Stay On Your Multilingual Course

By Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa

One step at a time you have found your path, now stay on it! Don’t let yourself lose sight of your goal, even when the going gets tough.

Here are some tips to keep you motivated when
the path starts to take an uphill climb.

The key to staying motivated is in finding little gems of success along the path to fluency; a new word here or there, an idiomatic expression or a joke in the target language, the first thank you note written in the second language. Every little bit of progress can and should be celebrated (imagine if it was you learning the new language, wouldn’t each of these steps be cause for joy?).

Siblings can be a wonderful contributing factor to this process as well. The applause from a big sister can work wonders towards encouraging her younger brother to experiment even more with new sounds, words, and eventually sentences and complex ideas.
Finally, motivation can also come from the fast-paced globalized world which now prizes linguistic ability in a way never seen before in history.  The marketability, social aptitude, cultural sensitivity, and increased mental flexibility of multilinguals are motivation enough for many, independent of internal home factors.
Whether the initial motivation starts with parents, sibling or society, all contribute to the eventual passion children can development for the role of languages in their lives, and each should be exploited to its maximum potential to keep the enthusiasm high.

1. Explicitly tell your child how important his/her languages are (e.g. “Won’t it be great to be able to visit with Grandma and tell her how much you enjoyed the birthday gift she sent?”  “Won’t it be fun to play with your cousins next summer [in English]?” “When you know enough Turkish we can read that story together.”

2. Implicitly hint at the value of knowing more than one language (“Wouldn’t it be great to play with Alfred next door [who speaks Spanish]?” “Did you know that when you can speak more than one language, more people want to offer you jobs?” “Isn’t it funny that when you know more languages, they say you might live longer because your brain is more active?”)

3. Celebrate every small success your child demonstrates with language (e.g. each new word, each correct sentence, each attempt at a new structure or joke, etc.)

4. Involve all the players. Get siblings, grandparents and friends involved in the language-learning goal. Explicitly ask for collaboration (e.g. “Please only speak to John in French.” “When we visit, would you mind only speaking in English, even though I know you speak perfectly in Japanese as well?”)

5. Language is a full-time job: Children are very acute at perceiving inconsistencies in strategies.  If you have decided that mom will speak English and dad Spanish, then your child’s language acquisition will be stunted by inconsistencies; stick to your guns and stay true to your strategy.

Getting started and staying motivated with raising children in several languages begins with the parent’s own passion and enthusiasm for the task.  If the parents are not devoted to the process, the results will show in the language level of the child.  Where does this passion come from?  Often a parent wants to be sure her child can communicate with relatives in another country. Sometimes a parent wants to guarantee cultural links to his family.  Yet other parents are interested in the child’s ability to adapt socially.  There are a myriad of reasons to be passionate about one’s languages, and all contribute to the enthusiasm parents have for choosing and staying consistent with a strategy for raising their children multilingually.

-------------------------------------
TRACEY TOKUHAMA-ESPINOSA is the author of Raising Multilingual Children: Foreign Language Acquisition and Children (2000) and The Multilingual Mind: Questions by, for and about people living with many languages (2003). www.multifaceta.com.

back to Multilingual Living Magazine Table Of Contents