Bilingual Education
How do English speaking parents teach baby to learn a second language?
We all know that language is best taught from young. The younger you start the better the outcome is. There were a few babies that I taught last year who had absolutely no Chinese (a second language), neither the farther nor the mother came from any of the Chinese backgrounds. So how could the English speaking parent teach the baby, say, Chinese? How did we do it in our playroom on the weekly bases?
Well, you can spend lots of money buying all sorts of learning materials, DVDs Audio tapes and so on, or hiring a Chinese speaking nanny for their services. These are all high cost ways of helping your baby to be on the path to a second language learning. The result of DVDs and Audio tapes are pending for babies even though it might be a good idea for older children but it is not really the way to go about when you are raising babies up bilingually.
The best would be for a bilingual parent to speak to your child your home language. Unfortunately, this is not always possible for us all. Most of us have only got one language.
There were about 15 babies all together since my first Mandarin baby class in July, 08. These babies are ranging from 24 to 13 months old now. 99% of them talked very early, either starting with Chinese words or English. Once they are able to talk, their language ability just matured daily. They are much happier to be around new members of the community and they are much more friendly to other toddlers and adults. They are so confident at being with other adults/mums. Few months ago, I was telling a group of 8 toddlers (a few of them from our baby class last year) a story, suddenly, I realize that most of them are sitting with someone else's mum, not their own. But they were all so involved at the story that I was giving. I wish I had a camera to capture this moment, but I soon realized that this happens all the time with this particular group of baby then become toddler learners from our baby groups.
Compare this group of now toddlers to the other groups of toddlers that I have, which none of them were with us from babyhood, you can see the difference and teachers actually feel that it is harder to teach these new groups to the one baby (group) turn toddler group and I often have to help the other groups of new toddlers joining in.
This actually shows us that the new research finds Bilingual babies developing the ability of acceptance to others (people, language, cultural, foods,) more easily than Monolingual babies.
For this reason alone, we need to find ways to help our little babies and toddlers to learn a second language as soon as we can.
Low costs ways of helping your baby/toddler/preschooler to learn a second language are:
Organize visits and home plays with friends or community members that speaking the particular language that you would like your child to learn.
- Join local/starting your own bilingual learning playgroup that is community minded and focus on children's language learning and aiming at providing the best outcome for families.
- Using free on-line learning materials, and learn it with your child.
- Install the cable TV system that provides 24/7 language access of programs that you can choose particular time frame to watch the TV show with your child. I don't suggest that you use TV as baby sitter while you get other house chores done. As some of the contents of the show may be ok to the culture background but not acceptable to you.
- Songs is the best way of helping your child to learn a new language. Play song CDs in the car, at home, in the playroom, sing along with them. Don’t worry too much about how perfect your singing sounds, babies love mother/father’s voices, the important thing here is not how good your pronunciation is but the interaction you provide and the fun in doing so.
Printable flashcards, place them all over your house. Visual stimulation is so important to those little brains' development. Fill your house up with them and your child will soon learn to make connections with what he sees and what it means with your help on the side.
Make a space available to encourage your toddler to draw and express himself on the wall, whiteboard, if possible. Don't forget that gross motor skill development is another vital part of language learning.
Most importantly, don't forget to bring fun into the learning. Children won't want to learn or participate if there is no fun. So make it fun for them to do any activity that is the aid to their second language learning.
