Since I've taken the decision to talk in English with Schmoo, there's been an unforeseen consequence for Pan-Pan, who has also decided he only wants to talk to me in English! Aaaargh! I thought I would be able to keep things in French during the day while Schmoo's at school and switch to English when she gets home, but I underestimated the dominance of English for Pan-Pan. Today almost everything he said to me has been in English, and I've asked him to repeat it in French before I respond. He's happy enough to do this, but it's very tedious and time-consuming! And I thought after a few goes, he'd get the idea and switch back to talking to me in French, but he's being very persistent! I've decided to go back to French with Schmoo for now, at least until Pan-Pan is in school and getting some French input there. I think it's worthwhile, as it's only a few months.
The other problem trend is that Schmoo and Pan-Pan are talking more and more English together - around 80% of the time. This week I've introduced a reward chart for talking in French together, which has edged the French up to around 50% of their chat..! What I've come to realise is that language is such a fluid emotive thing, it doesn't really respond to set rules and targets, and sometimes you do just have to go with the flow.
On the plus side, I've noticed Schmoo has started to correct Pan-Pan's French lately! 'Pas "une" biberon, c'est "un" biberon!' ('Not "a (f.)" baby's bottle, "a (m.)" baby's bottle!') she'll tell him, or 'Je veux "de" l'eau, pas Je veux l'eau!' ('I want "some" water, not I want water!').
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2 comments:
Hello and thank you for sharing your experiences on this blog!
What really interested me was to read that you are raising your children bilingual with non-native French, because I am looking for families like yours for a case study in my Master's project.
To introduce myself: My husband and I were both born in Kazakhstan (native language Russian) and immigrated to Germany 5 years ago. We both also speak English, I taught English and worked as a Russian-English translator in Kazakhstan. Our daughter who is almost 2 is to grow up bilingual with German and Russian. I chose non-native bilingualism as the subject for my Master's project, because we were considering this way of bilingual upbringing (with non-native English) for our daughter before she was born, but then decided not to do it for a number of reasons. I still find the topic quite intriguing and the more I learn about it, the more I think about doing it when our second child comes. I believe, however rare, this method deserves to be better studied and described!
So far I have found 4 other families that agreed to help me in my research and I wanted to ask you if you would be willing to fill out a questionnaire where you would share your joys and difficulties of bringing up a child biliingual with a non-native language. I am still working on it and it should be ready in less than a month. There would be one part where I would ask you to assess your own proficiency in French with a separate questionnaire, then the main questionnaire with questions on general information about the child, the parents and their linguistic background (about 10 questions), about 11 questions on the speech development of the child, about 13 particularly on the non-native nature of the child's bilingualism, about 5 questions on the language contact and interference and about 7 on the psychological factors that might be influencing the bilingualism.
Please contact me at jdimples@yandex.ru if you are interested and if you have enough time to do it. I would really appreciate your help!
Best wishes to you and your family,
Irina
Glad to find another person who promotes bilingual life. Me too! I am a big fun of bilingual education, bilingual parenting, and bilingual life as you are. Right now I am teaching my baby to learn Chinese, hoping she will become a bilingual in the future.
Can we exchange link? My reciprocal link goes like this:
Best4Future Blog: Bringing up baby bilingual!
Devoted to bilingual learning, parenting and teaching!
You can submit your link at http://www.best4future.com/blog and click "links". Thank you!
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