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Promotion of Child Bilingualism in a Monolingual Society

Rebecca Lindsey Parsons
Griffith University
2 May, 2005   

Introduction

For various reasons, many families need and/or want to raise their children bilingual while living in a monolingual society. They may employ one of several language use strategies to try to accomplish this, and may or may not meet with success. It is important to note that success to one family could mean failure to another. While one set of parents may be happy if their children simply understand a second language (receptive bilingualism), another may be hoping to have children who appear to be native speakers in both languages. I will be reviewing the strategies and issues in promoting bilingualism in children up to primary school age, as well as case studies of families who have tried to raise their children bilingual.

To begin a study on the promotion of bilingualism in children, it is first necessary to define bilingualism. There are many possible definitions of bilingualism, ranging from the mere use of two languages, regardless of proficiency, to complete mastery of both languages to the level of a native speaker. The former allows for even those with poor language skills to be included and does not imply the level of nativity a child bilingual would ideally acquire in both languages. However, the latter definition may go too far, for as Saunders (1988) points out, it is very rare for someone to attain complete mastery in two languages. When one considers all the various domains in which we use language, it is extremely unlikely that even a balanced bilingual would not have areas of dominance in each language. However, I would tend toward a more demanding definition of bilingualism, such as that of Thiéry (1976, cited in Liddicoat, 1991) “being taken for a native speaker by native speakers of both languages”. When applied to children, this would mean that they have attained a level equivalent to that of native speaking children of the same age in each of their languages, and that their pronunciation is such that they would be mistaken for native speakers, with perhaps a small allowance for some amount of syntactic, lexical, and phonological interference from their dominant to their non-dominant language. I will also allow that this is the ultimate goal, and that at various points in his or her development, a child may not live up to this definition. However, for the purposes of this paper, attaining only competent but non native-like skills in the second language and receptive bilingualism will be considered failure to become bilingual, which will be grouped with cases in which children ultimately lose their second language skills completely.

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