Raising a Bilingual Child: Only Speaking English to my Children

Teaching Tips: ONLY Speaking English to my Children

Some of you out there may find yourself in a situation similar to the one I’ll talk about today. You may be in a different country and the language in question may not be English, but your situation may be similar.

I am in Japan. I have two very young children and a Japanese wife. We want our children to be completely and effortlessly bilingual. I work during the day and my wife stays home raising our kids. She takes them out everyday to play with their friends in the playground and they are very active in other ways. They go to the local community center, kindergarten and day care for various classes throughout the week. My son even takes swimming lessons. All of these are done in Japanese of course. We are in Japan after all. This means the majority of my kids’ days are spent immersed in the Japanese language.

My wife works hard to add some English throughout the day. She speaks to them at times in English and they watch DVDs of children’s programs from America, Australia and Canada. When I come home from work in the evening and on weekends that is really their chance to learn English. That is their opportunity to interact with a native English speaker using natural English. Time for them to play with their Daddy!

In a way, my poor Japanese skills have worked to an advantage for both my kids and me as I try to teach them English. At three years of age, my son already knows that English is his father’s language and Japanese is his mother’s.  Since I don’t speak Japanese (trying to remedy that at the moment), I must communicate with him in English and vice versa. Within our household it is a win/win situation.

Now, even if I could speak Japanese fluently I wouldn’t use it in front of my son during our day-to-day interactions. If I did, I would be robbing him of his chance to hear and utilize the Native English speaker living under his own roof. I would be taking away his teacher.

We live in Japan and every time my children head out the door Japanese surrounds them. They practice the language constantly and it is of course their first language. They don’t need me to speak it to them. Understanding Japanese does of course help me though. Often, my son may not know how to express himself in English. He asks me a question or makes a statement in Japanese. If I understand what he is saying, I can model the language for him in English. He speaks to me in Japanese; I repeat what he just said in English and then make him repeat it. The “modeling” style of language teaching works extremely well and the more Japanese I understand, the better I will be at using this method.

My wife has told me that some Japanese women she has met who are married to foreign men such as myself worry when their husbands only speak Japanese to their kids. Pre-school to early elementary school is what is known as the critical phase of language acquisition. That's the time when a child can learn a new language with no accent and sound like a native speaker (or at least close to it).  One mother shared her worries with my wife. She said that her kindergarten-aged children could only speak Japanese and was stressed because when they travel to America to meet her husband’s family, the kids would not have the ability to communicate. 

That’s something I think about often. I live far away from my family in Canada and someday I plan to return there with my family. For whatever reason, even if we stayed in Japan, half of my son’s family (and the majority of relatives) are Canadian and don’t speak Japanese. When we visit Canada and spend time with them, how will he be able to communicate with his grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles? He simply wouldn’t be able to. He’s be missing out on so much.

I suppose, another thing I would worry about, if I spoke Japanese to my son would be teaching him my bad pronunciation and broken grammar.

At the end of the day, whether my family moves to Canada or stays in Japan, my children will have wonderful advantages if they are able to communicate flawlessly in two languages. By using only English when I am with them, I am giving them the chance to always be with a teacher. I just have to remember to always be encouraging, make them comfortable to speak English and correct (in a caring way) the mistakes they make.

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Raising a Bilingual Child: Code Switching

Code Switching  - Up close and personal

I have to admit that watching my son’s language development is absolutely amazing. I grew up in “one language” household. My family used English. Now, my family in Japan uses both English in the house and outside as well.

My son is now a newly minted 3 year-old. As I’ve mentioned before, his first language is Japanese and his second language is English.  His speaking skills are quite high and it is clear that he can communicate much more fluently in Japanese, but what I have noticed recently is the dramatic increase in his code-switching skills.

In linguistics, code switching is switching between two or more language varieties, in the context of a single conversation.

When my son was only one year old he started conversing in both English and Japanese with family and friends. At that point he didn’t realize that there was a difference between the two languages he was learning. He would speak to his little friends in a mixture of English and Japanese and they would just look at him blankly. Their Japanese skills were also just emerging, but of course, they didn’t understand any English. Not long after he was two years old, a switch in his brain was flipped and he realized that when he was at the local kindergarten, community center or playground with his friends and their mothers, he should only speak Japanese. 

The most basic and obvious examples of code switching with my son are in the home when he interacts with his mother, who is Japanese and myself. When I come home from wok in the evening, he runs down the hall yelling “Hello Daddy” and then he commences to tell me about his day’s adventures in English. When I respond to him in English, he runs back down the hall and tells my wife what I just said, but in Japanese.

At the dinner table he sits at the end and we sit on either side of him. The majority of his day is spent “living in Japanese” so when I come home my wife and I speak English to each other and to my son (and now daughter). We haven’t set an “English Only” rule in our house that some other people do. We just tend to use English because my Japanese skills are not strong. Also, even though I am currently learning Japanese, I choose not to use it around my son since his only daily opportunities to hear natural English are with me.

Our normal dinner experiences are in English. At times though, my son will tell me a story in English and then immediately turn to his mother and repeat the story in Japanese. Other times, he will share it with her in English.

Watching his code switching skills evolve is a constant and wonderful process.

You can follow me on Twitter: @jlandkev