one-parent one-language/Grammont's principle

[Barbara Zurer Pearson]

Dear Infochildes,

To add a little to the discussion of one-
parent/one-language.
I believe Margaret Deuchar and Suzanne Quay
bring up the lack of evidence in favor of
1-parent/1-language. In their study, both
parents used both languages (although they were
pretty strict about separating the language
by context (home, school, grandmom's house, etc).
On the other hand, 1-p/1-l's tenaciousness as a
folk principle attests to the fact that it
generally works.  The question becomes whether
it is the only practice that works--and it clearly
isn't.

In our work in Miami, many of the parents were
bilinguals and went comfortably back and forth
between languages.  Our recent analyses show that--
as Hazel indicates, the issue might be one of
how much support each language gets. If parents
split their input, they will likely favor the
majority language and that will have the effect
of decreasing support for the minority language.
Then, if that language doesn't get enough input,
the children won't be as bilingual as their
parents. So our kids were usually served by having some
monolingual caretakers.  They may not have been
served by their not switching, so much as by
getting more (minority) input.

I can't tell from the titles of Hazel's work
what her methodology is, but it would be great
to see some empirical work with Betty's
question as an explicit focus.

Our evidence here is "anecdotal"--but we found
that language impaired children had equally rough
times in both languages (we had one or two bilingual
Downs Syndrome children in the parent study--not in
our sample).  A couple of parents switched to
one language, but that wasn't a "cure."  We had
one case, though, where it ended up being useful.
I don't think we've spoken about one of our subjects
who developed a progressive hearing loss after
age 2, which wasn't really diagnosed until about
age 5.  Not surprisingly, she had trouble becoming
bilingual.  In her case, most of the early input
was in Spanish (she's an 85-15 child in our data)
--until age 2 when the parents wanted her to switch
to more English and arranged for more English input. It
was a mystery (at the time) why she did not respond
to more English--but I think the mystery has since
been solved (!) It was not a question of who gave
the input.

Still a very open question,
Till soon,
Barbara


On Apr 19, 2005, at 6:15 AM, See Lei Chia, Hazel wrote:

> Hi Betty and everyone else interested in this "hot" topic
>
> I'm Hazel See, the student mentioned by Madalena. OK, here's my two 
> cents worth, based on my understanding, there was some convergence on 
> the usefulness of one-parent-one-language principle in communities 
> with little or no support for the non-dominant language (see for e.g.
>
> Döpke, S. 1992. One parent, one language: an interactional approach. 
> Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.)
>
>
>
> However, in communities such as Singapore, some parts of India or 
> other multilingual communities, there is little current research on 
> the differences in the various parenting policies with regards to 
> nurturing bilingualism. My honours dissertation which contains several 
> references that may be helpful, you may contact me at 
> hazelsee at starhub.net.sg if interested:
>
>
> See, H.L.C (2003). The mixed language policy: an alternative to the 
> one-person-one-language-policy for a child with bilingual caregivers. 
> Unpublished Honours thesis. Singapore, National University of 
> Singapore.
>
> and the following papers:
>
> See, H. L. C. (2004). The mixed languages policy as a viable 
> alternative to the one person-one language policy: a case study. Paper 
> presented to the 6th Conference on General Linguistics, Universidade 
> de Santiago de Compostela.
>
> See, H. L. C. (2004). Exploring the role of caregivers' pragmatic 
> discourse strategies in mixed languages policy bilingualism. Paper 
> presented to the Second Lisbon Meeting on Language Acquisition, 
> Faculdade de Letras, Universidade de Lisboa. <-- I've not had time to 
> write up a full paper on this, so I only have the conference handouts 
> and slides. Sorry about that.
>
>
> In addition, I found the following papers / articles extremely 
> insightful:
>
> Juan-Garau, M and Perez-Vidal,C. (2001) Mixing and pragmatic parental 
> strategies in early bilingual acquisition.   J. Child Lang. 28 (2001), 
> 59- 86.
>
> Noguchi, Mary Goebel.(1996). The bilingual parent as model for the 
> bilingual child. Policy Science,Mar 1996, pp. 245-61 . (This is an 
> English article published in a Japanese journal, so if you're keen, 
> I've a copy of it.)
>
> Goodz, N.S. 1994. Interactions between parents and children in 
> bilingual families. Educating second language children: the whole 
> child, the whole curriculum, the whole community, ed. by F. Genesee, 
> 62-81. Cambridge: CUP.
>
>
> Bhaya Nair, R. (1991). Monosyllabic English or disyllabic Hindi? 
> Language acquisition in a bilingual child. Indian Linguistics, 5, pp. 
> 51-90.
>
> Regards
>
> Hazel
>
> 	-----Original Message-----
> 	From: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org 代表 Madalena Cruz-Ferreira
> 	Sent: 19/4/2005 (星期二) PM 1:42
> 	To: Betty Yu; info-childes at mail.talkbank.org
> 	Cc:
> 	Subject: RE: one-parent one-language/Grammont's principle
> 	
> 	
>
> 	Hi Betty,
> 	
> 	One of my students, Hazel See, has done some work on this here in 
> Singapore for Mandarin-English bilinguals.
> 	She has presented two papers, where she argues that a mixed-language 
> policy is no different from the OPOL policy in nurturing competent 
> child multilingualism, and that child mixes are evidence not of 
> confusion but of pragmatic fluency that matches that of the child's 
> environment.
> 	The references are:
> 	
> 	See, H. L. C. (2004). The mixed languages policy as a viable 
> alternative to the one person-one language policy: a case study. Paper 
> presented to the 6th Conference on General Linguistics, Universidade 
> de Santiago de Compostela.
> 	
> 	See, H. L. C. (2004). Exploring the role of caregivers' pragmatic 
> discourse strategies in mixed languages policy bilingualism. Paper 
> presented to the Second Lisbon Meeting on Language Acquisition, 
> Faculdade de Letras, Universidade de Lisboa.
> 	
> 	Hazel is with the info-childes network, so she might want to add 
> details on her research.
> 	
> 	Madalena
> 	
> 	======================================
> 	Madalena Cruz-Ferreira
> 	Dept. English Language and Literature
> 	National University of Singapore
> 	ellmcf at nus.edu.sg
> 	http://profile.nus.edu.sg/fass/ellmcf/
> 	======================================
> 	
> 	
> 	> -----Original Message-----
> 	> From: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org
> 	> [mailto:info-childes at mail.talkbank.org]On Behalf Of Betty Yu
> 	> Sent: Tuesday, 19 April, 2005 1:07 PM
> 	> To: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org
> 	> Subject: one-parent one-language/Grammont's principle
> 	>
> 	>
> 	> Hello all,
> 	>
> 	>   I am curious if there is convergence in current research on the
> 	> usefulness (or not) of separating languages as a strategy for
> 	> teaching
> 	> children more than one language (e.g., one-parent/one-language,
> 	> one-situation/one-language). Is there evidence that children really
> 	> become confused by mixed linguistic input given that there's 
> evidence
> 	> that code-switching and other language mixing behaviors are quite
> 	> normal in bilingual communities? I'm especially interested in this
> 	> topic as it relates to children with language impairments.
> 	>
> 	> Thank you for your attention.
> 	>
> 	> Betty
> 	> Doctoral Student at UC Berkeley/SFSU
> 	>
> 	>
> 	>
> 	
> 	
>