Developing a Bilingual Child
Perplexities in the search for the right method
By Denise Lai, BA, BSocSc (Hons), MEd

At my wedding dinner years ago, I was gullible enough to promise the guests who had come to wish my husband and I well that I would be a good wife and learn to speak his native language, Cantonese! More than a decade after, the extent of my spoken vocabulary in Cantonese is largely limited to "lei ho ma?" (directly translated, "Are you well?"), and "sek bao mei?" ("Have you eaten?"). I cannot even count from 1 to 10 correctly, mixing up the tones and the phonemes with expert ease.

Thankfully, Nicholas and my mother-in-law have been sufficiently content with the fact that I have at least learnt to brew some of his favourite soups to get by, and so the need for conversing in Cantonese has been set aside for occasions like Chinese New Year only, when I have no choice but to stammer and struggle, painfully, to communicate with the rest of his family. I like to think though, that I have learnt to smile, more broadly than is necessary, because of these years of practice in para-linguistic discourse!

How my own grandparents and the other elderly individuals whom I know learnt to speak in multiple languages and dialects with relative competence during the years before and after the war baffles me to no end. This passive curiosity however, turns into sheer panic when I start to think of my younger daughter’s seeming inability to learn and acquire Mandarin as a spoken language. Not that I have overt ambitions about her becoming a top local student, mind you.

"She’s much too playful," says her current kindergarten teacher.

"She needs to learn her han-yu-ping-ying first," says the tutor.

"She needs to recognize the written characters and their meanings before she can progress further."

"You need to speak with her in Mandarin yourself before you can expect her to use it comfortably."

Ah. If ever there were a more foolproof way of making a mother feel the unrelenting pangs of unremitting guilt, it would be to advise her to speak with her child’s teachers! To be fair though, of all of the reasons that I have heard, or been given, to account for my daughter’s apparent incompetence, the last (and the first!) are probably the only ones that I believe may have some real influence on the outcomes.

But these worries, and the latest revisions to Mandarin-teaching methodology in the local primary school system, recently forced me to return to the literature of how linguists believe children and adults acquire a second-language, regardless of what this language system is and wherever in the world the learning of the second-language is taking place. I felt that I needed to try and make sense of the evidence of what works and what does not, and then to decide what I was going to do for my daughter afterwards. Not surprisingly, as in most other disciplines, it was disheartening to note that this field of research is also riddled with controversies and disagreements. Consider for example, the number of theories that have been proposed to explain how humans learn language:

The Critical Age Hypothesis by Eric Lenneberg in 1967 states that children have a special propensity for acquiring language, especially between the ages of 2 to 13. Studies have shown however, that Lenneberg was only partially correct. Language usually settles by the age of 5, not 13, and it begins developing, not at 2, but much earlier, when the child is still in the womb.

The Language Acquisition Device Hypothesis states that infants are innately endowed with the ability to acquire a natural language and that all they need to set the process of language acquisition going are natural language data.

With regards to Second-Language learning in particular,

The Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis seeks to teach learners to avoid problems and making mistakes in the second-language by developing teaching and practice materials that point out what the differences between both the first and the second languages are.

The Generative-Transformational Theory states that to learn the second language, the learner must understand the precise way(s) in which the new/second language maps meanings onto surface structure and phonetic sounds. Put another way, the second-language learner must learn the rules that underpin the workings of the new language.

Monitor Theory states that the second-language learner should learn the new language through natural communication, without being overly-corrected for errors, or the explicit teaching of rules. In this way, the learner gets a "feel" for what is correct or wrong in the new language, rather than being aware of the rules that the second language possesses.

It seems to me that the current move in Mandarin-teaching methodology in the local primary school system appears to be a broad and general shift from an approach that is more rule-based (ie. the Generative-Transformational theory) to one that is more communicative and natural (ie. the Monitor Theory).

And whilst this can be nothing but positive from the outset, I cannot help but worry too about the possible problems in accuracy that might develop over time as children “mix and match” lexical labels (ie. vocabulary), language structures and other grammatical or phonetic rules, to come up with a kind of pidgin Mandarin in the end. After all, it has been said that Singlish is a pidgin English of our local languages, with markers such as “lah,” “lor” and “hor” being derived from Malay or Chinese dialects, and even the typical switches in sentence structure or grammar being the result of people using the rules of their first language to converse in the second. Consider, for instance, the following sentence:

"She goes to school everyday" or "Everyday, she goes to school" (standard English)

"She everyday go to school" (Singlish)

"ta (she) mei tian (everyday) qu (go – no tense marker) xue xiao (school)" (Mandarin)

Importantly, what this illustrates is that humans use rules when communicating through the medium of language, and it has been shown that this principle applies to even young children who seek to understand and to implement their understanding of these rules from very early on in the language-learning process.

It is my view therefore, that a pedagogy of second-language teaching must try and strike a balance between an approach that helps its learners to practice the new language naturally and with purpose, as well as one that teaches basic rules and principles coherently. Moreover, it must seek to do this with learners of all ages, without the discrimination that after a certain age, learning a second language becomes difficult or impossible.

In an influential study conducted in 1978 by Catherine Snow (a well-respected psycholinguist) and Marian Hoefnagel-Hohle, it was found that teenagers did better than either adults or kindergarten children in acquiring the second-language, Dutch. The researchers explained their findings by describing how kindergarten children can function well at school without any specific linguistic interactions with classmates or teachers. Similarly, the adults in the study did not encounter many situations when speaking Dutch was crucial to them. In contrast to both of these groups however, the teenagers in the study learnt Dutch at school, from teachers and from classmates, and so had better language-learning environments in general. They required a fair command of Dutch to get along with others, and to keep up with their studies.

The outcomes of a study like this would thus seem to point us towards a clearer and straighter path when determining how we should approach the whole “let’s make our child bilingual” debate. For one, it raises doubts about the efficacy of video and audio programmes that claim to teach young babies multiple languages like Japanese, Russian and Spanish before the age of 5. If your two-year-old will not have the privilege of playing with Japanese, Russian or Spanish-speaking children during the period when he/she is listening to these tapes, then he/she will, in turn, be very likely to treat the sounds from the video programme as just that… sounds!

Secondly, it also means that developing a bilingual child requires, not just extra enrichment or tuition classes in the evenings or during the weekends (although this will help in rules-acquisition) but also an overall modification to the child’s environment to allow for the second-language to be heard and used in context, consistently and constructively, throughout each day and week. The more communicative demands are made on the child to communicate in the target language, the more the child is likely to be able to respond by using the language him/herself.

What this means for me then is… sigh… a need to find a way to place my daughter with Mandarin-speaking play-dates and nurturing adults, before it is likely that I, or her teachers, will see any progress, of any kind or sort, in relation to her ability to manage two languages happily. But it also means that the reason why I have not learnt to speak enough Cantonese all of these years is very simple to fathom and explain. After all, if my husband is inclined to whisper sweet nothings into my ear in English all of the time, then surely the trouble lies with him, yes?

I am indebted to the work of Paul Baker & Tony McEnery, from the Department of Linguistics at Lancaster University, for many of the theoretical ideas cited in this article.