Yo hablo español

Trying to raise a child bilingually is hard. Really HARD.

I could talk about how I didn’t study another language until high school, how I didn’t really learn another language (Spanish) until my mid-20s when I did an immersion program in Mexico and did my thesis research in Ecuador, how even then my vocabulary was largely focused on words related to going out to clubs (Mexico) and agriculture and the environment (Ecuador), or how I’m a first-time mom.  But none of these things are the main reason why I’ve been struggling so much recently with how to raise Kahlilah bilingually. It’s the books and experts! Why must every one I read or hear contradict the one previous to it?!?!

When I was pregnant and we had just entered the Foreign Service life, we took a seminar at the Foreign Service Institute on raising children bilingually. That was my first time thinking about the issue in any real way. Since my husband is a heritage Spanish speaker and much of his extended family still lives in Chile, we knew we wanted our children to speak both English and Spanish fluently. But, how? The lesson I took away from that seminar was that one-parent-one-language (OPOL) is the best approach. That is, one parent speaks one language exclusively with the child and the other parent speaks another language exclusively with the child. We read a little bit more on bilingualism, and those books seemed to back up OPOL.

So, we went with OPOL from Kahlilah’s birth. I felt great about it. It was easy, since all I had to do was speak the language I knew best. And it was consistent with what experts who talked to career expats like us advised. I’ll admit it: I felt almost smug with how well it seemed to be working out at first. (Of course, that was before Kahlilah began saying anything more than “ba, ba, ba,” but I’m getting ahead of myself.)  I did however become aware of one major challenge pretty quickly: I knew that Kahlilah got way more English with me than Spanish with Albert since, for the first year, I was home with her all the time. But, we quickly adapted. In her second year, we supplemented her language exposure by having a Spanish-only-speaking nanny care for her while I worked 20 hours per week at the Embassy.  At that point, Kahlilah wasn’t speaking a lot but she had a pretty good balance of Spanish and English words.

But then, when Kahlilah was almost 2 years old, we finished our post in Caracas and moved back to DC for Albert to complete language training in preparation for our next post here in Amsterdam. Again, we worked hard to try to keep a balance of languages. In particular, we made the decision to bring Albert’s aunt from Chile to care for Kahlilah while I took a few months of Dutch and a Consular course as well.  Since Albert’s aunt only speaks Spanish, Kahlilah had 40+ hours per week of Spanish exposure for several months. Plus, during that time, Kahlilah was lucky to spend a lot of time with Albert’s mom who speaks only Spanish with her as well. Despite all that effort, I started to notice that Kahlilah was starting to inch towards English dominance.

Well, then, we moved to Amsterdam and a number of things happened. First, Kahlilah was with me all the time. Second, Kahlilah started having a spoken language explosion while, at the same time, exhibiting more and more English dominance. It was clear that Kahlilah understood a lot of Spanish but rarely produced it herself. Third, Albert and I were considering preschools for Kahlilah. Should we put her in a Dutch-only, Dutch-English, or English-only preschool, we wondered?  If we went with either the first or second option, we’d go from considering bilingual issues to multilingual issues! Argh. At that point, I started to look for some guidance in books. In particular, I read Bilingual Edge. These are some of the points that I took from it: (1) OPOL isn’t always the best approach, particularly if there isn’t a balance of time between both parents. (2) In fact, sometimes you need to overcompensate with time for the “minority” language over the “majority” language. (The “majority” language is the dominant language spoken in your country/culture.) They recommended that parents speak to their child roughly 80% of the time in the minority language and 20% of the time in the majority language. Their rationale was that the child will get other exposure to the majority language through other outlets, e.g. playmates, teachers, TV. (3) A parent can speak another language with the child even if s/he is not a native or fluent speaker. And (4), you can have different bilingual or multilingual goals–all of which are legitimate. For example, some parents might really want a child to become fluent. That’s a fine goal. Other parents might want to expose the child to another language to “hardwire” the child’s brain for learning that or other languages in the future. That’s okay too.  Or yet other parents may simply want to expand the child’s awareness of other cultures. Also fine.

So, after talking it over with Albert and mulling it over, I decided to go Spanish. I would start speaking with Kahlilah in Spanish as much and as consistently as I could and, in essence, make Spanish our family’s language. It was really difficult at first. It felt odd speaking to Kahlilah in Spanish. It felt even more odd talking to Albert in Spanish, as English has been the primary language of our relationship for the past eight years. And, I realized I needed more (and specialized) vocabulary FAST to be able to handle toddler issues.  I quickly picked up clean-up related vocabulary  (e.g. bookshelves, drawer, dresser) and recently picked up holiday-related words (e.g. sleigh, elves, reindeer).  Within a couple weeks, it felt more natural and I was making progress on my Spanish. (It struck me as so funny: I was improving my Spanish more while living in the Netherlands, than in the two years I had just lived in Caracas, Venezuela!) And, as for the school, we decided to go with the Dutch-English preschool. It was the school where we felt the most at home, it follows the Montessori approach which we wanted,  and it would expose Kahlilah to a Germanic language, with the goal not necessarily being fluency but simply exposure to another language group with its own unique sounds.

So, what’s happened? The results, please. I find that relatively quickly Kahlilah has started to produce a few more words in Spanish voluntarily but, a month into it, she still is clearly English dominant. I know, I know. I’ve been speaking to her in English for nearly three years so we’re not going to see changes that quickly. But, I think I’m more sensitive to her English dominance now that I’m making such an effort to speak in Spanish to her. I also find that I’m still confronted almost daily with contrasting opinions on how best to handle this bilingual/multilingual childrearing issue.  Just before  putting Kahlilah in the preschool, I was told by an administrator that it really wasn’t valuable to put a child into a Dutch-English bilingual program if we were going to be moving in a couple years anyway. What?!?! I thought you’d be with me on this? Errr. Then a couple days after joining the school, a teacher reminded me to make sure not to switch back and forth that much between Spanish and English, that I really needed to be consistent.  I know, alright! I’m trying!!!  And, finally, I just know that some of you reading this blog post who are also raising your child bilingually probably have read something different and are thinking, “Oh no, you’ve got it all wrong, Chela! You need to read X book.”  Ahhhhhh! (By the way, I DO welcome book recommendations and other tidbits of advice. But I can’t promise I’ll look at them this week. This week I feel like screaming!) So, that’s where I am now with it.  For now, yo hablo español.

~ by Chela on December 2, 2011.