Enjoy the Ride!

I have been thinking of our family's journey towards bilingualism and biculturalism in terms of a roller-coaster ride because learning a language always has its ups and downs. The beginning is really slow, you start acquiring a vocabulary, learning the grammatical structures, going steadily uphill, and then… there's that sudden scary drop when you actually have to take the plunge and start speaking it. Then there are those moments when you feel you don't really know the language, there are ups, downs, until you're done, you've learned it, but, wait... no! It's not really like that! Language learning is a never-ending ride that you embark on for life.

Riding Alone
I have always been fascinated by bilingual/ biculturalism. When I was born, my parents were studying in France (you can read more here), and even though they came back to Brazil when I was only one and a half, I grew up with them speaking French around the house when they didn't want me to understand. Slowly, though, I started to pick it up and surprise my parents with questions about their conversations. My mom even gave me and my brother a few months of French lessons back in the early 1980s.

French was not to become my second language, though (only my third, more on that later) because when I was a teenager I decided that I wanted to learn English and study language and literature in college. I took private lessons of English for a year, participated of an English “Immersion” summer course, and my English started to take off. I began to write in my journal in English, I listened to music and wrote down the lyrics, and I started reading books and talking to my twin girl friends in English (they had family in the U.S. ). I was not afraid to embrace the language, to make mistakes, and my progress was so quick that everyone I knew was impressed by it.

I went on to do a double major in English and Portuguese in one of the only universities in Brazil in which the English language and literature classes are taught entirely in English, and I became an English teacher even before graduating from college because in Brazil the need for teachers is so great that private elementary and high-schools usually hire part-time teachers who are still in college. Ever since I came to the U.S. people have wondered about my “near-native” English. They ask where I learned it and are surprised to find out that I did so in Brazil and spent 25 years there before coming here. I guess mine has been a successful ride!

Two for the Ride
When we got engaged, my fiancée and I decided that we wanted to live abroad for a while after we got married. He wanted to learn English, and I, as an English teacher, would greatly benefit from experiencing life in an English speaking country. Our first choice was England, but that didn't work out. My husband's uncle, who had come here to study English three years earlier, advised us on how to proceed for my husband to get a student visa. We went to Massachusetts, where my husband studied English in a Community College while I immersed myself in the culture and read voraciously many of the books that were not available to me in English in Brazil. A sponsorship from a Brazilian college allowed us to move on to graduate school a year later. My husband finished his Ph.D. in 2004, and I hope to defend my Ph.D. dissertation this year, after eight long years. During graduate school I finally went back to my “roots” and resumed the study of French. I even went to France for a summer course in the same school my parents had studied 30 years earlier. French then became my third language and I can also converse in Spanish and read it. My husband's English, in the meantime, has become excellent, and once in a while we do talk to each other in English at home, particularly when we do not want the boys to understand, like my parents did many years ago. We are definitely together in this ride now.

Getting Four on Board: Work in Progress
We had never envisioned living abroad for so long, but as the years of graduate school went by, we thought it was time to start a family, and we had two boys. They were born in the United States, but have dual citizenship, American and Brazilian. When I was pregnant with my first son I immediately started reading both academic and “how-to” books about raising bilingual children, and I quickly learned that most of them declared unanimously that the most “natural” way to make children bi/multi-lingual is for each parent, caretaker, or family member to speak on a different language to the child, the “one parent, one language” method. Both of us were Brazilian, though, and spoke to each other in Portuguese at home most of the time, so it didn't feel natural to either one of us to speak English with our baby exclusively. Some books suggested that in certain circumstances, families could decide on particular places (like upstairs/ downstairs) or times (days of the week) to speak a given language, and we thought that we could try that. We started having “English days” in which both of us spoke only in English to our baby son. This worked until he was nine months and we had a month-long visit from my husband's parents and brothers over the holidays during which we spoke only in Portuguese. Then my son started saying his first words and developing extremely quickly linguistically and we just stuck to one language. When our second son came along 2 years later I thought it would be wise for us to keep speaking only Portuguese at home even though our oldest son was showing interest in learning English. I feared that if he started speaking English to his brother, then our youngest would be more interested in English than Portuguese and would not acquire the language as quickly.

Now we have a 4 year-old and a 21 month old who are extremely proficient linguistically. Both of them spoke over 200 words (that's when I stopped counting) and in sentences at around 18-20 months. They are, however, still monolingual because they haven't been cared for by anyone but us and my Brazilian parents, who have been spending several months a year with us. Moreover, since we moved from MA we don't have many American friends and don't interact with English speaking people on a regular basis anymore.

In this column I will share our efforts and our dilemmas as we gradually try to bring our sons on board the bilingual roller-coaster. Will you join us for the ride?

Lilian W. is a monthly contributing editor for BBFN. 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.

©Lilian W. - http://mamaintranslation.blogspot.com/

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