Raising Bilingual Children: Overcoming the Monolingual Myth | Kim Potowski TEDx

[00:00:02][Applause] hi everybody thanks for coming so Dan you and I have a Lithuanian connection I remember being about 14 years old and sitting in my grandmother's kitchen table she and my grandfather were both fluent in Lithuanian and English because their parents had immigrated from Vilnius to New York and I remember asking her why they didn't speak Lithuanian to my father and his brothers and she said you just didn't do that in the 1950s in Brooklyn you were supposed to speak only English and assimilate and I remember thinking well that's that's a shame it would be pretty cool if I spoke with Swaney and right now and had learned into my family now the fact is that 65% of the world today is bilingual or multilingual that's over half of the planet who speaks more than one language now we have improved since the 50s in the United States as far as our appreciation for linguistic diversity but we still have a long way to go the fact is that we are a nation that neither encourages immigrants to maintain their heritage languages nor do we learn non-english languages very well let's take a look at the census it asks people whether they speak a non-english language in the home and if you're from a large city like Chicago or Los Angeles or New York you might predict it's got to be about what 40% 50% 60% of people must speak a non-english language in the home now in those large cities that is indeed the case but overall in the nation only 20% of people speak a language other than English in the home now this isn't an entirely accurate measure of our nation's multilingualism because you may very well speak a non-english language but not speaking in the home but on the whole we are a nation that both exhibits and promotes monolingualism in English and I think a lot of this is due to at least two myths the myths that multilingualism is damaging to society and the myths that multilingualism is damaging to individuals let's debunk the first one a study done in the early 90s examined a number of different factors in 170 countries and they found that linguistic diversity is not a predictor of civil strife nor of gross national product civil strife tends to come from power imbalances and there can certainly be power imbalances between people who speak different languages but language is not the root cause of that problem now some people are surprised to learn that the United States does not have an official language but I think it's quite obvious that you need English to be successful in many different levels of society here in this country no one knows that better than immigrants who don't speak English and yet some people have this idea that today's immigrants aren't learning English and this is another myth if we take another look at that question about non-english speaking a language other than English in the home it also asks people how well they speak English and overall seventy-five percent of people who speak another language in the home report that they speak English well or very well and if you break it down by language group here are our top ten non-english languages spoken in the United States and when you break it down by language you see that it ranges from about 70% all the way up to 95 percent who say that they speak English well now this is remarkable when you think about how difficult it is to learn a language when you're an adult and in particular when you work 8 to 10 to 12 to 16 hours a day when you have child care issues when you have transportation issues or if you simply can't afford English as a second language classes now another way to examine the English language learning of immigrant families is to examine the heritage language shift of immigrant families and the pattern typically goes like this you have the adults who immigrate monolingual in their home language some of them learn English some of them not as well as they might have liked their children like my grandmother who is raised in the United States typically are bilingual but their English tends to be stronger because they're schooled here and they live here now they're children there's a gamut of what can happen with their children some of them do develop proficiency in the heritage language some are receptive bilinguals they can understand it but they can't speak it some of them have zero proficiency in the heritage language so you have a fairly sad case in which grandparents cannot communicate with their grandchildren and this has been happening since the 19th century it happened to the Italians happened to the Germans happen to the poles happen to Lithuanian and it's happening today as well in fact we see it happening even more quickly in some cases today we see a one generation language shift in which the immigrants come monolingual in their language they're struggling to learn English and their children who are under tremendous pressure to abandon the heritage language don't acquire it at all and as a parent myself I can't imagine how devastating it would be to not be able to communicate to your own children so immigrant families absolutely are learning English and shifting more quickly than in the past and as one of my colleagues once wrote shift happens another point that we can examine this is the degree to which immigrants are acculturating to the United States to the culture in the language is if we look at this example we've all heard about immigration from Mexico we know that between 2005 and 2012 there was about 1.4 million Mexican nationals who came to the US but there was also 1.4 million who went back to Mexico and I've been working on a project interviewing these young people as they're trying to integrate into Mexican schools and they're having a very difficult time of it their Spanish isn't strong enough for them to be academically successful their classmates make fun of them for not having sort of the requisite cultural knowledge that everybody knows and their own family members call them gringos now this is new for Mexico they've been traditionally an immigrant sending nation now they're becoming an immigrant receiving nation with all the linguistic diversity that had that