Dr Van Tran, Charles Sturt University, presented this week’s Lecture in Linguistic Diversity
In Australia almost a quarter of the population speak a language other than English (LOTE) at home but relatively few succeed in maintaining their home language across generations. The typical pattern in migrant families is bilingualism with LOTE dominance in the first generation, bilingualism with English dominance in the second generation, and English monolingualism in the third generation.
There is a gap between parents’ desires to raise their children bilingually and their success in achieving their aspirations (Piller & Gerber, 2018).
Why do some parents succeed in their efforts to maintain the home language and to raise their children bilingually in English and a LOTE while others fail? Our guest speaker in this week’s Lecture in Linguistic Diversity, Dr Van Tran from Charles Sturt University, explored precisely this question with a focus on Vietnamese in Australia.
As part of the “Vietspeech” research project, the researcher surveyed over 150 first generation Vietnamese parents living in Australia with children aged below 18 years. The questionnaire study asked parents to rate their children’s proficiency in Vietnamese and English, respond to questions about language use practices, and identify characteristics of the child, the parent, the family, and the community. She then went on to identify the factors that differed for children with above and below average Vietnamese language proficiency (as rated by their parents).
With regard to spoken language proficiency, the best predictor was child language use. Maybe unsurprisingly, the more likely a child was to use Vietnamese, the higher their ability to speak the language.
This finding points to the existence of vicious and virtuous cycles in language learning. A vicious language learning cycle is one where there are few opportunities to speak, resulting in fewer practice opportunities, resulting in deteriorating language proficiency, resulting in reduced likelihood to speak. By contrast, a virtuous language learning cycle works in the opposite direction: many and varied practice opportunities lead to proficiency gains which in turn further increase the likelihood of language use.
This means that the ability to establish virtuous language learning cycles is one of the secrets of success in bilingual parenting.
With regard to written proficiency, the researcher identified a correlation with children’s age: obviously, a child has to be old enough to learn how to write. Literacy is tied to schooling. Therefore, children who had only recently arrived in Australia and had experienced some schooling in Vietnam had an advantage when it came to Vietnamese literacy.
In Australia, community language schools are supposed to teach literacy in the home language. However, the VietSpeech team has found that it makes no difference for a child’s Vietnamese proficiency whether a child attends a community school or not. However, it would be wrong to conclude that language education in school is pointless and that all that matters is parental effort.
Parental attitudes and efforts matter most in the early years. During the early years, the focus is necessarily on developing oral proficiency and on getting those virtuous language cycles going. However, the control parents have over a child’s linguistic environment decreases rapidly as they get older.
Starting school is usually a turning point and virtuous language learning cycles can all too easily collapse into vicious cycles at that point.
The challenge of maintaining the LOTE as the habitual language spoken in the home in the early primary years is magnified by the fact that, at this point, literacy comes into play. To continue developing the LOTE towards the full range of linguistic proficiencies, including academic proficiencies that will last into adulthood, it is essential for children to learn how to read and write in the LOTE. And learning to read and write does not only mean learning one’s ABC but being able to draw knowledge from increasingly complex texts.
Achieving biliteracy on parental effort alone, without school support, is extremely difficult. Some families adopt a “one child, two curricula” approach (Chao and Ma, 2019). In this approach, which is also employed by some of the participants in our team member’s Yining Wang’s research with Chinese parents in Australia, parents coach their children outside school hours in the curriculum of the home country. In Chao and Ma’s study, this included Chinese and maths; for one of Yining’s participants, coaching was even more extensive and also included history and social studies.
Adopting a “one child, two curricula” approach is only feasible for a small minority of families. The capacity constraints on the part of both children and parents are obvious. Therefore, for biliteracy to ever be a feasible option for all families who want it, school support is essential.
In Australia, only a very small number of schools offer bilingual curricula. Bilingual schools such as the German International School Sydney, are not a wide option, either. They are few and far between and almost always expensive private schools.
This leaves community language schools as the main option to develop and support children’s written home language proficiency. Unfortunately, Dr Tran’s finding that Vietnamese community schools do not seem to be particularly effective is not unusual. With so many other things competing for precious time, most community schools find that attendance starts to plummet by the mid-primary years.
Australia is not unusual in its neglect of community schools, as Martha Sif Karrebæk recently reported in her account of heritage language education in Denmark.
