Auto-immersion

Those of us who are doing our best to raise our kids with something other than the community language know that we have to seize every possible moment to barrage them with lots and lots of input in the target language.  (This is especially challenging for those parents who work full-time and have a very limited number of hours most days to share their language with their children.)

When we're at home, we can take advantage of games, books, toys, videos, and the simple fact that we're engaging in face-to-face interactions with their accompanying gestures, expressions, and props--we have a lot of tools to provide contextualized prompts for conversation and activities in the target language.

But what about those endless hours in the car, chauffeuring from one playgroup to another lesson, running errand upon errand?  The parent is driving, facing forward, no eye contact, hands occupied--not ideal conditions for practicing another language with small (or bigger) children.

So here's my challenge to us: let's take advantage of the fact that the kids are a trapped audience to immerse them in our language of choice! Let's brainstorm as many as possible ways to engage our kids in the target language when we're driving them here and there and everywhere!  Here, I'll start:

Music (duh): Listen to songs in the target language--children's music, yes, but also pop music, rap music, folk songs, music from all the countries where the language is spoken.  Sing songs to (or with) your children.  (Griffin, approaching age four, has learned to sing in a round, which sounds so lovely to my ears.)  And don't forget the nursery rhymes!

I still remember the trip Griffin and I took to visit with a friend in another city, a 45-minute drive, when he was about six months old.  I turned off the tape player (yeah, my twelve-year-old Toyota, Earl Grey, is so basic that he doesn't have a CD player!) to see if I could sing French children's songs the whole way there.  To my surprise, we made it to my friend's house without my repeating a single one!

(This video is just a placeholder--he's singing in English.  I'll try to film him singing in French in the car soon.)

Rhyme time: You say a word in the target language; your kids reply with words that rhyme.  Then let them pick the words to start with.

Counting: Count to 100 together, then count solo and pause for the kids to fill in the next number, then alternating (you count the odd numbers, your kids the evens), then by tens, fives, twos, then backwards (whatever the children are capable of); count objects that you pass (stop signs, cows, blue cars).

Twenty Questions: Play this vocabulary-rich game that involves guessing what object someone is thinking of, where the guessers can only ask yes/no questions.  A child who can't form complete sentences (much less questions) can still show his understanding of your questions by answering them while you guess!  (Unless your interlocutor is like three-year-old Griffin, whose answers tend to lead to things like "something green that's made of metal and bigger than the universe").

I Spy: Another fun and easy game that involves sighting an object (inside or outside the car) and giving clues so that the others can guess the object.

Un truc dans un machin: "A thingy in a whats-it" is what I call this activity, where I pretend to misunderstand something Griffin said, repeating it back to him as inaccurately as possible (and making it as silly as I can).  For example,

Griffin: Regarde, Maman!  Il y a un chien dans la camionnette!  (Look, Mommy, there's a dog in that pickup truck!)
Maman: Quoi?  Il y a un dinosaure dans ta poche?  (What?  There's a dinosaur in your pocket?)
Griffin (giggling): Non, il y a un chien dans la camionnette!
Maman: Quoi?  Il y a un extra-terrestre dans l'arbre?  (What?  There's an alien in the tree?)
And so on; Griffin usually joins in and makes up other strange combinations.  We can do this for a good ten or fifteen minutes before one of us (okay, moi) tires of it.

And a related activity: sing a familiar song but insert other silly words here and there.  For instance, "Au feu, les pompiers/Voila la maison qui brule/Au feu, les pompiers/Voila la maison brulee/C'est pas moi qui l'ai brulee/C'est la coccinelle/C'est pas moi qui l'ai brulee/C'est l'arraignee" (instead of "la cuisiniere" and "le cuisinier").

Storytelling, of course!  I find that listening to audio books in French in the car is too challenging for Griffin at this point, unless it's a story he's already very familiar with because I've read it to him multiple times and he's seen pictures illustrating it.  (We have a small handful of stories-on-tape like Boucle d'or et les trois ours.)  Rather, I'll pick a story he knows much less well and tell it to him, simply at first, then   gradually adding details and length.  Changing my voice for each character helps him follow along (Occasionally I change it up to see how quickly he notices the differences, a la "Boucle d'or et les trois girafes.")

Now it's your turn....what do you do to keep your kids in the target language during car rides?