entails and their teachers are needing to find ways to work with these young people another example is Italy Italy also historically was a strong immigrant sending nation and now they're finding themselves receiving immigrants this is a picture of me in a classroom in northern Italy and this classroom is filled with children from Albania northern Africa and Latin America and in this particular classroom every week they have to learn a phrase from some of the other kids languages and this is just an effort to promote linguistic appreciation I also visited another school in a heavily Ecuadorian neighborhood and they had an after-school program that taught Spanish so what these kids could retain their home language it was a fantastic program so I think there's plenty of evidence that immigrants are learning English but we can certainly do more to help a study in 2006 looked at 12 different states that offered free ESL English as a second language classes and what they found was 60% of them had waiting lists of either several months to several years now couldn't we perhaps allocate some federal funding we all know how important learning English is couldn't we do better at providing free ESL classes to immigrants some people have proposed that maybe legislation is the answer let's legislate and make English the official language make this an English only country but the truth is legislation does nothing to provide any practical assistance to anybody who's trying to learn a language and besides do we really want to become an English only nation or an official English nation wouldn't it be better to be an English plus nation wouldn't it be better to promote the heritage language maintenance of immigrants throughout the generations wouldn't that do well for us internationally as far as communication global commerce might we enjoy higher levels of diplomacy which would then lead to greater national security so moving on to this myth number two that multilingualism is somehow damaging to individuals it's actually exactly the opposite educators and scientists are consistently coming up with new ways that bilingualism is advantageous now I'm going to share with you an educational example when a kid shows up to a school here in the United States and doesn't know English we have several program options for them one program option is all English you go in the mainstream classroom with all the other kids and if you're lucky you receive type of English as a second language support classrooms another type of program we have is called bilingual education and I use my air quotes because the true goal of most bilingual education programs is not bilingualism the true goal is mainstreaming those kids into the all English classroom as quickly as possible and I'm using Spanish as my example here these classrooms typically use about 25% Spanish but only as a crutch again until the kids can do well in the other classroom and they only do it for on average about three years a third program type is called two-way immersion and these are fascinating these are programs in which 80 to 90 percent of the school day is in Spanish and when the kids get a little older it moves to 5050 another thing that's fascinating about these programs half the kids are children who need to learn English but the other half already know English their parents chose to put them in this program so that they could learn Spanish now when you take a look at these three program types you might predict that the one that's going to result in the highest levels of English language learning is going to be this one right because that's where the most English is used but actually the results show us something different this study was done in California but it's been replicated all over the nation they looked at a group of 11th graders who had been in all three different program types and they looked at their English reading and here's what they found the kids who had received the most instruction in Spanish far outperformed their peers both in the bilingual education 75% Spanish and the English only with 100% English this is completely counterintuitive what we're saying is that the more quality instruction you receive in your heritage language the better you're going to do in English by the way they also do better in math and in their other subject areas now part of the reason for this is because when a child is immersed in a language they don't understand every single year they fall further and further behind their peers in their content areas if they understand what's going on then they can keep up in the content while they're learning the language okay now you might be wondering what about those english-speaking kids does their English for when they spend anywhere from 50 to 90% of a day in Spanish you can probably guess the answer is no there doesn't suffer they do just as well as their peers in English only programs and they also have in some cases have been found to score higher in math and other subject areas but okay it's true their English doesn't suffer but what's awesome about these programs is that what these kids get that their peers don't is fluency in Spanish at no cost to their English let me show you an example this young man his name is Julian his family is monolingual in English and his parents decided they'd like for him to learn Spanish so they put him 5 years old kindergarten taught entirely in Spanish okay he's in second grade now and he can read grade level texts in Spanish he can talk to you about what he does in Spanish and he also reads Harry Potter in English another kid in Julian's classroom is quacking quacking is the grandchildren of immigrants from Mexico his family is almost entirely his home almost all english-speaking when the grandparents come by more Spanish is used but if Joaquin were to be attending a regular all English program he would not have the high levels of Spanish fluency and literacy that he does now because he's in a dual immersion program by the way these programs are free there's 10 of them here in the city of Chicago there's about 400 across the nations these are free public schools we need far more of them now another way but this myth manifests itself that bilingualism