However, it does not have to be that way, as an initiative in the German state of North-Rhine Westphalia shows. There schools are required to provide home language teaching if requested by a minimum of 15 parents. Currently, schools in the city of Dortmund (ca. 586,000 inhabitants), for instance, teach 14 different home languages as part of their regular curriculum.
So proud is the city of its achievement in bilingual education that they’ve produced a video about it. Entitled “Every language is a treasure”, the heart-warming video [in German, Arabic, Bosnian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish] features the voices of parents, children, teachers, and policy makers, and shows the real secret of successful bilingual parenting: communities and schools that value languages.
Next Lecture in Linguistic Diversity
Learn more about bilingual education and home language maintenance in Australia at next week’s lecture by Dr Kerry Taylor-Leech about “Translanguaging and identity: Creating safe space for Samoan language and culture in an Australian a’oga amata”
References
Chao, X., & Ma, X. Transnational habitus: Educational, bilingual and biliteracy practices of Chinese sojourner families in the U.S. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 0(0), 1468798417729551. doi:10.1177/1468798417729551
Piller, I., & Gerber, L. (2018). Family language policy between the bilingual advantage and the monolingual mindset. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 1-14. doi:10.1080/13670050.2018.1503227 [available open access]
This work is licensed under a
Modern parents have several concerns about the language policies to follow. One parent one language is the most popular strategy that parents tend to use. It is essentially two monolingual strategies applied simultaneously. However, there is unequal distribution of the exposure to each language and its effect on the rates of language development and the lack of exposure to the heritage language in the majorly English-speaking community.
I completely agree with this post regarding bilingual education. We cannot only hold parents responsible for ensuring children acquire and maintain proficiency in the native language along with other languages taught in school. Both parents and schools have to work in collaboration with each other. A family I know from India, moved to Australia about 7 years ago. Their child was about 3 years then and they were determined to teach her Hindi (native language) along with English (medium of instruction in school). They maintain the understanding that once she comes home they must speak in Hindi. They haven’t been to India much since then. A couple of months ago, I remember having a conversation with her. She did not understand the importance of learning to speak, read or write in Hindi considering she only spoke to her parents and some time extended family in Hindi. I think it is also important for us to make children autonomous and show them the positives of learning these languages so that the are intrinsically motivated.
From my point of view, bilingual parents at home only, is not enough for success, they need school and community to help them. Some children with bilingual parents, can understand their parents’ language and maybe speak too, but this is not enough to learn a language. Other children as my cousins whose living in the US with bilingual parents; they just speak their community language, so the school will support their bilingual parents to success.
Thanks a lot for this interesting post
First-generation of any migrant Australian does have bilingualism with LOTE( language other than English) dominance; the second generation does have bilingualism with English dominance and the third generation is monolingual or entirely English speaking. This idea made me contemplative why people, despite their attempts to preserve their cultural and linguistic heritage, are unable to pass on their home language across generations, why the migrant families’ yearning of making their descendants proficient bilingual ends up in monolingualism. The answers provided by this post is really insightful that the charm of home language wears off across generations due to the lack of adequate platforms or opportunities of using the home language orally in the preschool stage and the further. Another cause of deficits in the use of home language is schooling devoid of literacy practices.
The solutions can be the biliteracy program in school and the individual dedication for the continuation of the language root of the family. The collective effort of the government, the family and the school can preserve the linguistic diversity of the countries like Australia.
This is a very interesting article as my parents and I have always had a great interest in bilingualism, however, in my case, it will be about Bahasa Indonesia and English. As a young girl, my father was planning to raise me as a bilingual speaker of English and Bahasa Indonesia. He introduced me to some English vocabulary and started speaking with some English while Bahasa Indonesia was mostly taught at school. Nevertheless, if adapting Dr. Van Tran’s notion of virtuous language learning, my father was probably in the opposite side. As he got busier with work, he barely had time to teach me English and this led to fewer opportunities and practice. That was one regret I probably had in my life however I am still grateful that my father was the one who introduces me to the English language that leads to my interest in the language as I grow up.
