The great challenge of raising bilingual children

Throughout the next blog are going to explain the ability that babies have to differenciate sounds between languages, from four to six months. Moreover, we are going to develop the most important theories about baby's brain development, explaining the experiments in which babies are exposed to different types of languages and we observe how they react in all the cases.

The recent experiments done by Psychologist Whitney Weikum and researchers from the university of British Columbia and Katherine Kinzler and her colleagues from Harvard University, have shown that between four to six months, babies have the ability to distinguish among the sounds of unfamiliar languages. Having also found that they start loosing this ability after their first year. The research showed that young infants can tell the difference between the sound of different languages through some experiments. 

In the case of Weikum´s experiment, babies were exposed to different silent video clips in which French-English speakers read out the same sentence in one of the two languages. Once the babies become accustomed, Weikum showed them different clips of the same speakers reading out new sentences. Due to this, babies spend more time looking at the speaker on their screen, which showed that they had noticed the language changed, based only on lip movement. 

On the case of  Kinzler´s experiment, infants from english speaking homes were tested. Each baby watched videos of two bilingual women, one speaking English and the other Spanish. Then the babies watched the women on two screens at the same time, but no longer speaking. Babies expressed their preference for the woman who had spoken English by looking at the screen for a longer time.

Apart from these experiments, it is also important to highlight the studies made by Patricia Kuhl´s lab, in which researchers study brain activity in babies less than a year old through a device that measures the magnetic field around baby´s scalp´, to reveal the pattern of neurons firing in the brain. Even though, the period of study (four to six months of age) is just a small window to the complex world of human language, before speech language development begins. It gives us new tools to understand the functioning of the human brain, so this can be the beginning of new researches to find the cure for language dissabilities, or to get to know each part of the human brain in deep. This new knowledge can open the door to understand several processes, the way in which we use our brain, and it can also increase the percentage of the brain that humans use. 

 How does a baby's brain grow and develop?

How does a baby's brain learn to communicate?

How does a baby's brain learn by imitation?

Up to here, we have been discussing the importance of this discoveries as regards baby's brain, what has showed us that in certain aspects we start discriminating , having preferences or prejudice since we are very  little; and that the way in which we use our language can drive us apart and act as massive barriers between different social groups. 

Banning the use of a language has a long history, full of sad stories in which many children were forced to forget where they came from, or having to be ashamed of their own culture. Banned languages is not a past issue, although there has been some changes in the way we behave as regards different cultures in schools. In some cases, banned languages eventually dissapeared but this is not the general rule. 

The following set of tips contain some ideas on how to foster this actitudes at school:

1. Embrace all the languages spoken at school, both in word and indeed. Use visual support around the school, verbal support in and out of the class, and affective support to let all children know that their first/home language has value.
2.  Encourage children to share together their different languages, and to understand how they are different and similar.
3. Show through positive modeling that all languages are of equal value in the school environment, even if one is more “useful” for school purposes. In particular, let children use their first/home languages together to help them learn content and ensure understanding when they are still learning the school language.
4. Involve parents. Children who have parents who speak another language often believe that this is something to be ashamed of. Bring parents into the school to read in their language to the whole class, to demonstrate that other languages are also used for communication and literacy, and to help the monolingual children better understand the position of the children who are language learners.
5.  Never make language a source of punishment. Languages – all languages – are important and useful and beautiful. Punishing a child for their language use is not only unfair, it is also cruel, and so very detrimental to their overall development in and out of school. There are many positive ways to encourage children to use the school language without being punitive about their own language.

Nevertheless, if our linguistic preferences are hardwired from an early age, perhaps including exposure to multiple languages we can promote the growth – linguistic, cognitive and social – of our bi/multilingual pupils, not only giving the children the opportunity to learn a different language but also to embrace the difference.

Resources taken from: https://www.onraisingbilingualchildren.com

Done by: Karen Navarro/Lucía Cervera