and opportunity.”

  • Chatter matters!

“Follow the child's focus of attention and communicate what they are doing and what is happening with simple language and in slightly longer sentences than what the child is using.”

  • Make language fun

“Sing, rhyme, and read age-appropriate books (in your mother tongue). Do expect bilingual children to reach language milestones (first words, sentences, more complex sentences) at the same time as monolingual children.”