First or Second Language Acquisition

[Olga T. Yokoyama]

Here is my personal experience with raising a bilingual child.

Before our daughter was born (Boston, 1983), we decided that we will try
to raise her bilingual in English and Russian. We started the first day
she was born, following the method that attached each language to a
different person: the mother (me) to Russian, and the father to English.
Our daughter started full time infant care at a normal American child
care center when she was 2 months old, and her exposure to Russian was
necessarily much more limited than to English. I tried to counterbalance
this by putting Russian story and song tapes on whenever she was in her
room (even when she was 2 months old), by showing her Russian video
cartoons (and later video films), by exposing her to Russian speaking
children once in a while, and of course by speaking exclusively Russian
to her and in her presence. For several years she thought I could not
speak English at all. Then she began to notice that I spoke English with
other people but for several years after that discovery she was still
convinced that I din't understand *her* English. When she told smth to
her dad in English, she would then turn to me and immediately re-say it
in Russian. The method of tying a lg to a person is definitely
preferred, if only because it is also easier for the adult, who may
forget to switch between the first and the second floor, or between the
odd and even days.

While I was regularly her only interlocutor in Russian, there were
blocks of time when her contact with Russian was more extended. When she
was 2 yrs old, I put her for one summer in care of a Russian
baby-sitter, who had also babysat another Russian-speaking child. When
she was 5, I took her to Moscow for one semester and put her in a
Russian public kindergarden. Then I took her to Moscow twice more for 6
weeks each in the summer when she was 8 and 12. Despite a very limited
experience in Russia, and relatively little time spent at home where she
used Russian with me, she has acquired the language with no accent, all
the cases, word order variation and verbal aspect in place, and with a
considerable vocabulary and phraseology. The past year or two I have
been a bit worried that she is reluctant to take a Russian book and read
it and that her English has acquired such sophisitcation (she is a
voracious reader in English) that she must derive less satisfaction from
speaking Russian. A few months ago I fianlly began to give her formal
lessons in reading, vocabulary building and writing Russian twice a
week, for 1 hr each. The progress is very good and it is delightful to
see how easy it is for her to learn all the vocab and spelling because
most morphemes in this morphologically rich lg are transparent to her
(last week she actually did take a Russian book to bed with her and read
it for an hour!). I only hope that she manages to make enough progress
before adolescence sets in for real and she will for a few years reject
everything her mother says.

I, too, would recommend to your friends to actively expose them to
English as soon as possible. It would also be good to associate English
with fun, such as videos and cardboard games with the father, as well as
other activities. Putting on Raffi or other children's tapes round the
clock will be good, too. We do not have TV at home, and began to allow
English lg videos only after our daughter turned 11. That way, the fun
of watching a video was necessarily associated with Russian. Occasional
get togethers with English-only kids of the same age group will also be
helpful. English-speaking babysitters would not hurt if they speak
native English, but often what children learn from domestic helpers is
just "kitchen" lg and that would be hardly worth the trouble. If the
babisitter is verbal, is willing to systematically engage in
lg-enhancing contact with the children, and does not turn them off by
explicitly correcting their English (a taboo at young age) it would of
course be very effective. Good luck!