It is undoubtedly that in this today’s age, as the world is increasingly becoming globalized and diverse, the demand for bilingual or multilingual ability is such a hot trend, especially since this can convey social, economic and intellectual success. However, parents of bilingual or multilingual children are believed to largely have difficulties to surmount. Because raising the children who speak more than one language demands numerous requirements. It asks for such vast quantities of time and joint efforts from both homeschooling and academic schooling. Also, it calls for huge support from an advanced education policy as well as the dedicated and thorough serves from the educational workers.
Neither schools nor parents can success in bilingual language teaching. In general, parents provide a bilingual language environment for children at home and children learn deep language knowledge in school, so as most language, learners need to learn and practice much to acquire language. In terms of my own experience and observation, most bilingual children learn home language only from their parents, so what they parents say and the way their parents express in home language affect them much, this might be the reason why the title of this article uses “secrets”.
I always possess a great interest in parenting bilingual; however, I have never tried to dig deeper into this issue by reading articles or research papers. Thanks to this post, I feel more confident to train my next generation to be bilingual. I totally agree with the notion that school plays an important role to raise bilingual children. However, due to my experience, the second language studying in Australia is optional, which means that students have chance to choose their L2. I believe that parents should give advice to their language learning selection to drive them to the rights way.
Hi Ingrid,
Thank you for your sharing of the article. I totally agree that success in achieving bilingual education requires not only parental effort but also support from schools. It appears to be a sad thing to me that later generations of the first migrant generations are losing their mother tongues, no matter how hard some parents are trying to educate their children in learning English together with their home languages. Apart from the reasons shared in the article, I believe sense of belonging is also one of the main factors that affect the students’ motivation in learning bilingually. Both schools and parents should deliver a message to the students that maintaining another language or even more other languages other than English should be considered as an advantage to be proud of instead of a sign of differentiation in the society that would create distance between them and other mainstream students.
This article is very interesting for parents though. I agree that parents play an important role in child development. As I think children spend more time at home than at school. The control of parents is the key factor for bilingualism. However, I agree that literacy is developed at school. I have experienced some bilingual friends who are fluent in both languages and literate in both languages. Most of them said their parents spent extra money and sent them to extra class to learn reading and writing of their language during their childhood, and they have to speak the language at home since that is compulsory in their house. This way helps them to improve and maintain their bilingual skill.
Thank you for sharing. Australia is a country of immigrants, it means that there are a large number of children who come from diverse linguistic background. In fact, i live with a family whose children are bilingual. It is true that literacy has a close relationship with schools. Many children who come from different countries and they have diverse cultural background. The family i lived with has two children and they can speak mandarin at home. However, literacy skills for them are very difficult. The older child has learned mandarin in China for several years, but with the time she stayed in Australia, it is impossible for her to write in her native language . As far as i am concerned, their schools have optional courses for students, including mandarin, Japanese and other languages. I think it is useful for these children to develop bilingual competence. Supports from communities, schools and parents are crucial for children’s literacy learning in different languages.
Hi Ingrid,
This article is very interesting to read. I quite agree with what you said that the successful education of bilingual families requires the joint efforts of both schools and families. Thus, I think of the language learning environment and out-of-school language exposure. Using your explanation of the key to bilingualism as a reference can help me think about other questions as well. As a teacher, how can we help bilingual students with their writing proficiency? As a monolingual family, how can parents raise a bilingual excellent child?
In my opinion, the language learning needs of bilingual children should be considered including their first language and second language. Early children develop their language skills through play and environment around them but school settings are more important for older children to develop their academic language skills. Considering the methods for early children developing their languages that are provided by these early children’s parents, more opportunities should be provided for their communication and interaction with other using both first language and second language in their daily life. By doing this way, they can learn luggage skills from their parents and peers through play and interaction.
Bilingual competence development has been a concerning issue of numerous immigrant families in Australia and other countries where children coming from a different linguistic background make up a large proportion of the national population. It is often believed that a child’s home language proficiency relies mostly on the amount of exposure to the LOTE that he/she receives. As a result, parents attempts to surround the kid with the parental language by using it as language for household communication and sending kids to community language schools. However, by the time of mid-primary school, these linguistic practices gradually diminish due to the tension to succeed in school’s academic performance, which leads to a large number of students’ weaker literacy in their home language in later years. Thus, it is ultimately communities’ and schools’ work to continuously value and support children’ bi-literacy development to adulthood.
