Like many first generation migrant parents, we would like to raise our son to speak both English and our own mother tongue fluently. I believe that language is an important part of one's cultural heritage and Chinese is a very useful language to know these days. He also needs it to communicate with his grandparents who don't speak much English.
A quick research showed that the two main methods used by parents are the One Parent One Language (OPOL) and Minority Language at Home (ML@H) methods. Both are quite successful.
We have been using the partial application of minority language at home method, where both of us speak Mandarin to him. Our own mandarin is flawed so we speak around 80% mandarin to him, with the remaining 20% a mixture of English, Indonesian and Hokkien. Wenty and I also speak Hokkien to each other so that probably confuses the little boy a bit more.
He is picking up Mandarin well despite mixing it up a bit with words from the other three languages so the minority language is not my concern at the moment. I will be very happy if he grows up with just our level of Mandarin. I am more concerned with his lack of English at the moment.
The minority language at home strategy seems to work well if the kid is also attending regular child care or something like that where the majority (English) language is used. Considering it's still a year and a bit before he starts kinder/preschool I think we'll need a change of strategy here or he'll be starting kinder without sufficient language skills to communicate with his teachers and peers.
I know he will pick English up just fine once he starts kinder. I have seen how quickly young kids learn languages. Other parents tell me that in a few years time, he will only want to speak English even to me. It's just quite embarrassing to have to explain to others that he doesn't understand English and I think it's quite disrespectful to his country of birth for us not to attempt to teach him English as well prior to school. We are now Australians after all, not just some temporary visitors here.
We'll give this One Parent One Language strategy a try and see how he responds. Wenty is switching to English with him and I'll persist with Mandarin and try to stay disciplined enough to not throw any Hokkien and Indonesian in our conversations.
Swarming of Silver Gulls in Altona
1 hour ago
6 comments:
Don't worry about it, I'd say. Lucas picks up a lot of English as soon as he started daycare. He now speaks more words and more and more English than we expected, to the point that even if we force him to speak Mandarin, he will just answer back in English.
Yeah, look like once they are surrounded frequently by other people who speak english for lengthy period, it will become the opposite problem. I'll persist with one of us speaking lots of English to him until he starts kinder in 2013 though rather than have him going through next year not understanding other kids in the playground when they speak to him when he is at the age that they expect him to understand and speak back.
How old was Lucas when he started day care?
A bit over 2 years. We were advised not to speak English to Lucas as we have certain accent and pronounciation that may not be the best, so yeah, we try not to speak much English to him at home. The thing is, most of his carers at his daycare are Asians too, so he will most likely learn English with some sort of accent as well. I guess by the time he grows up, there would be hardly any Aussie Ocker accent left.
We are trying to speak Indonesian to ellie as well (I can't speak mandarin sadly). Bruno is learning Indonesian at the same time haha...
I think you shouldn't worry abt English, I'm sure the child care would understand as many kids don't speak English when started CC. Lots of French or German families probably do the same thing.
Cheers,
Vivi
T: That was one of the reasons we initially went with minority language at home. We didn't want him to pick up our English accent. Ocker accent isn't much used even by the WASP Australians anymore, very few Aussies speak like Steve Irwin. Majority of Australians in major cities speak general Australian accent now, and I expect our kids will grow up speaking that.
Interesting about child care workers there, is that standard in perth or just your area? Dont know about cc here but kinder teachers in our area are nearly all wasp or europeans stock as far as I can see from their website.
V: Bruno's Indo is very good! I saw that he was even correcting you lol.
It's not a problem if he goes to cc. He doesnt attend cc, and kinder doesnt start until they are 3 and 3yo kinder here only goes like 3-4 hours a week. I also dont like the idea of him going through another year not understanding the playground conversation and not being understood.
Post a Comment