I grew up in a bilingual household so I know firsthand how beneficial it is to be able to communicate in more than one language. So when the kids came, it was only expected that we’ll do anything and everything to give this gift to them, too. Fast forward a few years, and the initial plan doesn’t seems so easily achievable anymore. It was way easier said than done.

So it got me thinking: The one thing we worry about as expat parents is how we can help our children get fluent in Chinese, a language that’s so difficult for adults to learn. We send them to fully-Chinese speaking kindergartens aiming for total immersion, hire ayis and other domestic helpers asking them to talk to our kids so they “absorb” the language faster. Because children are like little sponges, right? Right. And this usually works. So here we are, expat parents with our little Chinese speaking 3, 4, 7, 10 or 15-year-old third-culture kid who’s got lots of little local friends and they’re able to communicate with neighbors and follow classes and do almost all the things a local kid can do.

And then it’s time for the scheduled call with the family back home and suddenly, this at other times confident child becomes not so confident anymore. After the initial “Hello”, everything goes downhill. They start to stutter, looking at you asking for help, desperately browsing through their minds searching for the correct word.

So how do we avoid this from happening? How do we make sure our children become fluent in our native languages while spending most of their day time at school or with ayis? What strategies do we apply to provide them with enough exposure in our respective languages? With limited resources, especially when it comes to languages other than English, difficulties in having regular phone or video calls with family due to a time zone difference, being at work 8 to 5, how do we manage to keep our mother tongue and ties to the family and culture strong? We asked our fellow expat parents and here’s what they said:

“We send our son to an English language kindergarten. Even though the other kids are all Chinese, the lessons being in English means they learn it fast, while Chinese comes from grandparents and social activities (as the common language between kids is usually Chinese”, says Mark Pinner whose mother tongue is English.

But what happens if parents’ first language is not English? Or if parents speak different languages and have a third home language? There’s so many scenarios and even more paths that can be taken.

For Jackie, whose husband’s native tongue is Korean, it’s very important that her children speak the language as well, “I don’t speak Korean so most of my children’s Korean comes from my mother-in-law, who has around 3 online meet-ups with each kid per week, each time at least 1 hour each. My kids also attend Saturday Korean classes at the Korean school and they each have 1 hour with a Korean tutor during the weekend. For movie time, we sometimes watch movies in Korean. It might seem excessive, but when we eventually return to Korea our plan is to send them to a local school, so that’s why as early as now we need them at level where they can speak, understand and write the language well enough to attend a local school there”.

For Jean-Mare Kuipers, a South African mom of a 1-year-old girl, the plan is still in making: “This is still very new for us, so we’re still figuring out the right way to do this. I am hoping she will pick up Afrikaans through songs and music, we like to play the radio during the day. I’ve been also thinking about starting with the OPOL method, where one parent speaks one language. It just makes sense to me. We do speak with the grandparents a lot, but I don’t think it will be enough. But then again, even if she only masters English and we go back home, it will be fine since the whole education system there is also in English.”

When it comes to teaching her children her native language, Denisse focuses on reading: “Reading in my mother tongue, going to the library to choose books and preparing lectures for what we call our mini book club. It is a small group of children that meets once a month to play and read under the rule that we can only speak in our language. Sometimes dictation and spelling.”

Things get even more complicated when there is more than 1 language involved. Which and how many languages should be prioritized? We’ve been told that kids pick up languages quickest in the first three years of their lives, but how many is too many or is there such thing as “too many languages”?

Polina Gumbu feels pretty confident about her ways: “Our family speaks 4 languages, both of us have our own mother tongue, plus English and since we are in China – we speak Chinese. We mainly speak English and it became native to our daughter. Her second language is Chinese because of school and we teach her Russian and Shona, our native languages. She can speak with her grandparents, sometimes needing translation. But she finds ways to communicate without words. We make sure she knows and feels loved by her relatives”.

For Ausma Karkle, a mom of 2, things are pretty clear: “We don’t teach our native languages (Latvian and Portugese) because we’re in China, and we didn’t want our kids to have communication barriers once they start kindergarten. They hear us talk to their grandparents in our respective languages, but we don’t translate for them. We don’t mix languages and speak exclusively English to them. The communication with our family members is obviously limited, but I don’t think it will be a problem later on, because once we go back to Latvia or Brazil, it will be total language immersion for them and I’m sure they will pick up both languages quickly.”

There are clearly many ways to deal with this, depending on your priorities and plan for the future. So what’s the right way for your family?

