bi-curious?

Heh. I mean "curious about raising kids bilingually?" Over at Ask Moxie, someone posed a question about whether this effort is worth pursuing.

Hey, if you're a regular reader of this blog, you know in your heart of heart, you feel in your very soul of souls, that giving your children the gift of more than one language is giving them the tools they'll need to thrive in life. But if you're not convinced yet--or if you just want to hear from dozens and dozens of people about why and how it works for them--check out the comments to the post.

(Of course, if you want more details, eloquently presented, then may I also direct you to the profiles I have published over the past four years? Gentle readers, please meet these amazing bi- and multilingual families. Families, let's welcome these new readers!)

canard confusion

Lots of people ask me how my husband, Ed, is handling being the only non-francophone in the house, and I have to say, he's a great sport. He is so supportive of my efforts to raise Griffin bilingually, even though it means doubling the number of children's books we have to find room for and putting up with Tickle Me Elmo in French umpteen times a day ("Oh là là, ça chatouille!").

As he has listened to me talking and reading and singing to Griffin for 2.5 years now, Ed has also picked up quite a few words and phrases in French, which he sprinkles into his English when speaking to us. ("Time for do-do, Griffin," or "Are you ready? On y va!") And the fact that I have done a lot of parentese (the PC term for baby talk these days), repetition, exaggeration, all within the context of taking care of a baby or toddler, means that Ed understands a lot more than he did before Griffin was born. At least, when it comes to words connected to children.

But every now and then, Ed gets words in French confused. Please indulge me and allow me to share my new favorite anecdote!

The other day, Griffin was playing with his stuffed duck (a “canard”), and it inevitably ended up behind the couch (the “canapé”), so he begged his father to retrieve it. Ed bent his 6’3 self over the back of the couch trying to locate the errant bird, but just couldn’t find it. “Griffin, I’m sorry, I just don’t see your canapé,” he told his confused son. “I’ve looked and looked for your canapé, but there’s just no canapé here. I don’t see a canapé anywhere!” he concluded as he unfolded himself and sat down on the canapé.

Oh well. I think it's charmant that he tries to use French with Griffin in the first place!

How about the rest of you with partners who don't speak the language you use with your children? Do they end up learning a lot anyway? What funny things do they inadvertently say?

free books and stories and fables and poems and rhymes, all online, in so many languages!

While researching my articles on French language activities for Multilingual Living, I realized that I could probably stop buying books for Griffin entirely--both in English and in French--beause so very many books exist online already, and some on websites that can even boast animation and/or professional narrators!

(Oh, let's be honest. I'll never stop buying books.)

Anyway, here are some sites that I've explored lately. I hope you'll enjoy them too!

free online children's books--because you can't always find an older cousin to read to you

Tumblebooks:
I first blogged about this program three years ago; read my original post about how it works, the few aspects I don't like about it, and how you could use it in a language classroom. Briefly, you select a picture book, chapter book, or nonfiction book in English, French, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, or Russian. (Predictably, English predominates; click on the "language learning" button at the top of the page to access the books in one of the other languages.) You watch the story unfurl onscreen, with a narrator reading aloud while the lines of text are highlighted like a karaoke storytime. You can opt to have it advance automatically or manually. Many of the picture books have activities that accompany them--matching games, quiz questions, and so forth. If your public library or school doesn't subscribe to Tumblebooks, you can access it through the Lafayette Public Library's kid's stuff page.

We Give Books:
At this charitable giving site, everytime you read a book, the publisher (Penguin Books) will donate one to the nonprofit organization of your choice. You have to sign up (for free) and the selection is fairly limited (smaller than Tumblebooks), but it's hard to argue with the idea! The books, all in English, are geared to ages ten and under and include both DK nonfiction titles (which my kids in Reading Buddies love) and familiar picture books--definitely a plus. You (or your child) do have to actually read the book yourself from pages identical to those of the printed book.

Lire et RéCréer:
This site in French has short stories, fables, poems, and nursery rhymes, both classic and contemporary. The text is presented on the screen, often with simple animation and background music, but the reader is (usually) invited to pronounce it aloud (note that music will start when the site is opened).The tales are divided by genre and also by age. It doesn't have as many "bells and whistles" as Tumblebooks, but it's all in French and the selection (and variety of genres) is a lot better!

