RAISE A TRILINGUAL KID, WHY NOT?

"Parents" magazine issue of Arpil 2009 had an article about raising a bilingual kid. According to Nancy Rhodes, director of foreign-language education at the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington D.C., "Between birth and puberty, children can learn multiple languages and echo accents easily". More specifically, "Learning early on that an object can be described in more than one way (house, maison, casa), promotes flexibility in thinking and overal creativity", says Karen MacGilvray, director of education at Language Stars, a children's language program based in Chicago.

Inspired by these professional affirmations, as also obliged by our current situation, off we go, aiming at raising Mew as a trilingual kid in the future.

First, during her Xmas vacation, Mew spent 33 one-hour sessions in an intensive private tutoring course to learn formally her mother tongue. Before, she can speak and understand our own language without any big problem, except for her pronunciation of some tone marks. Her vocabulary is not as big as other kids at her same age at home, but it does not matter much as long as she can express fluently in her own words. Sometimes she does need some help from us parents to find an equivalent word in our language from an English word that she has known well its definition and/or meaning. We were really amazed at the result of her intensive course: she could now read a lot of written words by herself (well, she still need occasional reminders about the difference between tone marks however). If we continue to strengthen her mother language spelling and reading skills on a daily basis, I bet her level would improve greatly in no time. Another fruit of this intensive course is that her writing appears to look much nicer and neater than other kids here.

Regarding her English proficiency, we are pleased at her current level. I agree that the best way to introduce a child to a foreign language (English for Mew) is through immersion - no translation. Her only one year at the daycare with Karen, Kristina and a multi-ethnic group of friends created a miracle to her English fluency. Of course, we do not and have never expected that she could speak English naturally as a native speaker. But at least she now feels at ease to communicate with others in English. She also loves to watch movies in English without any translation or subtitles and can easily understand almost all of the contents. Every night, Robert Munsch's stories read by the author himself bring her to a sound sleep. Her Daddy also prefers reading English stories for her when asked and for a lot of times they chose to read the Bible!!!


Now finally it comes to the official learning language at her school: French. The problem is that Mew still has a lot of difficulties in exposing herself to French, mainly due to the ironic fact that her resistance to learning French against her confidence in her English remains too strong. Contrary to her one year at the daycare where she had no common language with her classmates and teachers and consequently she was obliged to adapt herself to the new environment and gradually got caught up with English language development, at her current French school she could find some buddies who are bilingual. Since they can both speak English, Mew opted to communicate with either her French teachers or her bilingual friends in English rather than trying to learn French. As a consequence of her knowing English, her French improves sluggishly despite the fact that every Tuesday she is offered a small group tutoring in French at school. We have to admit that we are also not really interested in speaking with her in French at home, simply because our French is not as good as our English. I am scared whenever she brings home some French story books from the library and asks me to read them for her. There are a lot of new words that I am too lazy to look them up in the dictionary. Though, I always try to get as many French books as possible to add to her library so that she can have available resources once she starts enjoying French and mastering it. We have just decided to invite a private tutor who is an English-speaking undergraduate with a minor in French to spend 3 forty-five minutes sessions per week with her. Mew seems to get along easily with this tutor and we do hope that she will be able to learn the language via playing and interacting with someone being fluent in both English and French.