Natural Birth and Baby Care.com

Just Curious about Langauge Acquisition

You write about a lot things but I was wondering how you feel about language acquisition for mono or multilingual children?

I don't think I've ever seen anything about them on your website and what you think about homeschooling families looking to teach 1 or more language at home.

Answer:

I don't write about language acquisition a lot because my site focuses a little more on pregnancy, birth, and baby's first year. Language can and does begin then (I've written some on baby signing, for instance), but in general big language leaps happen in the second and third years of life.

I know if you want to raise a multi-lingual child, one of the best ways to do it is by having the second (or more) language spoken frequently around your child. Some families speak only a second language in the home and some have each parent speak a different language.

My older children do take Japanese lessons from a native speaker. We go to her home for lessons and she always speaks in Japanese to her son and daughter.

My children's lessons are part in English and part in Japanese. They have to work harder to pick it up than their Sensei's little ones, but not so hard as I would have to! I hope that Galen will find it easier having heard Japanese frequently from birth (but not every day).

As for language acquisition of the native language, I think children pick it up. Babies who are worn are always right there, listening to your conversations with others. They pick up on language.

I play typical games with my little ones - helping them label body parts, pointing out animal names, etc. But I don't really believe that we should narrate our entire lives to "teach" babies to talk.

Reading or telling stories, playing baby games, talking to them, having them overhear conversations is fine. But we don't need to narrate (for instance "Mommy is putting on your diaper now. Now lets put on your pants. Ok, I'm picking you up. We're walking to the kitchen now. Mommy is getting your cup out." - I think that's unnecessary).

A big part of my opinion on that is formed by the fact that I have three older children who can and will talk non-stop, and I've never narrated their world out to them. They learned just by being part of life. I am a very soft-spoken person and I don't talk a whole lot - and honestly I wish sometimes that they were a little more like me! I can't figure out where they got their need to talk so much from ;)

I think baby sign language is useful before little ones learn to talk, but otherwise, I think that they learn just by being part of the world and through normal daily activities like reading and playing.

We do read a lot and I tell many oral stories and do fingerplays with toddlers and preschoolers. We also have several Japanese storybooks. And I sing a lot, both in English and Japanese songs we've learned from their teacher.