Librivox:
Like Tumblebooks, Librivox reads books to you; unlike Tumblebooks, this program focuses on books for adults, and all of the texts are recorded by volunteers from their homes, which makes the sound quality less professional. On the other hand, this means that new texts are constantly being added. (By "new," I mean "previously unrecorded." The books are limited to those in the public domain, which means nothing from the past few decades.) Librivox offers texts in just about any language you can think of, limited only by the languages that their volunteer readers around the world speak, from Catalan to Korean to Latvian to Old English to Tagalog to Urdu (click here and select a language from the drop-down menu to see what books are available in the languages of your choice). Among their choices in French, I haven't found anything appropriate for Griffin or Carl--even the fables by Jean de la Fontaine would go over their heads, at least without illustrations, and no way would I give a preschooler the original versions of Charles Perrault's fairy tales! In English, though, they have stories by Beatrix Potter, Thornton Burgess, Aesop, and Mother Goose, plus The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (and with 10,000+ texts in English, many more are bound to be appropriate for kids).

Reading A-Z:
I found this one almost four years ago, before I started working as a reading enrichment program coordinator at the library; I'll be exploring it more thoroughly now to steal (er, adapt) some of their ideas for my Reading Buddies. As I stated in my original post, you must purchase a subscription ($85/year for one classroom) to access all of their materials, but they also offer a generous number of free samples. You print out the black-line books and staple them together (then the kids can color them themselves). As the site is designed for teachers of English, the vast majority of their books are in English, but they also have a selection in French and in Spanish (both translations of their original books in English). The subheading on the home page of this site claims "Everything You Need to Teach Reading," and I pretty much believe them--everything from phonics to poetry to readers' theatre to worksheets to lesson plans to assessments is here.

Enchanted Learning:
Like Reading A-Z, this subscription-based site markets itself to teachers with printable books and worksheets. Its offerings are much more limited when it comes to books, but the site provides more printable activities, games, and worksheets. You can also access all of their materials without subscribing ($20/year) if you're willing to look at ads and not have the prettiest versions of the pages when you print them. While Reading A-Z seems very educational, the Enchanted Learning stuff strikes me as more fun. Check out their materials, including short printable books, about Africa and Kwanzaa, in American Sign Language, about Canada, about China and the Chinese New Year, in Spanish and about Cinco de Mayo and Dia de los Muertos, in French, in Swedish, in Dutch, in German, in Hebrew and about Hanukkah, in Italian, about Japan and Japanese crafts, in Portuguese, in Russian, and about geography in general. Enchanted Learning's materials in English are divided into categories on the home page.

So now it's your turn!  What do you think about sites like these?  Do you prefer the interactive ones or the simpler text-based sites?  Which are your favorites (and least favorites) (and why)?  What others do you recommend?

Note: Do check out the comments, where readers have recommended many more worthy sites in the past two three years!

Who knew you could play online Peter Rabbit games in French?!

Worms, scavenger hunts, interactive Peter Rabbit games, "Jacques a dit," online cooking, comptines....you'll find all this (and more!) in my fourth (and final!) installment of the series "Learning French In and Around the Garden" over at Multilingual Living, all about hands-on, kinesthetic activities you can do to help your kids learn or practice French.

In fact, a lot of the activities I describe in the series will work regardless of what language you want your children to speak! Here are the first three articles if you want to see for yourself....

Part I: Music, rhythm, and rhyme

Part II: Art and drama activities

Part III: Literacy activities

Griffin's first zuli!

I've been slowly working on completing all the pages in Griffin's baby book and regretting the fact that I occasionally let several months at a time slide by without jotting down notes about his growth and development. For example, I'm on a page that asks about some of his "firsts"--his first bath, first smile, first time he walked unassisted. Those are fine--I did write down those dates. But I don't know his first laugh, his first time walking up stairs, and lots of others.

On the other hand, I can tell you about his first ear infection, his first booger, his first projectile vomit, and his first projectile poop during a diaper change. Or rather, I could, but I won't. Half of you have probably cringed and stopped reading already--and the other half are smiling nostalgically about their child's first projectile what-have-you and remembering fondly the days when the kids were physically messy but emotionally pretty straightforward.