Hi Ingrid. It was interesting to read about this article. Although I grew up in a monolingual family, and the country in which I have lived for most of my life is also officially monolingual, I have known some people who were born in bilingual families. As you mentioned in the article, “Literacy is tied to schooling”. In general, the dominant language of those people is the one they have been mostly taught at school. Additionally, despite the fact they speak another language with their parents at home, there is obvious distinction between the proficiency of the two languages.
In my opinions, for the sake of bilingual children, both homeschooling and community schools are necessary. On the one hand, parents’ language proficiency take a salient role in forming children language capabilities since parents share the most strong connection with children. On the other hand, parents should also aware of the school curriculum to support their children in the language learning process so they can meet the demand of the social. Consequently, the parents should create a more adaptable environment for the LOTE children to practice both their mother tongue and English.
It’s disappointing to read that community language schools don’t seem to be playing a very effective role in helping children of bilingual families to develop their home language proficiency and literacy skills in Australia. Also it’s unfortunate that bilingual schools are a rarity, and are expensive even when they are available. With so much onus and responsibility on the parents to teach their children the home language and develop their home language literacy skills, its no wonder that with time and work constraints, by the time the child’s entered the Australian school system for a few years, the parents struggle to maintain their teaching efforts and the virtuous language cycles collapse. It would be nice to see the government and education system do more to promote and encourage bilingual learning environments in Australian communities. At least, its encouraging to see the bilingual education initiative in North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany, leading to positive results for the community. I am optimistic that one day such an initiative could be trialed and eventually implemented in the more multilingual regions of Australia. In this way multilingualism can be better celebrated and embraced, rather than seen in a deficit view as per current monolingual education norms.
Raising bilingual children requires a lot of intentional planning and can be a lot of work. It requires parents to persevere in a particular language when using another language might be easier. It also requires additional linguistic support as children navigate the two languages at school and at home. Good knowledge of parents’ native language can actually help their children with learning the language of the wider community. Bilingual children who have a solid foundation in their native language learn the majority language more easily and do better at school than children who aren’t learning their native language at home. For example, children who are familiar with books and stories in first languages find it easier to learn to read and write in their second language when they get to school.
Thanks Ingrid for posting valuable article and video.
Australia become cosmopolitan city because high rate of migration and all migrants have their own mother tongue. In this context many parents want to make perfect their children in English language and some parents want to preserve their mother tongue. Parents who want to preserve their mother tongue, they want to teach both English language and their mother tongue as well. In this article writer takes the reference of Vietnamese parents bilingual parenting. It is true that without bilingual parenting children cannot be bilingual, because if their parents are monolingual they cannot be bilingual. Yes they can learn English in school but it is not enough for children they must have English learning environment also in their home.
There are no sufficient bilingual school in Australia, so parents have to care about their children’s multilingual teaching. Those children who have bilingual parents they can learn bilingualism easily.
Hi Ingrid, thanks for your post about bilingual parenting success. I agree with the importance of bilingual parenting and schooling in developing children’s proficiency in home language and English. To improve children’s Vietnamese literacy, I agree that it is necessary to establish a virtuous language learning cycle in every family and school, which can increase the likelihood of language use and learn how to read and write in Vietnamese and English outside school hours. Apart from the parental effort in developing Vietnamese literacy, the support of schooling is also important as some schools increasingly offer regular bilingual curricula and teachers can teach learners their home languages in schools.
Thank you for an interesting post. When I read about this post, it reminded of my younger days. In my case, my mom taught me the basic Japanese letters using a graph. I remember that it was challenging because I had to learn many different letters. However, my mom did not teach me kanji so I had to teach my self how to read these strange looking characters using basically with pure memorization. As a student without a teacher, I learnt how to read these characters using manga books which taught me about Japanese values as well. As a result, I agree that the parent’s involvement in Bilingual education at home is very important. However, I also believe that trusting your child’s interest in his or her LOTE and creating an environment where there are books in his or her daily lives is important as well.
As a bilingual family a lot of the arguments in this blogpost resonate with me. I struggle with the idea of how we are going to teach our son Spanish literacy and maintain his oral proficiency in the language. It saddens me to read about the findings from Dr Van Tran’s research on community language schools in Australia. I had high hopes that these community programs will aid us in maintaining our son’s home language, as well as helping him to become a proficient writer in Spanish. I was well aware that a lot of parental effort from us was going to be required to tech our young son Spanish literacy, however, I was unaware that we were going to be alone in this journey. For our family at this stage it seems impossible to afford the high costs associated with private education where bilingual education is more feasible, thus maintaining our son’s bilingualism will be our sole responsibility.