KEEP READING: 一，二，三! Methods and Apps To Help Your Child Learn Chinese

Images: Unsplash, Pexels

Most people would agree that one of the best things about Beijing’s international community is the wide range of cultures and languages you come into contact with. Being part of this community positively impacts our children’s development, helping them to grow into internationally-minded global citizens. However, since international schools in Beijing teach primarily in English, adapting to this new language environment can be a challenge for students from the international community who didn’t grow up in a primarily English-speaking household. 

In the distance past, some international schools teaching in English avoided or reduced the use of students’ home languages. However, research has increasingly shown that drawing on students’ home languages and cultural background can help to validate and enforce their personal identities, while also providing a strong foundation for learning other languages. 

CISB’s BML program includes one-on-one and small group instruction and co-teaching

This concept is at the core of the Bilingual and Multilingual Learners (BML) program at the Canadian International School of Beijing (CISB). “CISB has had a language support program since the school opened in 2006, but in 2019, our elementary school decided to change the name from English as an additional language to BML. We wanted to change the way we view BML/EAL students from a deficit to a strengths perspective, one that emphasizes competencies and potential, and focuses on resilience and empowerment,” Rose Muralla, BML department head, says. “We also wanted to create an environment that celebrates diversity in language and multilingualism.”

The goal of the BML program is to reach each child’s full language potential by making authentic links to their Homeroom class’s curriculum and providing a differentiated approach for each student. Data from in-class and formal assessments (including WIDA and MAP assessments) are used to determine a student’s needs, and the BML teacher designs targeted instruction in speaking, listening, reading, and writing using leveled texts and materials.

“I had a hard time writing sentences before joining the BML intervention program. Doing the different activities we do every day, now I feel more confident in writing sentences and trying to spell words on my own.” — Martina, grade 2

For example, for new students at CISB, the focus will be on building functional language to ease their transition. This might include building a bank of classroom vocabulary, such as classroom objects, and teaching phrases and sentence stems that will allow them to communicate with teachers and classmates. Sentence stems, in particular, can be useful for bilingual and multilingual learners, since they give children the tools to focus on what they are trying to say rather than how to say it. Grade 5 Chinese student Harry told jingkids that “in BML we can learn many things to use in my homeroom class. We use many materials. For example, we have tiny phones to hear yourself reading in a quiet voice. We also have A to Z blocks to make words.”

Regular BML support might include BML teachers supporting students in small groups or one on one, and co-planning and co-teaching with Homeroom teachers. “Having more than one teacher in the room creates multiple perspectives or ways of teaching a concept and gives another set of eyes for assessment or feedback about students that can contribute to meeting a student’s needs and recognizing gaps,” Rose explains. 

Students taking part in CISB’s reading intervention program

This year, the BML Department has also started a reading intervention program where students get extra support from CISB’s interventionists to develop reading, vocabulary, phonics and comprehension skills aside from the support they are regularly getting from the grade level BML teachers. At the end of the six weeks, the BML teacher, the homeroom teacher, and the intervention teacher determine if children need to continue in the intervention program. “BML intervention helped me learn reading strategies like sounding out the words (phonemes and graphemes) so I can read and write words and also to make a picture of what the words mean in my head,” grade 2 student Oskar says. 

“I struggled with phonics but now my phonics is good. I like my BML reading because I can find a lot of funny things in the stories.” — Cedrick, grade 5

Beyond simple English language proficiency, CISB’s BML program is about recognizing that although a student might come to CISB needing support in expressing themselves in English, they might already have the background knowledge to understand the concept they are learning in class in their mother tongue. As Rose concludes, “BML at CISB is different because we are not just supporting our BMLs with their English language skills but also empowering them to embrace and celebrate their mother tongue and culture.”  

Images courtesy of CISB

Thank you to the whole of the BML department for their invaluable contributions to this article

I have a quiet son.  Ever since he turned 1.5 years, I have been concerned with him reaching his language “milestones” and speaking in general.  It seemed that up till a few weeks ago all he could do was make animal-like sounds to protest, gain attention, and point out things.  He could sound out more “words” when he was a year old than he could now (at 22 months), and I wondered if he had forgotten the words, if they just didn’t register as “words” to him, or if he’s just extremely confused with all the languages we have at home and that he’s been exposed to with his grandparents.

To explain, my husband and I decided that we would share the language teaching responsibility with me focusing on English (since it’s my native language), and him focusing on Mandarin (since it’s his native language).  We speak both languages at home, and my Mandarin isn’t too shabby, but I do have an accent and my vocabulary is rather limited. A good example is how a friend had bought our son a cricket last night after dinner, and I put the little straw cage in my son’s hand and said “cricket”. Then, my husband asked me to teach him the Chinese equivalent, and all I could think of was the Disney version of Mulan and how I’m pretty sure there is a word for Cricket, but what was it again? Didn’t it have a pinyin-like name? If you wondered, it turns out they’re called guo guo (which he proceeded to confuse us with by teaching a dialect version, qu qu). This is exactly why Trish Hull from Beijing LIH Olivia’s Place Pediatric Clinic does not recommend teaching your child a language that is not your native tongue. You’re just not that good at it.