And a few of you are wondering why I wrote down the dates of the weird stuff but not the normal baby developmental milestones. Yeah, me too. My notes also are sprinkled with random Griffin-produced phrases like "choo-choo Boppy" and "pumpkin pénis," yes, pronounced à la française.

(Now let's see how many hits this blog receives for Google searches about pumpkin penises! Roll your eyes all you like--I bet we'll have a couple.)

Anyway, last week Griffin participated in his first language study. The Cognitive Development Center at the University of Colorado is investigating how bilingual children learn new words, positing that kids like Griffin pay more attention to pragmatics than do monolingual children. He had a lot of fun playing the researcher, a student who presented him with various oddly-shaped forms covered with interesting textures and colors, then taught him the names for the new objects, then had him pick similar objects out of a tray of other oddly-shaped objects.

Griffin has always been passionate about transfering objects from one container to another, thus these tasks really resonated with him, so he had a blast. (Also there was a train and tracks to play with, and she gave him a book. That makes for a very good morning for my little boy.)

As for me, I enjoyed observing how very open-minded he was about the whole process. The researcher told him this thing was a "zuli," and he accepted it right away, asked me if I wanted to hold the zuli, and then told her that the round red thing covered in the same sprinkly texture was a "balle de zuli" (a "zuli ball").

In the car on the way home he told me that he liked the zulis!

I also learned a lot by completing the parent questionnaires ahead of time. One task involved looking at lists of words and indicating whether he speaks (not just recognizes or understands) a word or phrase in English, in French, or in both. As I went through the lists, I realized that even though most of his phrases and sentences are in English--even when speaking with me--he probably knows more words in French. Every list of nouns ended up with more words in the "only French" column than the "only English" one. The verbs seemed about even, and he seems to know more function words like pronouns, conjunctions, and adverbs in English than in French.

I think that since he does more reading with me than anyone else--simply because I spend more time with him than his daddy or his daycare providers--he has encountered more words in French in context that are not part of his everyday life. So he knows the names of exotic animals, things you see at the beach, and so forth, in French, but not English, because they don't come up in daily conversation, at daycare, or in the books that his other relatives read to him.

I would also add that his comprehension in English and French is about equal.

But when it comes to actual meaningful communication, getting his needs and wants and interests understood, he relies on English, because that's what he hears most often and because he has all the little pieces to put into the sentences, even if they're not always grammatically perfect. ("That's Daddy's black car! Need me go in her car!")

Now I just have to figure out what to do when he asks to play with the "balle de zuli" here at home!

profile: Susan's multilingual family

Meet language afficionado Susan Herrick Siu and her multilingual family! Thank you very much, Susan, for answering my questions.

Who are the members of your family?

I am a publisher/linguist/writer, a dual Canadian/US citizen, born and raised in Newfoundland, Canada. My husband, Steve Siu , is a doctor of chiropractic. He is a US citizen but was born in Fujian province, China, and raised in Hong Kong and Philadelphia.

Sebastian, four years old: likes riding his bicycle, cooking, traveling, reading (in any language!), building things, analyzing situations (his preschool teachers call him the “Great Problem Solver),” swimming, and gymnastics.

Serena, two years old: loves to swim, draw, go for walks, play in the dirt, sleep, cuddle with mom and dad, give things to people, and meet new friends.

Kai, six months old: likes to play in water, go for walks, stand up, listen to music, grab things, and laugh at his older siblings.

Where do you currently live?

Lewiston, Maine, USA, for the last two and a half years

Where else have you lived?

I grew up in Canada and have lived in Turkey (for close to a year in high school) and South Korea (for close to a year in college), as well as six U.S. states. Steve has lived in China and in Hong Kong (when it wasn’t part of China), as well as five U.S. states.

What languages are spoken by the adults in your household and at what level of proficiency?

I speak fluent (but somewhat rusty) French; intermediate-level Chinese, Korean, Spanish, Italian, and German; and bits and pieces of other languages. I have a background in linguistics and hope to earn my PhD in linguistics when the kids are a little older. I went through the French Immersion program in Canada as a child.

Steve speaks Fujian Chinese (natively), Cantonese (fluently), Mandarin (at an advanced level), Spanish (what he remembers from high school and college courses), and French (a little that he’s picked up from me and the kids so far).

What languages are you exposing your children to, and how?