Notwithstanding, I am not discouraged, because examples such as the initiative in the German state of North-Rhine Westphalia gives the rest of the world a great example to follow. I believe advocacy is extremely important in these types of topics, and as parents is also our duty to fight for better educational programmes for our children.
It is common for parents to worry about their children’s diminishing mother tongues. I have a sister in Year 3 (aged 8) who has low English literacy skills (struggles with reading and spelling). She attends a private school which incorporates Arabic and religious studies in their curriculum. Despite my sister’s low English literacy skills, my mum hesitates to transfer my sister to a public school because my mum wants my sister to keep learning Arabic in her private school. My parents place an importance on Arabic literacy skills more than English. This is because Australia is rich with English resources and exposure, while not for Arabic of course. So my parents think my sister has many opportunities to catch up with her English literacy skills, and want to focus on her Arabic literacy whilst she is still young. Although I don’t completely agree with their move to neglect English and focus on Arabic, I understand why my parents are concerned.
How to maintain their home languages(LOTE) is an increasing challenge facing migrant families, especially those with children born and living in an host country with English dominance. It is a fact that many second or third migrant generation can not speak or are not fluent in their home language(LOTE). The reasons could be an interaction of many factors. To help those to maintain their home language heritage, apart from family efforts, schools and communities should contribute more to it by providing environment, materials, and teaching staff. Joint efforts should be made to create an atmosphere, where children can expose to as much as possible and are motivated to learn their and practice their home language.
I have recently been exposed to a lot of articles about bilingual parenting. Almost all articles mention the importance of the family for bilingual education. Of course, this also stems from the lack of bilingual schools and the weak reality of the school for bilingual education. Actively or passively, the family has become a base for bilingual education. Families who offer more language use opportunities will be more successful in bilingual parenting. The examples I have encountered that I can learn bilingually from an early age show that most of their parents are bilingual. So you can communicate with your children in two languages. Most of the schools selected are bilingual schools. This is also more proof of the importance of the joint efforts of families and schools.
This blog post has indicated the importance of parental effort in preserving the heritage language while also emphasizing the prominent role of schooling in developing and nourishing it further. Moreover, the North-Rhine Westphalia initiative mentioned is a successful story of heritage language education when it is done right. Therefore, such a model should be studied and modified as necessary in order to apply in areas where minority languages are prevalent, e.g. Australia, Britain, and the U.S.
I have met quite a lot of bilingual Vietnamese- Australian people in Australia. Those whose parents cant speak English turn out to be very good at Vietnamese because they have to use VIetnamese to communite with their parents on a daily basis. By constrast, ones whose parents can use English or have a job which requires a minimum English proficiency, tend to be less fluent in Vietnamese and dont feel comfortable speaking Vietnamese as compared to the former. It can be inferred that parents who create the learning environment play a significant role in educating children bilingually. From this example, I believe homeschooling is more effective than community schools. However, both types of education existing means more choices for parents who hope their children grown up bilingually.
It is interesting to find out bilingualism is not only a trend but a need for both families and schools. I admire the opinion that “every language is a treasure”, and it transforms my perspective regarding bilingual education in family and school. Just like language learning is more than learning a language itself, it also helps students know another culture more. Bilingual education may enable children to raise their awareness of their culture backgrounds. I know some second generation migrants in Australia and few of them really understand or value their home culture because they may not be required to live in the environment of virtuous language cycle. Thus, I believe bilingual education is important in both families and schools rather than just attending a language club.
Thank you for an interesting post. It is clear that if parental effort is the necessary condition, school would be the sufficient condition for the development of the child’s proficiency in their home language. As far as I know, some schools in Australia do provide classes in LOTE, and the students are allowed to count their LOTE unit result in their HSC scores. However, most schools only offer classes in popular languages like Chinese or Japanese; the needs of students and parents in minority groups have not been met. The model of the German state of North-Rhine Westphalia may be a solution for this problem. A minimum number of students could be set to open classes, and the teaching content in these classes could be related to what students have been learning in other subjects. In that way, students would be given the opportunity to use their home language for deep learning.
