Livia Gerber has just completed her Master of Research thesis entitled “We really believe that we have given our children a gift”: Discourses on bilingual child-rearing in an online parenting forum. The thesis is now available for download from Language on the Move here.
Background
In 1994, when I was in kindergarten, as part of a project on multiculturalism, my primary school in Newcastle, NSW, conducted interviews with pupils from immigrant backgrounds. My family had only arrived in Australia a few months prior: my parents knew very little English, and I knew none. As part of the project, a picture book was made by the school, with photographs and descriptive captions telling the story of each pupil’s previous life in far-away places; Switzerland, in my case. On the very last page of this picture book, there is a photo of myself, proudly wearing my first school uniform during my first Easter Hat Parade. Below the photo, a short note, obviously dictated, and copied in the unsteady hand of a five-year-old. In the note, I thank the children in my class for taking care of me and for ‘writing for me all the words I need’. Although my primary school was evidently interested in making its multicultural students feel welcome, their focus, unsurprisingly, was primarily on my (linguistic) integration: the ‘words I needed’ were English words. This obviously left the maintenance of my mother tongue to my parents. At the same time as the local school was pressuring my parents to make certain I learnt English as quickly as possible, my mother was relentlessly pressured by my grandparents to ensure their grandchildren would not forget their Swiss-German roots.
Bilingual child-rearing in an English-dominant environment is not an easy task. In a society that largely sees English monolingualism as the norm, promoting a language other than English, often with little community or institutional support, can be a daunting undertaking. The paradox of my five-year-old self’s thank-you note in a book celebrating multiculturalism and multilingualism, sparked my interest in the tension between the dominance of English and the valorisation of diversity as it is experienced by families.
Giving your child the gift of bilingualism (Image source: babybliss.com.au)
Abstract
My thesis seeks to explore the ideologies underpinning parental decisions on family language policies in a predominantly English monolingual environment. Focussing on how the notion of ‘good’ parenting is linked to bilingualism as a child-rearing strategy, the discursive construction of bilingual parenting is explored in one of the largest online parenting communities in Australia, essentialbaby.com.au, using critical discourse analysis. The corpus consists of 15 discussion threads totalling 266 comments posted between 2007 and 2014 by parents and carers seeking and giving advice on bilingual child-rearing. This forum was chosen for three reasons: first, with over 255,000 members it is one of Australia’s largest online parenting forums and it enjoys a broad audience. Secondly, this is a ‘mainstream’ forum that is not a priori concerned with language. It is not specialised in bi-or multilingualism, so members are largely non-experts, making it possible to analyse peer advice as opposed to expert advice. Lastly, an investigation of parental beliefs about bilingual child-rearing in a general parenting forum will reflect more widely popularised discourses within the wider public. Therefore, these – mostly anonymous – conversations can be understood as a manifestation of public knowledge about bilingual parenting. Specifically, the online parenting forum is seen as an environment to explore how parents talk about bilingual child-rearing, and the language ideologies that underlie parental advice on ‘good’ bilingual parenting.
The Bilingual Bonus
Findings suggest that raising a child in two or more languages is often associated with providing the child with what I term the bilingual bonus. Bilingual competencies are associated with a range of cognitive, health, personal, and economic benefits that are unavailable to monolingual peers. Therefore, the increased dissemination of the benefits associated with bilingualism, particularly in the popular media, valorises parental decisions on bilingual child-rearing. Additionally, bilingual family language policies, such as the ‘one parent – one language’ strategy, have become incorporated into mainstream parenting strategies due to the increasing valorisation of bilingualism in general discourses. As a result, parents strongly believe that bilingual competency can only be achieved by implementing a bilingual language learning strategy that promotes double monolingual language acquisition. Overall, parental efforts in raising children with an additional language positions parents as ‘good’ caregivers who are providing their children with an advantage in life. Nevertheless, this study finds that parents are often faced with contradictory bilingual child-rearing realities that inform their language-related parenting decisions. These contradictions indicate that the same tension exists today that existed over two decades ago when I wrote my thank-you note: the tension between the dominance of English and the valorisation of bilingualism. The research extends existing literature on how the monolingual mindset operates on an individual level, and has implications for language policy at individual, institutional and state levels.
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The bilingual bonus is enthralling! In today’s interconnected world, learning to connect and communicate with people of different cultural backgrounds effectively is immensely important. The ability to speak multiple languages is essential to thriving in the global economy, and a bilingual approach to education has proven tremendously beneficial.
I am grateful that in our country, which is the Philippines. The education system has this Bilingual Education Program (BEP). English is the medium of instruction in Science and Mathematics, and Filipino, is the national language, in all other subjects. It has been recognized as one of the earliest comprehensive bilingual education experiments in the world.
Thank you for sharing with us the contents of your research, it sounds very fascinating. I find it very noteworthy that you bridge the gap between bilingualism and ‘good parenting’ in regard to language acquisition. It is understandable for parents to consider teaching their children multiple languages, bilingual competency can produce many benefits and a wide range of future opportunities. However, you did state that these kinds of ideologies can have contradictions, I find it intriguing that in the findings that the families’ experiences are similar to your experience many years ago. I wonder if this kind of research can be applied in the Philippines context since we learn our mother tongue from our parents and we learn English at an early age in school.
What a truly-enlightening post ! The portion about this “bilingual bonus” is also an interesting finding. Growing up, I’ve been told and have learned about various misconceptions surrounding bilingualism—how it can presumably delay language development, make children develop a small vocabulary, lead to a stutter, and more. These statements, however, are very much untrue, and the findings suggested not just in this article but also the studies that precede it support the competencies associated with bilingualism.
I also noticed that one user in this comment section mentioned about the possibility of looking into the state of parenting and bilingualism in other countries. I must say, this is an academic opportunity worth endeavouring. It makes me wonder about how things are in nations where English is not the dominant language.
This study was interesting because it linked the benefits of bilingualism to the importance of learning English. In the Philippines, Filipino and English are the official languages. Filipino is usually taught by parents, while English is the medium of instruction in schools. In my experience, however, some parents, especially those from wealthy families, abandon Filipino altogether and teach their children only English due to the latter’s ideology as the language of the workplace. The child would learn Filipino only from friends or popular culture. The way I see it, it is common for Filipino parents to feel conflicted about raising their child bilingually while prioritizing English.
This article is a good and helpful eye-opener for those people who are in the study of Bilingualism focusing on learners that are situated in other countries. As for myself, I really got interested while reading this blog entry because of how it was able to link and connect bilingualism and even the role of parenting in order to teach young learners not just different target languages aside from their L1 but also on the huge importance of the the learners’ parents as their first language teachers. For I actually believe in the idea that parents are the earliest linguists that any child or learner can actually encounter since they were their first instructors at home and that their parents passes down to their children their own communicative skills on any kind of language that will later on as the child matures and enter formal schooling, those skills will be further shaped and developed and of course will help the learners by that time how to be communicatively competent with the use of the languages he or she learned.
This article is an interesting study considering the favorable aspects of bilingualism and the perceived idea of English as a dominant language. What is more interesting about your article is its attempts to link good parenting with language learning inside the household. Although I understand that this study is situated in the online parenting communities in Australia, I am curious to situate this discussion in a different country or in a different online parenting community to know whether or not the possibility of a “bilingual bonus” occurs there or is somehow given importance within their household.
Thank you for your interest, Daniel, and good luck with your own research! Looking forward to hearing about the results of your study in another context!