Mainly French and Mandarin Chinese. I speak French with the children as much as possible, sing to them in French, read lots of French books to them, and play French music and videos for them

The children attend a Mandarin Chinese Saturday school, listen to Chinese music, and watch Chinese DVDs. Steve and I both reinforce Mandarin vocabulary and simple phrases with them and read simple Chinese books to them. When their paternal grandmother comes to visit, she speaks to them mostly in Chinese, although the situation is somewhat complicated by the fact that Mandarin is not her native dialect.

The children have also had some exposure to Spanish through books and videos and to several other languages, including American Sign Language at Sebastian’s preschool.

Why do you want your children to know more than one language?

First of all, languages are part of our family’s heritage. Steve’s family speaks several Chinese dialects (mostly Fujian at home), and his parents speak very little English, so the children need to speak some Chinese in order to communicate with them. My paternal grandmother was a New Orleans French speaker, and I also have some Spanish ancestors.

As well as maintaining those family connections, we want our children to have real access to other cultures, to classics of world literature, and to friends and business associates who are not English speakers. We want our children to be able to be active participants in the world community and to have the capacity to see things from a variety of viewpoints.

We also want them to be able to choose any career that interests them, and many, perhaps most, jobs and careers—science, librarianship, health care, government, sports, journalism, business, education, and other areas—will require knowledge of languages other than English in the future if they don’t already.

How well do your children understand, speak, read, and write the different languages? How do they feel about them? Do they have a preference for what they speak in which contexts? How has their language use evolved as they grow?

Our children are still very young, so they aren’t completely fluent speakers in any language yet. Our oldest, Sebastian, four, is forming quite complex sentences in English now, and I wish I had concentrated more on speaking French with him between the ages of two and three, when he was first starting to use grammar in English. Still, he is using more French every day. He uses many of the words and phrases that I’ve used with him or that we’ve encountered in books, and he understands a lot more than he speaks. He is very enthusiastic about using his French. I wish that I could send him to a French preschool, though, so that he could speak the language regularly with people other than his own family members. He is very shy about speaking it (or English, for that matter) with people that he doesn’t know well, so extra-curricular classes don’t work well for him.

In Chinese, he is limited mostly to single words so far, but he has quite a large vocabulary. He loves to read long and complicated books in French, but prefers simple word books in Chinese. He is very proud when he learns something new in French or Chinese, he doesn’t prefer to have his bedtime stories in English, and he is very aware that the three languages are three separate systems and keeps them separate. Now that he is attending preschool, he has a lot of exposure to English outside the home, so we’re trying to get closer to speaking exclusively in French and Chinese at home. He is doing well in his Chinese Saturday classes now that he is getting used to the people there; he does much better when I don’t go with him, though.

Serena, two, seems to be picking up nearly as many Chinese words as English words. She only says a few French words so far, but I’m hoping that she’ll start using more soon since I speak to her in French much more often than I did with Sebastian at the same age. I think the tones in Chinese make it easier for her to pronounce Chinese words recognizably; she can always get the tones even when she can’t pronounce the rest of the word at all.

How have you been able to expose your children to the cultures where the different languages are spoken?

Sebastian loves to go to Chinatown in Boston (or occasionally New York), and will take a Chinese restaurant as second best if we can’t take a longer trip! He also helps to make Chinese dumplings at home. The kids are also exposed to Chinese culture through Steve’s mother’s visits and through books and DVDs. Our dream is to take them to China someday—preferably for a whole year or more—and to make summer visits to our French-speaking neighbor to the North: Quebec! We are friends with a French-Canadian woman and her bilingual children here in Maine, and a friend of mine who is married to a French Canadian and lives in Montreal often writes letters in French to Sebastian.

What resources and activities have been most useful to you? What, on the other hand, has not been useful?

Please see my other answers, as well as my blog, LinguistKids.

What challenges have you faced as you raise your children with more than one language?

The biggest challenges are my own level of proficiency in the languages that I’m trying to teach them and the lack of community support/resources. I am a big reader, and recently I’ve been trying to do most of my own reading in French and study Chinese characters more intensively in order to be able to read in Chinese in order to improve my own proficiency in those languages. In the car, when the kids are not with me, I listen to French and Chinese courses and books on CD.

I am planning to start an international school here in Maine and to begin advocating for better foreign-language instruction in the public schools, since our local offerings are really quite pathetic. I would like to network with like-minded parents to share ideas and strength in numbers in improving access to language education and resources in the United States (and internationally).