The language initiative in Dortmund leads me to ruminate on the ramifications of such results in a developed country. Is it possible for these studies to be replicated in other developed countries with large multilingual populations such as Australia and the U.S? There is much to be said for parental involvement and advocacy of linguistic diversity, especially if the consequences of such implementation are found to be as drastically successful as they are in this particular scenario. I am interested in knowing the political and cultural ramifications of such a policy, and if this situation could be duplicated for the purpose of improving linguistic diversity and cultural understanding for not only minority students but all students. This approach to language learning could help establish language diversity awareness and appreciation on a macro scale if implemented nationally. Although this idea is leagues away from where most developed (especially English speaking) nations are now, it is still alluring to contemplate for future purposes.
It is very critical matter, in particular parents living abroad, far away from their home countries. I totally agree that “every language is a treasure.” We all have known that being bilingual can bring benefit in terms of cognitive and brain development. I think bilingualism can be financially benefitial as well as I have known several people can earn reasonable money using 2 fluent languages. Nevertheless, how to get children to become bilingual is fascinating and also challenging matter for parents. I also find that parents use venacular language at home is not enough and only can achieve vicious language. With the aim of communities and schools valueing the target language parents and children can achieve the goals. In my opinion, in order to get virtious language children have to access to a variety of sources like parents talking, communities, schools and friends etc.
In my opinion, community schools and homeschooling bring numerous advantages to children. Homeschooling is regarded as a fundamental for the bilingual capability of LOTE children. For example, although my cousins were born in Australia, they use Vietnamese relatively well, not only speaking and listening but also writing and reading because their parents taught Vietnamese to them when they were young. Moreover, the community language schools are important to children because they can have many chances to interact with their friends, especially those who have similar language with their parents, both in English and in LOTE.
Hi Ingrid, Thank you for your interesting post!
In my point of view, the point that the language pattern of bilingual children in Australia depends on parental efforts is completely true with my uncle’s family here in Australia. In fact, when my brothers were children, their parents hardly communicate with them in English because they think that they will use English in the near future and Vietnamese- their parents’ first language- is not necessary in their later environment. This means that they believe acquiring two languages at the same time and at an early age is a challenging task for them. As a result, they can only speak English, and now they lose communication access to their relatives in Vietnam, which is against the Vietnamese cultural values. Therefore, it is possible to admit that parental ideologies play key roles in their children’s linguistic resources.
It is necessary to maintain the LOTE in the migrant families but it challenges the third and the next generations. I know a Vietnamese family living in Australia. Their children are 12 and 14 years old. They can speak broken-Vietnamese and understand Vietnamese when people speak at slow speed, but they cannot read or write. At home, their parents speak Vietnamese with them and in case they do not understand, their parents have to translate into English, but strive to make them understand in Vietnamese. They even ask a tutor to teach their children Vietnamese at home. However, unfortunately, their children fail to learn because for them, doing Vietnamese literacy is a big challenge. They try another way by sending their children to a private school where children can learn bilingualism. Again, the children refuse to do so. As a result, until now, their children can only speak Vietnamese but not write or read. As you can see, even the second generation fails to master their home language, so how can they encourage their third generation to study and use LOTE? It is a big challenge to maintain home language across generations.
Thank you again for this article. The video clip is just heart-warming, despite being able to pick only some Spanish and German words up now and then. It’s so uplifting to see the results of joint effort of so many educators, families and authorities. We have our own community language school that has been catering for the language needs of children from early childhood up to Y5/6 over the past decade here in Sydney. While I have been teaching there for many years now, it has occurred to me just recently how very important it is to run this not-for-profit school, get up and drag myself out there every single Saturday morning. Precisely for the reasons mentioned in the blog. Children need to be exposed to their home language as much as possible. While NSW Government supports community language schools it mostly ends there, thus it’s just crucial that parents have a right mindset, perseverance and strong desire to impart the knowledge of a mother tongue to their offspring.