What's new at Bringing up Baby Bilingual? (January 2012)

Mon fils can write his own prénom!   Uncoached!  Up to this point, I've drawn dots for him to connect so that he could "sign" his name on cards.  Yesterday, I was in a hurry and just told him to write "Griffin," fully expecting to see some cheerful, vigorous scribbles as a result.  Wowza!  He learned to write his name when we weren't looking!

Ma fille now likes to ride on mes épaules.

(Oh, did you think I meant "What's new on the blog?" Dear readers, thanks, once again, for indulging my habit of gratuitously posting photos of my kiddos.)

Here's what I've added to the blogroll recently:

French Today, a blog of fun and useful resources for practicing your French and learning about French culture (written by the the owner of a company that sells mp3 French classes--I just bought one with fairy tales because it sounded like it would help both me and Griffin).

She also shares some video clips of her daughter speaking and singing in French--adorable, plus it's important to me that Griffin see other children using French.

Parisian Fields, a very well-written, beautifully-photographed blog about the City of Lights, focusing on history and culture from the perspective of a Canadian francophile couple.

Vos questions de parents, "Pour aider vos enfants a grandir," a website in French with activities and advice divided up by children's ages.

PicassoHead, a face drawing game that you can play with your young children (and that older kids can play by themselves).  While it's not a language-based game, it provides lots of opportunities to discuss facial features using vocabulary more sophisticated than just "nose" and "smile" and "brown eyes" in the target language.

Get Bilingual, a growing series of YouTube tutorials about teaching your own second language to your children (or just staying a step ahead as you learn along with them).

And in a new category for my blogroll, "Global Learning," because I wanted to highlight these blogs and websites that encourage learning about other cultures and countries, even though most of these links don't focus specifically on languages:

Global Table Adventure, a blog by a mom whose family is learning about the culture and food of every country in the world (in alphabetical order) via their own kitchen in the US.

InCulture Parent, "a magazine for parents raising little global citizens" with articles and essays, including some by bloggers I really admire, Jan and Souad from BabelKid and Coco from Multilingual Mama.

Moms Gone Global, "helping parents raise happy, healthy, globally-enlightened kids," with crafts, activities, recipes, and more, with a global flare.

Drag-and-drop Middle East map quiz--because the region stretches as far west as French-speaking Morocco (and because I can't keep my -stans straight)

And what links would you like to recommend?

Oh, okay, if you insist: one more photo.  This is my niece Eleanor (14 months) with her  baby cousin Gwyneth.

I'm a language educator in The Language Educator!

The current issue of The Language Educator (Volume 7, Issue 1, January 2012), a publication of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), has a nice long article on raising children bilingually.  Among the parents they interviewed is--moi!  Lotsa quotes, some advice, and even a picture of Griffin and me snuggling with a book.  The article, "Raising Multilingual Children" (pages 48-53), is by Patricia Koning.

In the article, I say that speaking my non-native language with my children makes me a better parent--I'm consciously choosing to be very present when I'm with them.  More about that idea here.

moitié-anniversaire? demi-anniversaire? plus-jamais-un-tout-petit-bébé?

I don't know how to say it in French, but my sweet and smiley Gwyneth is six months old!  Happy half-birthday, ma petite.  Je t'aime!

Baby Bilingual by the numbers

Strike a pose, baby girl!

• Happy, healthy children: 2 (4, counting my niece and nephew) 
• Languages in our home every day: 2
• Languages in our home this time next year, we hope: 3 (We just applied again to enroll Griffin in the preschool program at Pioneer Elementary, the local Spanish-Engish immersion school)
• Supportive "hopelessly monolingual" (his words) husband: 1
• Years of blogging: 5.5 (6.5, if you start counting with Three Tarts, my co-authored and abandoned-after-we-started-having-babies food blog)
• Bringing up Baby Bilingual blog posts: 432
• Number of times a day I see, read, or hear something and think, "Oooooh, I should blog abot that!": probably 3 (more if Griffin has been particularly loquacious or I've been surfing the web)
• Number of times a day I actually do write about it: hah!  Not even three times a week these days.
• Conference presentations on raising children bilingually: 2 (CCFLT and ACTFL)
• Articles written for Multilingual Living Magazine: 10, for my "Tatie Teaches a Toddler" column (access to all 70 back issues to the magazine available here)
• Articles written for Multilingual Living's website: 15 (language learning activities for young children)
• French storytimes coordinated: 17
• Most commented post: 28 for French Films That Aren't Freaky
• Most viewed post: 3350 page hits for Resources 
• Followers: 133 (thank you!)
• And, as of the wee hours of this morning, while I was boobing the baby back to sleep: 100,000! hits here on Bringing up Baby Bilingual!  That's a lot of zeroes.

