Looking back to the past year:
The Power of the Screen

By Lilian Feitosa

As a new year begins, I have decided to look back to the months that passed since I wrote my first column last March so I can feel motivated to look forward to the future. That first column was titled “Enjoy the Ride” (www.biculturalfamily.org/onefamilyonelanguagemar06.html) and introduced our family’s journey towards multilingualism. As this column’s title describes, our family generally uses one language at home, Brazilian Portuguese, because my husband and I are Brazilian and our sons, who were born here in the United States, have double citizenship. This look back has made me reach an interesting conclusion regarding my older son’s English language development – we owe most of it to the screen, be it the TV’s or the computer’s.

In the past year, English slowly started to enter our household more and more, because our older son, who is going to be five next March, has been getting more proficient every day. He still stays home with me full-time, but his brief interactions with English speaking children and, most importantly, TV shows, DVDs, and online games (he plays those from PBS Kids’s website), are introducing him to English. Whenever he says a new word or asks me for the meaning of a word or expression – something he does daily, sometimes more than once – I ask him where he heard that, and he can always tell me exactly in which DVD, show, or website. This not only helps me explain the meaning of the word(s) because of the context, but allows me to know exactly where his new vocabulary is coming from. I just remembered that I already gave at least one example of such words learned in videos in the last column I wrote (Sept-Oct) (www.biculturalfamily.org/sept06/secure/onefamilysept06.html). So this has been a prominent characteristic of our family’s experience with multilingualism for a while now.

Sometimes it takes me longer to figure out that he learned something from a DVD or TV show. Take for example the day I was playing with him and decided to point out the names of the parts of his face.

“Cheeks,” I said, pointing to his cheeks. “Forehead,” and pointed to his forehead.
“No Mama,” he joked laughingly, “one head, not four head!”
“Wow, how smart my son is!” I thought.

Well, a few days later I saw that he learned this joke in one of his funny DVDs. After the discovery, I was not disappointed that he had not made up that joke himself, I was actually amazed that he was able not only to passively learn words from the video, but also to use them in the exact context they should be used.

Since then, because of the daily new words coming from things he has seen on TV or played with in the computer, I have become very curious to find out what language development specialists have to say about the role of videos and computer games in the process of learning new languages. I remember having read in several parenting books that it is the interaction with other people that helps a baby to acquire language and that videos are not helpful at all. Perhaps when one is already fluent in a first language and is learning a second one, in the absence of real interactions (and our sons’ interactions are very minimal), other kinds of media become much more powerful than they would be in other circumstances.

As a conscientious parent, I try to limit my children’s screen time as much as possible because I know that watching television and playing computer games are addictive and not very healthy, sedentary activities. It gladdens me to know that they can have positive results, though. In my older son’s case, they have helped me to become very communicative in English, so much so that a few months ago he said exactly the opposite thing he had said in an interaction I described in my Sept-Oct column: “Please speak English with me, Mama [or Papa]!” And we comply, so he can practice, and we are always amazed by how proficient he is becoming. Lately, he has been actually going back and forth between both languages. Yesterday, for example, we were talking in English for a bit and he said: “Mama, now I’m going to speak in Portuguese with you, OK?”

If the screen is a major learning tool for my older son, he, in turn, is his younger brother’s main language teacher. My younger son, who is two and a half, loves to repeat whatever his older brother is saying, be it in English in Portuguese, sometimes with hilarious results. One day we were having dinner and he started repeating his brother’s “pleases” – in English.

“Please, please, please,” he repeated when asking for something. I thought I’d try to reinforce the Portuguese and said, “Linton, say it in Portuguese now!”

He promptly replied: “Português, português, português.” This was so hilarious we just could not stop laughing for several minutes.
Trying to raise multilingual children is certainly a very fun adventure! I am glad my husband and I have embarked in this ride and that our sons are joining us. I am also thrilled with the opportunity of sharing our experiences with you. Happy New Year and Happy New Language Learning!!

Lilian W. is a monthly contributing editor and columnist for the Multilingual Living Magazine. She is a foreign student from Brazil currently working on her Ph.D. dissertation in the humanities. She and her husband speak Portuguese at home with their sons, but she is hoping they will start learning English soon. Check out her family’s journey in her One Family One Language column each month. You can learn more about Lilian at her blog: mamaintranslation.blogspot.com.

back to Multilingual Living Magazine Table Of Contents