strategies for bilingual kids?

[Mark I.]

...its all too easy for the school to just let go with the flow.

Is there another way to go through Finnish school system?

I learnt hardly anyhing about languages at school (not much else there either), it was ultra boring, teachers were "just doing their jobs" without any enthusiasm - so I kind of slept through my first 12 years of education. I never did any homework, and sometimes that was noticed, but at examinations I always came through somehow.

So, I learnt English, and later Swedish, from TV. Got some kind of strange ability in that. I'm sure I could learn, say Italian, by just watching Italian movies - even now in the end of a long film I get feeling I understand what they are saying.

Point here is that individuals have different profiles when it comes to learning. (My parents were teachers with severe Teacher's Syndrom, so I'v become allergic to any kind of teaching. That's kind of a problem.)

[enk]

Thanks, this is very encouraging! I speak Russian and English, so I'm glad to hear that this is working for your family!

We use the same method as Penelope and it's worked well.

-enk, whose kids have taken to talking to her in Swedish nowadays.

[karen]

I would never ignore my kid just because he spoke to me in the "wrong" language. He grew out of that phase of speaking to me in Finnish. I would always just repeat it in English. Like I said, I don't want him to laugh at my pronunciation.

[ajdias]

I would never ignore my kid just because he spoke to me in the "wrong" language. He grew out of that phase of speaking to me in Finnish. I would always just repeat it in English. Like I said, I don't want him to laugh at my pronunciation.

One other thing that I have trained myself to do is to newer point out at language mistakes, that can have an adverse effect if the child starts worrying of mistakes and being told off.
I rather emphasice the correct form by using it immediatly on a sentence, pronouncin clearly and slow, repeating on another sentence if necessary.

[superiorinferior]

One other thing that I have trained myself to do is to newer point out at language mistakes, that can have an adverse effect if the child starts worrying of mistakes and being told off.
I rather emphasice the correct form by using it immediatly on a sentence, pronouncin clearly and slow, repeating on another sentence if necessary.

Never correct your kid?

What's wrong with that? Otherwise they wouldn't know how to talk. They want help, they need guidance.

There's no need for ridicule, just a quick correction. That's not telling your kid off. Not correcting them would be neglect.

[Mark I.]

As long as you love your kid, rest is technical.

[kcl]

...its all too easy for the school to just let go with the flow.

Is there another way to go through Finnish school system?

I learnt hardly anyhing about languages at school (not much else there either), it was ultra boring, teachers were "just doing their jobs" without any enthusiasm - so I kind of slept through my first 12 years of education. I never did any homework, and sometimes that was noticed, but at examinations I always came through somehow.

yikes! that's not what schooling and teachers are still like, are they?
that sounds so depressing, and learning is so exciting
please, tell me times have changed!

[ajdias]

Never correct your kid?

What's wrong with that? Otherwise they wouldn't know how to talk. They want help, they need guidance.

There's no need for ridicule, just a quick correction. That's not telling your kid off. Not correcting them would be neglect.

Not saying never, my point is that pointing at their mistakes might cause them to be shy of speaking your language (particularly if you are the only one that speaks it to the child), at least with younger children who haven't much confidence in their language skills and might still resist learning it. If necessary I'll use the correct form 2-3 times afterwards and try to get them to reply using the correct form.
As they grow older and confident in their skills it should be okay to correct them directly.

[Mark I.]

I sincerely hope times have changed.

I went to school at 7 in -73 in Rovaniemi. That's exactly when the radical peruskoulu-uudistus was made. It was leftist's idea, that everyone is equal regardless of their background (which is exactly right, BTW), but it went a long way further: The idea was that every child is a similar mold (I believe some communists call it Tabula Rasa), and no attention should be focused to individuals, unless they were in danger of dropping of a train. The Finnish word is tasapäistäminen. Kind of Chineze Cultural Revolution in a minor scale. I remember some communists went even so far as to claiming that all gender differences in their behaviour are just thought to them by role models. Like boys fancy cars and guns versus girls like dolls.

That reminds me of those PISA results of Finns - Teachers and the whole Finnish school system was eager to take gredit from those results. Sure that might be a part of explanation. However, no attention was focused on differences between different culture's, and even genetic, differences in learning.

[karen]

I would never ignore my kid just because he spoke to me in the "wrong" language. He grew out of that phase of speaking to me in Finnish. I would always just repeat it in English. Like I said, I don't want him to laugh at my pronunciation.

One other thing that I have trained myself to do is to newer point out at language mistakes, that can have an adverse effect if the child starts worrying of mistakes and being told off.
I rather emphasice the correct form by using it immediatly on a sentence, pronouncin clearly and slow, repeating on another sentence if necessary.

Hey! Why quote me for this post?

[ajdias]

Hey! Why quote me for this post?

Did you take offence at my point?
Because I agreed with and think that I can relate my point on some level to your post. Therefore, I started my post with "one other thing..."