All I want for Christmas is the Blogging Carnival on Bilingualism...

Read about Christmas, Hanukkah, and other wintery, linguist-tastic customs and activities in the December issue of the Carnival, hosted by Rosalind of Tales from Windmill Fields.

Noel en français for free!

Speaking French while celebrating Christmas with your kids?  You'll need these sites!

Writing letters to Santa Claus is so old-fashioned, don't you think?

Well, no, actually, I don't, but Griffin can't read or write yet, so I'm thrilled to discover this website, "Portable Santa Claus," which will send a personalized video message (for free) to your child in French or in English!

You input information about the child (age, hair color, eye color), what behavior issues you wanted him to work on this year (selecting from drop-down menus of everything from "obeying your preschool teacher" to "obeying your stepmother" to "eating all your vegetables" to "going to bed on time" and so forth--and these are just the toddler options, because there are different choices for different ages), what he wants for Christmas, and so on. You can also include photos and indicate what they represent--a trip you took this year, a new arrival in the family, and so forth.

The website then puts together a video of a jolly, gentle Santa greeting your child and reading about him from his "grimoire" (complete with the photos you uploaded). Santa compliments the child on his good behavior (or chastizes him for not being a good boy, if you select that option) and generally says lots of Santa-riffic things. The versions of the video letter for older children are longer and begin with a tour through an area of Santa's Workshop at the North Pole.

Next, here's a fun resource for those of you who celebrate Christmas and speak French with your children: an online advent calendar with a song for each day! The sound quality isn't great--they are recordings from children's concerts, probably in school auditoriums--but the lyrics appear onscreen along with simple animations. And since it's a site from Quebec, it also includes a song about the national dish, la tourtiere!

Via that same site, you can also visit the Train de Noel, more songs by school choirs with onscreen lyrics and simple animations.  Most are in French, with some bilingual ("Lumières de Noel")  and even some French translations of traditional English songs ("Promenade en traineau," for example, which we know as "Sleigh Ride").

You'd prefer to hear adults singing carols professionally?  Okay, then you need to visit La neige folle, a Christmas-season-only online francophone radio station (November 20-December 26).

(I meant to poke around YouTube to find some existing French holiday playlists and some clips of French children singing and celebrating Christmas, but that'll have to wait for another day!  Perhaps in the meantime someone will share their YouTube or other online resources in French about the holidays?)

Finally, over at momes.net, the kiddos will discover all sorts of Christmassy inspiration for recipes, crafts, songs, and other activities in French, while their parents can read the holiday activity suggestions at Vos questions des parents.  In fact, if you click on the "French for kids" sites in the sidebar of this blog, you will probably find more activities than you could ever do in one holiday season!  But I can't check right now....must finish making candy to give away, finish wrapping presents, and get the basement ready to house my parents and my brother who are coming to visit us for their first Christmas in Colorado.  Merry merry, joyeux joyeux.  Thanks for joining me here.

(Oh, and I haven't sent any of our Christmas cards yet.  I should have just gone to Dromadaire to send their free e-cards in French!)

This post is part of the December Blogging Carnival on Bilingualism.

outgrowing French class? vive la difference!

"D'accord, maman, you can take a picture of me with Gwyneth, but I need to concentrate on my iPad game.  I'm too busy to smile right now.  I'm wearing my Tintin t-shirt and have my arm around ma petite soeur--that's as good as it's going to get."

For almost a year now, Griffin and I have off and on attended a small French class for preschoolers taught by a native speaker.  To my delight (and relief), he finally grew comfortable and confident enough to join in on the songs and dances and rhymes that the teacher led.  (My independent garçon has always resisted doing what people--namely his parents--want him to do, especially if it involves any sort of performing.   A shame, since he's quite the singer and dancer with us at home!)  But how much did he learn?

Here are my impressions of the first class, by the way.