This article is really fascinating and useful for parents who desire their children can get biliteracy. I agree with two points made by the author. Firstly, the virtuous language learning circle contributes to the success of bilinguality. Secondly, parents’ attitudes are utmost important. Children go to school just five days a week but spend most of their time at home, surrounded by their parents; therefore, creating an environment for children to learn and practice the target languages at home is necessary. I am living with my sister (Vietnamese) whose children were born in Australia. They speak English at school and with my brother-in-law (their father) at home but communicate with my sister in Vietnamese. This makes them familiar with two languages at the same time. My sister always encourage them to speak Vietnamese whenever possible and willing to correct their mistakes, therefore my nieces never fear of speaking this language
I am deeply touched by this article. No matter where a person is, he can never forget where does he or his ancestors come from because his cultural root is always in the country that he was born and grew up. Only in this way can diverse culture exist and spread forever. In this case, it is essential for migrant families to teach their children LOTE. However, it is difficult for parents to teach their children LOTE themselves at home in English-speaking countries, such as Australia, where English is the dominant language to be spoken. Schools should take the responsibility to teach bilingual children how to speak and write in LOTE. There are many private language schools in Sydney, aiming at helping children from migrant families to improve their LOTE language proficiency or teaching students who are interested in certain language and culture. For migrant parents, this can be a convenient choice because teachers of these schools are more professional than themselves and going to school can spare time for them. However, tuition fees for these school can be considerably high and there are still limited opportunities for these bilingual children to practice, which leds them into the vicious language learning circle. In this situation, community schools are supposed to play an important role in teaching LOTE.
“Every language is a treasure” means to me that having more than one language is like having two or more points of view of this world we live in. I find interesting that eventually in Australia people become monolingual. One question I have is why people migrate? Personally I have met exiled people who had a rough time exiting Latin America and for no reason wish to ever set foot there again. I wonder if this bad taste in their mouths contributes to permitting the mother tongue to die off. I guess it comes down to the reasons for conserving a language. Not everyone has the same reasons yet we all have the same goals of survival and a prosperous future. How does bilingualism fit into these goals defines how invested one will be and whether we feel bilingualism to be fruitfull?
I have chance talking with an Australian born Vietnamese friend who has come to Australia with his family since the age of 9. He was taught to speak Vietnamese fluently as his parents didn’t want one day he would forget his mother tongue. Similar to a Vietnamese couple I used to work with, their only son was born here in Australia but his speaking in Vietnamese is not bad, because the parents always talk to their child in their first language. However, in both cases, they are not able to read and write in Vietnamese, and they don’t attend to any school teaching their home language. I think it may come to one reason that being able to speak fluently is enough to not forget their mother tongue, also learning to read and write in other language not English doesn’t seem to be their priority. If one wants to find back and understand more about his origin, that is his own choice without being affected by his family or the society where he currently lives.
I think both homeschooling and community schools are essential for children. While homeschooling can be a foundation for the child’s bilingual ability or virtuous learning cycles, we cannot deny the significance of community language schools as they can provide a social environment for the children to interact not only in English but also in LOTE if they are with friends of same parents’ languages. This article really helps me understand the importance of homeschooling in children’s language speaking capacity.
As a Vietnamese myself, I find this post very interesting and worth reading. I’m amazed by the so-called ‘Every language is a treasure’ initiative you mentioned at the end. It brings so much value to bilingual education. I totally appreciate the fact that many parents want their children to be able to speak their heritage language but that doesn’t mean that the children are willing to in every case. It’s not only about the time or effort they can spare for learning the language, it’s also a matter of identity searching – what and who they see themselves as. While the first generation of migrants still see themselves as Vietnamese and try to maintain the cultural values, lifestyles, etc., these things get lost when being passed down to the younger generations as they get more immersed in the living and schooling environment of the host country. These younger generations, in time, will come to see themselves as (something-close-to-100%) Australians and that’s when the efforts and aspirations to learn the home language or acquire higher literacy in such language die down. I believe there are so many other factors that affect the actual outcomes of bilingual education, which are totally worth more thorough investigations.
This is an interesting article. I wish my parents had been more diligent with passing on their first language so I could be bilingual. They tried but there was no consistency or strategy over the long term. Also, my father would go in and out of Indonesian and Dutch (his first languages) and I often wonder if this inconsistency played a part in not obtaining either language. From this article, it actually doesn’t sound easy to achieve bilingualism either.
Thank you for an interesting article. It really makes sense to me that children can acquire speaking skills enough at home but reading and writing should be taught at school (because literacy is related to schooling). And it seems to be a good idea to provide home language teaching at school when there are high needs. I know some kids who go to a local school in Australia on weekdays and take a Japanese class on Saturday, but they often seem overwhelmed by the busy schedule and a large amount of school work. Considering this, teaching in home language is efficient and beneficial to children (thought there would be problems in terms of feasibility).
