The following piece was first published as blog of the month in December 2014 on Meertalig.nl, an initiative promoting language learning and bilingualism in the Netherlands. Meertalig also hosts the Dutch branch of Bilingualism Matters as part of the EU-funded AThEME project.
Sharon Unsworth is Associate Professor of Second Language Acquisition at Radboud University Nijmegen where she teaches linguistics and carries out research into the language development of bilingual children (see her website for more information). She is also a member of the editorial board at Meertalig.nl
My daughter started school about a month ago. She’s absolutely loving it and is already making friends with some of the other children in her class. So far, so good then. Whilst the usual sense of trepidation common to most new experiences might be waning, I must admit that there’s a part of the bilingual mum in me that can’t help worry about the effect attending (Dutch only) school might have on my daughter’s English.
When I give workshops on raising bilingual children, one of the most frequent concerns I hear from parents is a lack of development in the minority language as the school language gets more and more dominant. I keep telling myself not to worry, that in essence our daughter is only hearing Dutch for two half-days more than when she attended nursery, and that we if stick to our English-only policy at home as best we can, we’ll be giving her the best environment possible to support the minority language. Time will only tell if I’m right, I suppose.
Call me paranoid, but part of my worry about my eldest child starting school is not for her minority language development, but for that of her younger brother, currently 18 months old.
Anecdotally, you hear that first-borns are often the ‘most bilingual’ in a family. Indeed, in a book dedicated to the topic of language use in bilingual siblings, Suzanne Barron-Hauwaert reports on a survey amongst 105 bilingual families in which parents were asked to evaluate their children’s language abilities in their two (or more) languages. The families who responded indicated that first-born children were typically more correct in their speech production and they tended to have a larger vocabulary. They also reported that later-born siblings were likely to copy the language choices made by older brothers and sisters.
When it comes to what parents think of their bilingual children’s language development, then, younger siblings may be at a disadvantage. But what about studies investigating children’s language skills more directly? Whilst the influence of older siblings on the language development of bilingual children has been mentioned in various case studies, this topic had until recently not been subject to systematic investigation on a larger scale.
In a series of recent studies by American researchers Kelly Bridges and Erika Hoff have examined the impact of older sibling language use on the language development of bilingual toddlers growing up in the US. In a first study with 60 bilingual toddlers growing up with English and some other language, Bridges and Hoff found that toddlers were more likely to speak in English to their older, school-aged siblings than to other members of the household, and that the bilingual toddlers with older siblings were more advanced in their English that those without.
In a second study with Spanish-English bilingual toddlers, they found once again that children with older school-aged siblings more advanced in their English than children without older siblings. Strikingly, however, the reverse pattern held for the toddlers’ Spanish language development: in that language, the children with older siblings were less advanced that the children without. Interestingly, they also found that when there was a school-aged child in the house, mothers were more likely to speak English to their toddler than where no school-aged older siblings were present.
So what should I make of these results for my own situation? Well, I think I’m probably right to worry, at least a bit. Indeed, even though our daughter has only been at school for 4 weeks, we definitely hear her speaking more Dutch at home, even after this short period of time. Perhaps this is because before this she would hardly ever speak Dutch at all, and so the odd sentence she now uses is all the more noticeable. Again, only time will tell, but I can imagine that this will get more. What to do about it? Can we do something about it? Should we do something about it?
To be honest, I doubt it would make sense to tell our daughter to stop speaking Dutch at home, if that’s what she starts doing. Knowing her (and many other children like her), this is unlikely to have an effect anyway! Rather, my approach will be to encourage her continued use of English, trying to create as many genuine opportunities for her to use this language both with me and with her little brother. And I’ll try and monitor my own use of Dutch and limit this as much as possible.
In the end, though, as with many aspects of bilingual parenting, and parenting more generally, I think you sometimes just have to go with the flow and accept that you can’t micro-manage everything. Thank goodness, because let’s face it, life would be pretty dull if you could …
References
Barron-Hauwaert, S. (2011). Bilingual siblings. Language use in families. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Bridges, K. & Hoff, E. (2014). Older sibling influences on the language environment and language development of toddlers in bilingual homes. Applied Psycholinguistics, 35, 225-241.
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