The classes met once a week for 40 minutes for six weeks, and we signed up for four separate sessions, which means he's attended twenty-some classes, starting just after he turned three.  Although I grew less excited about them as the year progressed, I'm still glad we had the experience.  My decline in enthusiasm comes from the fact that each set of classes was more or less identical, not just in format, but in content as well.  It seems like each session had a class on clothing, on family members, on farm animals, on zoo animals, and on food.  Each time we "studied" farm animals, for example, we played with little figurines and did the same two puzzles (a barn and a cow).

And if Griffin hadn't already been a French speaker, this would have been fine, because we all need repetition to learn.  But since he already knew his numbers, letters, colors, and vocabulary for everyday life and what interests a toddler, he definitely didn't need the direct instruction with flashcards or the frequent repetition.  Moreover, he was usually the oldest child in the class, which meant he was more verbal to begin with.

We took about four months off class when I was massively pregnant and then after Gwyneth was born.  (But every now and then, Griffin would ask to have a French class at home!)  Coming back at the end of the year, we expected the class to have evolved and changed some.  However, I realized that the first class in November was going to be more or less a copy of the farm lesson, which meant the rest of the classes would probably be the same too.

Nevertheless, I wanted Griffin to keep attending, because having him listen to and interact with a native speaker for 40 minutes is so valuable to me.  (Plus, at four months, Gwyneth has been paying more and more attention to the world around her, so it wouldn't hurt to expose her to the teacher's words and songs!)

"If I could talk, I'd tell you that I love life and that the words on my onesie mean 'kisses'!"  

When I taught first-year French classes at Colorado State University, my classes would frequently be a melange of true beginners and people who had studied French or lived in a francophone country years before and students who had recently finished as many as six years of middle and high school French (and either failed the placement exam on their own or deliberately threw it so as to ensure an easy A in one of their courses).

My colleagues and I  would try to get the students who already knew the basics enrolled into other classes, but it didn't always work, leaving us with the challenge of keeping the experienced students interested but not intimidating the new ones who were pronouncing "hors-d'oeuvre" as "horse devour."
The solution?  Differentiated instruction.

Let's let Dr. Wikipedia tell us about this approach:

• Differentiated instruction involves providing students with different avenues to acquiring content; to processing, constructing, or making sense of ideas; and to developing teaching materials so that all students within a classroom can learn effectively, regardless of differences in ability.^[1]
• Differentiated instruction, according to Carol Ann Tomlinson (as cited by Ellis, Gable, Greg, & Rock, 2008, p. 32), is the process of “ensuring that what a student learns, how he/she learns it, and how the student demonstrates what he/she has learned is a match for that student’s readiness level, interests, and preferred mode of learning”. Differentiation stems from beliefs about differences among learners, how they learn, learning preferences and individual interests (Anderson, 2007). "Research indicates that many of the emotional or social difficulties gifted students experience disappear when their educational climates are adapted to their level and pace of learning."^[2] Differentiation in education can also include how a student shows that they have mastery of a concept. This could be through a research paper, role play, podcast, diagram, poster, etc. The key is finding how your students learn and displays their learning that meets their specific needs.

Full disclosure: This is hard as hell, I never did a very good job of it, and I deeply admire those who have learned how to meet their students' needs in this way.  Can you imagine doing this in, say, a class of 35 middle school math students, or a high school English class where the assessments include multiple-page essays to grade, when the teacher has four different classes to prepare for each and every day?  Chapeau, teachers.  They don't pay you enough.  Not nearly enough.

Anyway, back to Griffin's French class.  After watching, for the fourth time this year, Griffin give the plastic chicken figure back to the teacher when she asked for the poule,  I asked the teacher if she could modify how she spoke to Griffin in class.  Basically, I suggested that she use circumlocution and richer vocabulary when she addressed him--and she did!

For example, when she distributed colored cloths to the kids and then asked them to return them one color at a time, she would name the colors for the others ("donne-moi le tissu rouge") but say something like "donne-moi le tissu qui est la couleur des feuilles" [give me the cloth the color of leaves] when Griffin was holding the green one. 

While I'm still not sure that he acquired many more words and expressions in French this way--she still used vocabulary he was pretty familiar with--it did take his input from i+0* to i+, say, .25.  And I'm proud of myself for recognizing that something needed to change and finding a concrete solution that the teacher was receptive to.

