From my observations and encounters over the years, I would say children are the best example of all of motivation for language learning.? I can't even count the families I know, including my own, where parents wanted children to maintain a language learned in a foreign setting, but once back in the US, the children, who know perfectly well their peers do not use the language, would not.? 

One of the instances of successful multiple language learning in children that I knew of personally was a family whose mother was Italian, father American and nanny Spanish-speaking.? Each care giver from birth of the two children, talked to and responded to them ONLY in that person's language without fail.? I saw many instances where a child would address the mom in English, for example, and she would act as if she were deaf until the child switched to Italian.?? When I knew the children as they started school-- 5 and 7--they were fully trilingual, and continued to be so through high school. 

This takes tremendous discipline on the part of the caregivers. Think how many children in our schools come from a home where another language is spoken and once they learn English refuse to continue to speak the home language and the parents cave into the children's addressing them in English.? Lily Wong-Filmore, who has done so much for the field of bilingual education, has some pretty painful stories about the consequences of this language switch.?? 


 
Robin Lovrien Schwarz 


 

-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Kaufmann <steve at thelinguist.com>
To: The Adult English Language Learners Discussion List <englishlanguage at nifl.gov>
Sent: Tue, 6 May 2008 3:21 pm
Subject: [EnglishLanguage 2334] Re: Multiple language learning









Language learning requires motivation. The important thing with children is to get them to like languages, to open their eyes and ears to the music and logic other worlds, and to avoid burdening them with concerns about what is correct syntax, nor giving them the idea that it is something that the parents wants them to do. 


To some extent you have to love a language to learn it. I would not favour any kind of mechanical or subliminal language learning experiments. Why not just let children listen to stories and read them when they are awake. We want them to be awake to discover the delights of different languages and cultures.


Having tried to get my own children to learn languages and failed, I would suggest that any deliberate effort to push languages at children is very likely to fail. 

Steve








 

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