At the MOPS talk, Hull also dispelled the myth that bilingual or multi-lingual children acquire language at a slower pace than mono-lingual children–a belief I’ve always been dubious about given how how I had acquired three languages by age three.  The dispelling of this myth did mean that I no longer had a valid excuse for my son’s grunts and yelps.  Luckily, the talk did end with ways parents and caretakers can assist children in better developing language.

Takeaways on bilingualism or multilingualism:

• Multi-lingual children do not normally experience language development delays. You’re supposed to add up the words from each language to total the number of words a monolingual child can say.So, in my son’s case, by age 2 he should be able to say 50 words, but he might only be able to say 10 words in English and 40 words in Mandarin (let’s face it, Mandarin words are shorter and thus easier to learn).
• Children don’t just “pick up” a second or third language through immersion, but they have to be taught with interactive in-person methods, e.g. a play teacher rather than a television show.
• Mixing languages in one sentence or phrase is completely normal for bilingual and multi-lingual children.
  
  I can attest that it’s probably not something you “grow out of”.
• Bilingualism does not automatically mean “native proficiency” in both languages.
  
  I have been called trilingual since I was a child, but since I only “studied” two languages in school, the third language (Mandarin) remains at a pretty low level. Of course with practice, my accent has been reduced, I’ve learned more idioms, and I’ve improved my vocabulary, but it’s still not at the same proficiency level as my English and Finnish.
• The one parent, one language method (which is basically what we are trying to do) is not the only, or necessarily the best, method to teach your child many languages.  In the end, it’s more important that parents talk to children in a natural way and feel comfortable conversing with their kids.
• Families who live in a third culture should not worry about speaking the “majority language” at home to train their children.In California, for example, I have many American born Chinese (ABC) friends with parents from Taiwan who try very hard to keep the “home language” English, even though English is a second, or even third language for them.  In the end, studies show that your child benefits more from your native language, and will learn the majority language at school regardless. I, for example, took up Finnish almost completely at school (well, I had my grandparents) since my dad spoke English to me.

Once we had established that bilingualism and multi-lingualism does not cause language delays, we learned about simple tips and tricks for parents and caretakers (including your ayi) can help your child’s language development:

1. Talk to your kid–a lot! Interact with him and explain what you’re doing while you’re doing it!
2. Sing nursery rhymes and simple songs as the repeating words and rhythm and rhyme help with language learning.
3. Follow your child’s lead and mimick his language rather than trying to enforce your own.
4. Read books aloud, even if he only lets you read two pages!
5. Teach new words by pointing things out, reading signs aloud, etc.
6. Aim language at your child’s level (don’t forget to increase the level as he grows!)
7. Speak naturally.
8. Have daily routines in place and teach the words for them.
9. Be an “in tune parent” (more on this later).
10. Learn your child’s communication style (and your own) to better understand how to communicate with him (more on this later).

If you have concerns that your child is not meeting his or her language milestones, trust your gut feeling and seek out a speech therapist.  Olivia’s Place (previously called Elliot’s Corner) provide pediatric therapeutic services and educational outreach. They often host workshops and presentations for parents raising children with developmental challenges.

For me, our son returned from his grandparents with an arsenal of sign language commands that took me days to decipher. Luckily, he’s been picking up the spoken equivalent, especially in Chinese, now that he’s not confused by the various dialects he was exposed to from my husband’s family (Chengdu/Sichua/Chongqing dialect…).  He can now say at least 20 Mandarin words, and he understands when I confirm what he wants in English (he can now say “yea” and “no”).  It’s been such a relief for us since good communication means he’s a lot less frustrated, we are a lot less confused by what he wants, and it’s a lot easier to teach him new words and concepts when he’s able to communicate that he doesn’t know or understand what we’re saying (he asks “A-ah?!”)

MOPS is a faith-based community group for moms of preschool aged children, hosting international (English language) meetings twice a month, a bilingual English-Chinese group meeting once a month, and Chinese group meetings once a month.  The meetings often have speakers give talks/presentations or host workshops, followed by a discussion session in small groups, and often end with arts and crafts.  MOPS events have childcare available with RSVP and a small fee (RMB 20).

 Photos: courtesy of Olivia’s Place