The kiddos' Halloween costumes had nothing to do with French:
Griffin was a space shuttle and Gwyneth a chile pepper.

Here's my next idea: contact her to see if she would offer a class for preschoolers (ages three and four, rather than younger toddlers) who hear French on a regular basis.  I picture something more like a typical preschool class or playgroup, just with the activities, songs, and books in French, where the teacher can assume that the kids already know a lot of the lexicon, so that she doesn't need to explicitly teach the words for shoes, dogs, bread, and so on.

And if she can't, maybe I should....after all, that's basically what my francophone maman friends and I are doing with our French storytime!

* "i+1" is shorthand for "comprehensible input," e.g., input in the target language that includes some information that the student understands but is still challenging enough for them to stretch and thus learn new stuff.  "i+2" would be way over someone's head and thus very frustrating, while "i+0" indicates nothing new.  

FWP: French for Whining Purposes?

In TESL grad schoool (Teaching English as a Second Language), one of the zillions of acronyms thrown at us was ESP--"English for Specific Purposes," such as business or medicine.

Tonight, I think that Griffin was working on his FWP--"French for Whining Purposes."  We're visiting my parents in Wisconsin for the Thanksgiving holiday (happy turkey!), and he's just a little discombobulated and overstimulated with all the people and all the excitement and the changes to his daily routine, which has made bedtime a real challenge.

This evening, he showed particularly impressive defiance, despairing and crying and calling, "Daddy!  Daddy!  Daddy!  I want you, Daddy!  I never ever ever ever want to go to sleep!"  When it seemed like everyone else in the family was ready to leave to go buy stock in an earplug company, I gave in and tried to comfort him.

Griffin melted into my arms, in tears.  "Maman, maman, maman!  Je ne veux pas faire dodo!  Je veux Daddy!  Je veux lui!"  (Mommy, Mommy, Mommy!  I don't want to go to bed!  I want Daddy!  I want he!) 

I didn't mind Griffin's persistent proclamation of preference for his pere, because I was so thrilled that he was whining to me in French, unprompted!  He even used the subjunctive mood correctly: when I threatened to leave the room if he didn't calm down, he grabbed me and said "Je veux que tu restes" (I want you to stay).

In fact, Griffin usually falls asleep "reading."

So I snuggled up to my big little boy, rocked him in my arms, and read him French stories until he fell asleep.  I snuck out of the room, smiling, because he was whining so well in his second language.

my ACTFL handout on language teaching at home!

love and languages for my little ones

If you're  interested, you can download the handout from my recent presentation at the ACTFL convention (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) here.  (You have to register to become a member of the ACTFL Online Community first.)

Here's the blurb:

Language Teaching at Home: Strategies, Challenges, and Resources

You teach a world language at school--but at home, do you speak English with your family? This session will explore how, when, and why to share a second language with your children, examining concerns, challenges, and recommended activities. The presenter will provide an annotated list of resources for parents.

Rather than lecturing about bilingualism to a group of language teachers who probably know more about the topic than I do, I asked the participants to introduce themselves and explain their experience with raising children with more than one language.

And what a variety of backgrounds and experiences!  Everything from a single mom speaking Spanish and Hebrew with her toddler to an American planning to move to Benin with her trilingual African husband; from parents with teens and parents with babies to future parents; from parents who are curious about teaching their kids a second language to parents who are despairing that their school-age children have turned their backs on their second languages to parents wondering whether they can use a second language with their children with learning disabilities or developmental delays.

I only wish I had all the answers!  Fortunately, websites such as Multilingual Living exist and I was able to direct people to wonderful websites and resources like those listed the sidebar on my blog.  Go visit them already!

After hearing each attendee's stories, we broke up into four smaller groups to discuss our specific situations and suggest ideas: parents beginning this bilingual adventure; non-native-speaking parents using Spanish with their families; parents with older children; and those using three or more languages in their family.

I so enjoyed being among a group of 30+ teachers who wanted to share and strategize and commiserate! I came home with a revived interest in adding more resources and reviews and advice to this blog and a determination to read more books on bilingualism, plus the support and encouragement of my peers as Griffin, Gwyneth, and I continue on en francais.

Next up, if all goes well: A similar submission for AATF (American Association of Teachers of French) in Chicago in 2012. focused just on French!