What an interesting topic and post.
It makes me wonder, with Australia being such a culturally and linguistically diverse country, why isn’t bilingualism and biliteracy in the forefront of education for those who have a LOTE? I personally believe that integrating bilingual education into the regular school curriculum would be the most effective way to encourage and increase a student’s language proficiency in their home language. With the ever-increasing digital environment, I wonder if such bilingual education could even be conducted online. This way, all students, even those who are the only speaker of a particular language in the school, could receive bilingual education in the classroom, without having to attend another school or take up too much of their spare time. I believe a lot of work can be done in order to improve the biliteracy and bilingualism of students with LOTEs in Australia, Germany is off to a great start!
In my opinion, monolingual environments are no more enough for people. The conundrum now is multilingual environment which has been caused by the shift of migrants. Nowadays we can see multicultural communities’ existence in every continent because of changes in migration laws. On the one side, prosperity of people from certain regions such as Middle East and South East Asia leads to a higher demand of higher and better educational and living standard so that they decide to move to Western countries such as USA, UK, Australia and Canada or European region. On the other side, asylum crisis happening in other European regions also leads to illegal immigrants to other places in the world. However, there is not absolute collision between these groups of people because they represent different classes in society. When trying to figure out what someone should do to harmonize with other cultures, why don’t we think of intercultural environments and accept differences. Particularly, children who are being raised in a bilingual environment will undoubtedly become more linguistic competent in the future. Their linguistic skills will enable them to integrate into multicultural background environment. Therefore, monolingual curricula tends to be obsolete and doesn’t meet society’s need. Furthermore, multilingual learning environment seems more feasible to equip children with more living and interacting skills to live in a super fast paced changing world.
I have an Australian-born Vietnamese friend in Australia who just can speak Vietnamese without being able to read or write. He said he attended community language class when he was in Years1-2 and stopped because his schoolwork took much of his time.
I find this quite pitiful and wish he could have a more chance to learn, or his parents could have better valued his Vietnamese literacy.
I think the educational system is very critical in encouraging/discouraging parents to nurture their kids’ LOTE. Even though they value LOTE and want their children to grasp it, the concern about not sufficient time spent for schoolwork may hinder that desire. Overtime, they decide just to talk with the children in LOTE and don’t expect more than that. This post makes me more intrigued to find out more strategies to help the kids with LOTE.
Hi everyone,
I agree with that the community and schools should help parents with raising bilingual children. In Arabic, we have proverb that can be translated into “one hand can’t make a clap, so we should use both hands to clap”, which suggests that for any task, more hands would means more efficiency. Moreover, as another article about parenting bilingual children has pointed out, language learning is a continuous journey. Since parental control decreases as the children grow older, school and community at large become more influential in their development, especially language wise.
There is obviously further need for both State and Federal Australian governments to expand on language education policies that extend beyond the primary and high school level, and spread to the outer community schools. A State and Federal bilingual policy with a broad, comprehensive scope would enable further language diversity throughout Australia, while simultaneously building intercultural connections and links with a multi-lingual set of skills, cognitive advantages and a multi-branched language school curriculum that would sustain and build-on cultural heritage for children as they learn the language/s.
Alternatively, overseas experiences would also enrich and replenish language education for both the children and the parents. Recent World Economic Forum studies show the evidence that children who are exposed to living in the culture whilst studying the language have a successful outcome of retaining and utilizing the language for their prospective career/job opportunities, becoming more creative and better at solving problems as well as developing a deeper self-awareness.
Success sometimes comes with sacrifices. If moving abroad means that immersing in the culture and speaking the language more, then the sacrifice of leaving one’s comfort zone and giving such a great chance to one’s child is worth it. Community schools cannot completely capture socio-cultural context that only living abroad can gain for a child and their parents. Community schools have an important role to play in Australia. Then living overseas for a substantial period of time should be the next stage for bilingual families.
I wonder if there were any homeschooling families in the sample and how they negotiated what curriculum is taught and in what language.
Controlling the language environment is precisely the reason my 5 year old is not going to Kindergarten in the US, but joins a home schooling co-op and will be staying home with her sister and brother.