Early Develpment of Bilingualism

Week Six

Chapter 5: Early Development of Bilingualism.

Early bilingualism is a very important topic in America’s schools. In fact, since America started to integrate bilingualism education in the educational system, it was a need to focus in children who exhibited early bilingualism. Thus, it is crucial to address the ways how children become bilingual and multilingual, examine the issues involved in these aspects of the early language development, and include psychological, linguistic, social and educational factors.

Since birth, many children grow up to become bilingual or multilingual. Children may be impacted by bilingualism simultaneously when they are exposed to both languages at the same time from birth, or sequentially when the child learns one language first and then learns a second language. It is crucial to establish that there is no distinction between informal language acquisition and formal language learning. As a matter of fact, acquiring two languages from birth is not detrimental to a child’s language growth. Infants can differentiate between languages from a very early age. They are able to use appropriate “language matching” when talking to others.

Parents may take choices and use more than one language. They have the ability to speak more than one language to their children. The choice is referred to as “private language planning and family language policy”. Parents make language choices by conscious, subconscious and spontaneous decisions. Languages choices may change, in many cases, dependant on where the family lives. Also, bilingualism in childhood is influenced by factors outside of parents and the home. It is crucial to set that there is no balanced bilingualism. The usage of two or more languages is related to the change of the time as family, social and educational circumstances, and language use opportunities.

In order to have a broad knowledge of early childhood bilingualism, we need to categorize it according to the language or language spoken by parents to children or languages ofthe community. The categories are: (1) one parent one language (OPOL), (2) home language is different from the language outside the home, (3) mixed language, (4) delayed instruction of the second languages. Although, this category system has limitations, all categories describe how children may acquire two or more languages in their early childhood.

There are many people who are multilingual because of their geographic location. For example, some Swedes are fluent in Swedish, German and English. Many individuals in Africa, India and China speak local, regional and national or international languages. Also, children may become trilingual because parents speak two languages at home and they are learning other languages outside of the home, such as in school.

Mixing one language with another is an issue that parents and teachers have with bilingual students. Codeswitching and translanguaging are terms used to describe how bilingual children occasionally switch their languages. The first one is used to refer to any switches between languages that occur within or across sentences during the same conversation. The second term is related to how bilinguals use their two languages in daily life. In other words, codeswitching tends to focus more on the code and translanguaging focus on bilingual speakers. Both are frequent behaviors shown among bilinguals.

 The study of early development of bilingualism provides us a broad analysis of how languages are used by children and how languages impact a child’s linguistic.