Question on bilingual language acquisition from non-native speaker

[Barbara Zurer Pearson]

Dear InfoChilds,

This was frustrating for me yesterday to be on the road, aware of this 
thread, but not able to join in--till now.
Here are my two-cents (and of course, a recommendation of my own book for 
Kristin's friend).

Raising a Bilingual Child (by Zurer Pearson :) came out this year from 
Random House, and I think I can say, has been well-received both by parents 
and the research community.  In addition to what I tried to make a balanced 
review of the research, there's a section where I talk about why we don't 
have the studies one might want to design to answer a question similar to 
Kristin's. There are also several extended testimonials from non-native 
parents with multilingual families. (Check out some background and reviews 
about it at www.zurer.com/pearson/bilingualchild (--and at Amazon).

People seem to have strong opinions about whether non-native parents will do 
children a disservice by speaking non-natively to them. The issue rarely 
comes up, of course, if the language the parents are speaking non-natively 
to children is the community language.  No one has thought to research it, 
since children so clearly surpass their parents in the community language. 
(The question is framed somewhat differently for immigrant and guest worker 
communities, but I don't get the impression that this literature would be 
relevant for Kristin's friend.)

My own opinion is that a parent who *wants* to speak a non-native language 
to a child should be encouraged to do so.  The child will lose much less 
from the parent's disfluencies than she or he will gain from the extra 
practice.   Practically speaking, it's not optimal to have *any* single 
individual be the only source of input for a child.  Among the many parents 
I spoke with for my book, non-native parents seemed to understand that 
principle more readily than many international couples, and they took active 
steps to involve native speakers somewhere in the child's routine--through 
schools, sitters, travel, media, etc.  I especially enjoyed one parent's 
comment that he hesitated to speak only Yiddish with his child since he 
didn't know if he knew it well enough to carry it off.  Ten years later, he 
feels funny speaking a language other than Yiddish to any child, not just 
his own.

These days, parents can find a virtual community to help them out. Kristin's 
friend might like one of the internet sites with discussion groups etc.
www.biculturalfamily.org  (with an on-line magazine one can subscribe to)
www.multilingualchildren.org
humanities.byu.edu/bilingua  (especially for non-native parents, but it 
doesn't look like it has changed much since I first looked at it)
(among others).

Good luck to the friend--and others contemplating the same move.

Barbara
*************************************************************
Barbara Zurer Pearson, Ph.D.
Research Associate,
Depts of Linguistics and Communication Disorders
226 South College
University of Massachusetts
Amherst MA 01003

Tel: 413-545-5023
Fax: 413-545-2792

bpearson at research.umass.edu
www.umass.edu/aae/bp_indexold.htm
www.zurer.com/pearson/bilingualchild

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Isenthia" <kristinborjesson at yahoo.de>
To: "Info-CHILDES" <info-childes at googlegroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, December 10, 2008 6:04 AM
Subject: Question on bilingual language acquisition from non-native speaker


>
> Dear All,
>
> I'm not entirely sure whether this is the right place to pose my
> question. However, a friend of mine suggested I'd try here to get some
> information on the following issue.
>
> I'd like to know whether there are any studies investigating the
> question of whether or not a non-native speaker of a language (with
> fairly high competency) should try and raise his child bilingually
> nevertheless. I'm simply interested in views on that question.
>
> I'd be very happy if you could help me with suggestions or references
> on this.
>
> Thanks a lot.
>
> Best,
> Kristin
> >
> 


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