Multilingual children and monolingual parents

Learning a new language is like opening a door to a whole new world. You step through that door, and discover new ideas, sights and sounds.

You learn about how other people live and think. The similarities among all people remind us how we are all very much alike, and the differences remind us that the world is a big, interesting place just waiting to be discovered.

Learning a new language at a young age has furthermore benefits. Children have a terrific opportunity and a great ability to learn a new language quickly and exuberantly, laying the foundation for the continuing development of cognitive benefits—sharper reading ability, critical thinking skills, greater creativity, and a broader overall awareness of language in terms of its structure and sounds.

It is amazing to see the ease and openness which the children display toward learning a new language. Children are less anxious and less self-conscious, so they see and interact with a new language all the more easily and with less effort. In addition to being less anxious and more adventurous, children also possess a surprisingly skillful capacity for imitation. This capacity enables the children to pick up the sounds and tones of the language almost natively.

Now-a-days, more and more parents are eager to make their children multilingual. They have realized that language is an important asset for their child’s self development and also that a new language opens doors to higher education, business world and overall career enhancement.

However, since most of the parents themselves are monolingual, they cannot provide the required exposure to their children for learning a new language. In case of foreign languages, our vocabulary is generally restricted to a very Indianized ‘konnichiwa’ or ‘Bonjour’ and hence the parents often feel that such language exposure might just damage the accent of the child. In their book The Bilingual Edge (2007), Dr. Kendall King and Alison Mackey argue that "with the right foundation of knowledge, any parent can raise a child who knows more than one language, even if that parent is monolingual." Parents worry too much, they say, about giving their children only "native language models", which provide perfect linguistic input and exposure. But the most amazing thing about the learning abilities of a child is that they pick up language naturally and flawlessly despite the lack of perfect speech that surrounds children. How often we talk to a little child using the kiddy language, but still he ends up picking the correct accent and intonation. This is just amazing!

Parents definitely play an extremely crucial role in a child’s language learning process. A child imitates not just the words they hear, but also the habits and attitudes they see adults holding in relation to the language. If a parent is active and enthusiastic about language—playing word games with their child, reading aloud to them, singing songs, saying silly things—the child will soak up that enthusiasm and learn and play on their own. And this is as true of their first language, second language, third and so on.

A variety of foreign language teaching programs for kids are available in the market. However, many a times the pedagogy used is not very suitable for the language learning process. Hence the best way to choose a program would be to see if it provides a multisensory approach, surrounding the learners with visual, aural, verbal, and kinesthetic immersion in the language. And imagine the impression that will be created if the parents themselves make an effort to learn a new language along with the children- “One stone, two birds”







Contact: Rama Kale - 9819819328
             Little Lingusit
             B-3, Indu Bhuwan,Prarthana Samaj road,

             Vile Parle (East),

             Mumbai - 400 057, 

             India