[karen]

I wasn't offended, but didn't see how the two were related. You didn't actually say that you agreed with me.

[LilWabbit(unsubscribed)]

Never correct your kid?

What's wrong with that? Otherwise they wouldn't know how to talk. They want help, they need guidance.

There's no need for ridicule, just a quick correction. That's not telling your kid off. Not correcting them would be neglect.

Well said.

Not saying never, my point is that pointing at their mistakes might cause them to be shy of speaking your language....If necessary I'll use the correct form 2-3 times afterwards and try to get them to reply using the correct form....As they grow older and confident in their skills it should be okay to correct them directly.

You seem to advocate the "positive enforcement" school of child-rearing which certainly boasts some merits. It recognizes the salutary effects of encouragement, reward and loving affection, each and all absolutely essential in the growth of a healthy child and perhaps each downplayed in received (from grandparents) child-rearing methods.

One of its serious handicaps however is the underlying (and often inadverdent) presumption that the child is naturally fragile (lacking in self-esteem, timid and vulnerable) and therefore unable to handle rejection, disagreement, prohibition, let alone rebuke, anger and direct punishment.

Clinical development psychology, experience and quite frankly level-headed conventional wisdom suggest to the very contrary. Children are in fact naturally strong-minded, happy and curious. In varying degrees (conditional upon personality and temperament), children in fact naturally seek to challenge authority, dominate their peers and family-members, and test boundaries. To put it in plain French (all mothers shoot me!), the younger the kid, the more adorable a selfish son of a b@£#$ he is.

Kids are much more perplexed, less self-confident and emotionally frustrated by the lack of clear boundaries - boundaries the overstepping of which hurts in one harmless way or the other (emotionally, intellectually and sometimes even physically). Positive enforcement often deprives children of this clarity in addition to gloriously ill-equipping them for life in the real world, replete with necessary as well as unnecessary prohibitions and boundaries (and no, I'm not suggesting we should intentionally create unnecessary boundaries for our children). Positive enforcement fails to develop an adequately strong coping-mechanism for life as an adult.

I can hardly believe I am actually quoting Dr. Phil, but there seems to lie great truth at the core of his oft-repeated slogan "raising children is not about raising children, it's about raising adults."

Also, punishment and reward are two sides of the same coin and, together, constitute justice. They are absolutely indissoluble. Punishment without reward teaches the child that life's anyway a bloody bleak affair, but if you do wrong, it's a living hell. Reward without punishment teaches that life's a joyride, and by doing good it's a real pleasure cruise. Both approaches teach the kid to live in a fantasy world, whether Sartrean or utopian.

A healthy reality check impels to opt for the healthy middle way.

[LilWabbit(unsubscribed)]

@LilWabbit:

I fail to see how this is connected to giving correct examples instead of telling the kid it made a mistake. Unless you consider being told you're wrong punishment...

Fair question. I brought up the issue of punishment only to point out the main flaw of positive enforcement as the undue emphasis on reward at the expense of punishment. In this particular context 'punishment' was broadly used as a reference to any form of direct indication to the child that he or she is doing something wrong (including language corrections). I am aware that the issue of punishment in the immediate context may sound slightly off tangent, and my above ramblings way off tangent within the context of bilingual upbringing. I wouldn't myself employ the term quite so broadly in most contexts.

[Rosamunda]

The type of error is also a factor in correction strategies. I had this discussion with some of my (adult) students last week. One of them admitted he is always saying "he" when he means "she" (typical Finnish MT error, but such a basic error is rather surprising from a student who is otherwise a good "intermediate" level). I suggested it was probably the result of not being systematically corrected when he was a child learning English in school. In fact in the 60s / 70s schoolkids rarely got to "speak" English, so were rarely corrected and basic mistakes went unchecked. When teaching beginners, it is important to correct these very basic errors systematically. As a teacher (and also as a parent) I would systematically correct those basic grammatical errors (eg past participles like: I brang (brought) etc etc). There are different strategies for correcting.... one, already mentioned, is to echo the phrase with the error replaced by the corrected form. Another is to simply echo the error ( "you brang???") and encourage the student/ child to self-correct.

In the classroom I do not correct every error, especially if it means I have to interrupt a student, which I would do only if I cannot understand what he/she is trying to say. Mostly I take notes and correct later. At home I come down hard on acquired errors (like the ones they are getting from friends who are not native speakers.... eg we won (beat) them at football....) but generally they are just not making "basic" grammatical errors any more. When two languages are not closely related (eg Finnish and English) I think encouraging bilingualism is, in some ways, easier. There is less "interference" between the languages and therefore fewer errors. But it does mean there are no shortcuts too (of which there are many between, say, French and English vocabulary).

As for raising kids to be bilingual, I think vocabulary expansion is one of the hardest things in a foreign country. Read, read, read..... but buying foreign books can work out expensive, so TV, videos etc are really important, even more so as the children get older.... otherwise a 16 yr old can end up with the vocab of a toddler! Obviously being in a bilingual school system makes this easier.