Do you have any advice for us?

Don’t be shy, and don’t be too attached to any one teaching method. Take every opportunity that comes your way to give your children practice in the language(s) that they are learning. I used to feel silly speaking French with the children in front of my husband because he didn’t understand me, which meant that my children didn’t get to hear any French when he was around. Eventually I got over my embarrassment, and not only did the kids get to hear French more often, but my husband started picking up lots of French phrases, too!

When I got my minivan, I swore that I would never use the TV in the back, but I soon learned that it was a helpful language-teaching tool. We travel a lot, and my children have picked up a lot of French and Chinese from it on long, boring trips on the Interstates. (I still don’t use it on short trips or on scenic routes where they should really be looking out the windows, and even on long trips I try to exhaust my repertoire of songs and games before resorting to the TV.)

What do you think parents, caretakers, teachers, and/or researchers need to know about teaching a second language to children? What do you wish you had known when you started? What, if anything, would you do differently now?

Parents can teach languages to their children at home, with help from tutors, books, videos, and so on, but another important part of the parents’ job as second-, third-, and fourth-language educators is activism—getting other parents, schools, communities, and the nation at large involved. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Contact your local and state legislators to tell them that you want more extensive second-language offerings in your local public schools. I was recently talking to one of my state senators, and she claimed that she really does listen when she receives a letter or a phone call from a constituent. If two or three people call her to make the same point or request, she’ll tell her colleagues that the phones are ringing off the hook. So one voice really can make a difference!

• Talk to librarians at your local public library to suggest that they expand their foreign-language collections or purchase specific items that would be helpful to you and other parents in your community.

• Get involved with and support existing language-heritage organizations in your community.

• Build networks of like-minded parents nationally and internationally over the Internet (and through other channels).

• Start a club or language-tutoring exchange or find a teacher to offer lessons or conversation practice to a small group of children. If you homeschool your children, you may be able to form a cooperative lesson-exchange group.

• Even better: start an immersion charter school, private school, or cooperative preschool in your town and then teach others how to do the same. The school doesn’t have to be big or impressive—especially not at the beginning. You could start with one teacher teaching four or five children three days a week (perhaps in someone’s house) at the preschool level, for example.

Answer your own question now--what did I not ask about that you would like to comment on?

My publishing company, World’s Edge Books & Publishing, is currently producing a series of books (with accompanying audio CDs) to help parents who are trying to learn languages along with their children. Our first book in this series, Georgian Language for Parents and Children, Book I, was released in June 2010. We will have French, Russian, Korean, and Brazilian Portuguese editions coming out later in 2010, and we plan to include other languages within the next few years as well. Please visit us on the Web at LinguistKids and World's Edge Books and Publishing.

I am also in the initial stages of planning an international K-12 school here in Maine. If you would like to get involved, to share your own stories, to make a donation, or to receive more information, visit our new school website, International School of Maine or email me at internationalschoolofmaine@gmail.com.

take your kid into the backyard already!

In other words, part three of my series "Learning French In and Around the Garden" has just been published over at Multilingual Living. Please take a look--I hope it's helpful for those of you with little kids, regardless of what language you speak with them.

And now, a question: what topics would you recommend for future articles about language-learning activities? The editor and I anticipate keeping the same four-part format for each series (dividing the activities up according to their type: songs/rhymes/music, art/drama, literacy, and kinesthetic). But what should the content be?

It would probably be pretty easy to pick, say, seasons, or animals, or outer space, or food, and then find or develop activities around those themes. Or would you rather see lesson plans for something less commonly taught to little kids, like maybe geography or physics or mythology, or a topic less broad, such as a specific craft like weaving or a specific type of animal?

Please let me know if you have suggestions or requests! (Just keep in mind that the activities I write about are designed for younger children--kids Griffin's age through early elementary students, more or less.)

What about LiveMocha?

Reading this article in the New York Times about Livemocha, a social networking site crossed with online language tutoring, piqued my curiosity. I keep complaining that as Griffin's French improves, mine declines, since I'm not often around other French speakers after quitting my teaching job. I should look into this inexpensive service!

And now that I have posted about it on my blog, I guess I have to. Please hold me accountable!

Have any of you ever used Livemocha? Whaddya think?