is somehow damaging individuals is through the advice of well-meaning people some of whom are professionals who really should know better who will tell parents you should not be speaking your heritage language to the kids part of the reason is they're probably concerned that the kids won't learn English well enough or fast enough but the truth is we have absolutely no evidence that abandoning the home language accelerates English language learning absolutely no evidence of that another reason they might give this advice to parents is they're afraid that the kids will become confused now this contradicts what 65% of the planet has been doing for hundreds and hundreds of years children are not confused when they receive input in two or more languages our brains are wired to be bilingual even children who have learning difficulties become bilingual every day the world over I think some people misdiagnosis confusion a very very common practice among bilinguals which is called code switching that's a fancy word for when you switch back and forth between two languages sometimes you do it right in the middle of a sentence okay now far from being a lazy behavior or some type of confused behavior linguists know that this is absolutely rule governed behavior you can't switch willy-nilly at any point in the sentence that you want we also know that code switching requires very strong levels of syntax in order to not violate the structures of either language as you're going back and forth so it requires high degrees of bilingualism to do this and we also know that code switching indexes bilingual identity it's a way of saying I have two languages I have two cultures so I always tell my students here at USC for those of you say that you speak Spanglish or Arabic or Chinglish you should be very very proud of the strong levels of bilingualism that that indicates now let's shift gears for a moment to the parents who only speak English and they really want their kids to learn another language okay these are parents who want to cure their families monolingualism in this country unfortunately we typically wait until high school which is about the age of 14 to start teaching foreign languages this is way too late what the cognitive research shows is that significant language learning before approximately the age of eight to ten uses different parts of the brain some people have turned this organic memory so what were you're developing then is an organic bilingual when you start younger scientists are also discovering that bilinguals seem to have cognitive advantages in certain kinds of problem solving skills bilinguals are faster them they've also discovered recently that the onset of dementia Alzheimer's is delayed by an average of about ten years in bilingual brains so fine Laemmle isn't on the individual level reaps all kinds of benefits so if we were to start in kindergarten with a rigorous demanding content-based program in other languages like what two-way immersion does we would be a nation of organic bilinguals this would be fantastic it would also be fantastic for our heritage speaking children are children of immigrants what do we do with them they show up to school if they're not fortunate enough to be in a two-way immersion program it's English English English till they turn 14 and we say now you can study another language what if we took all those years instead and worked on developing their oral fluency and their literacy in their heritage language now some heritage families bring their children to Saturday schools anybody hear a product of Saturday schools I've worked on Saturday school programs here in Chicago with Spanish Polish and Lithuanian and when you interview these folks they will often confess I hated being dragged to Saturday school I really would have rather stayed home watch cartoons hang out with my friends they will sometimes also confess that they resented that their parents insisted that they speak the heritage language but you know what as adults every single one of them says how grateful they are they say how grateful they are that their parents instilled in them this organic bilingualism so to conclude what concrete steps can we take to move ourselves towards becoming a nation in which no child is left monolingual well if you know a non English language start speaking it to the kids in your family your own kids your nieces your nephews you may think that your language ability isn't strong enough but it probably is at least to contribute some basic syntax and basic vocabulary enlist the help of other people who speak the language you know we have Skype now it's free you can Skype have your kids Skype with people in other countries and develop their language abilities it is also critically important to read to the children in their heritage language you can start a book club you can go to the library and have a reading group and that way you take turns volunteering to read to the kids there's also a lot of media available you know when you buy a movie and on the back you look and see if it has the soundtrack in another language you can also bribe your kids that way you can tell them I'll give you ten minutes if you watch in English I'll give you 20 if you watch in Ukranian and by the way the brain doesn't care what language it is it doesn't matter how many speakers around the world speak it it's all good for this organic bilingualism which may in fact lead that individual to better language learning later on in life they can add a third or fourth language you can demand and do a two-way immersion program like Joaquin's parents did now if your modeling will in English the best thing you can do is go out and meet a bilingual and marry them but if that doesn't work you still have options there's lots of books that can help you through it get a class get a tutor some people can afford a nanny who can provide inputs of a child in the language there's also media there's also two-way immersion there's a lot of things you can do so in conclusion bilingualism is absolutely an advantage both to individuals and to societies and we can become a nation that is English plus in which the majority of us are proudly bilingual thank you very much you