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From: reza@ihuxb.UUCP (H. Reza Taheri)
Newsgroups: net.kids,net.nlang
Subject: Re: Teaching children to be bilingual
Message-ID: <858@ihuxb.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 8-Oct-84 14:16:58 EDT
Article-I.D.: ihuxb.858
Posted: Mon Oct  8 14:16:58 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 9-Oct-84 03:50:41 EDT
References: <1505@ucla-cs.ARPA>
Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Naperville, IL
Lines: 42

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    Rich Wales asks how you can raise a child to be bilingual.  His article
is 117 lines long, so I won't  quote any part of it.  Suffice to say
that it is assumed that one parent's native tongue is X and the other's
is Y.  Each parent speaks the other's native language reasonably well
and the family lives in a country where the native language is either
X or Y.

   Unfortunately, it does not work that way.  I have seen many examples
of children with the above situation and they are not completely
bilingual.  The best that can happen is you have a kid whose native
tongue is X and also speaks Y reasonably well.

   A child learns a language from two sources, her/his family and the
community s/he lives in.  I have seen many kids who to came to the
US without knowing a bit of English and after one (yes one) year you
could not tell that they were not born here.

   My mother's native tongue was a flavor of Turkish.  I can
understand some Turkish through listening to her talking to her
sisters.  On the other hand, my cousins can speak perfect Turkish
since both their parents were native speakers of Turkish.

   In short, a kid will speak languages X and Y as well as any native
speaker of X "or" Y if

1- s/he is raised partly where the native language is X and partly
where it is Y,

2- or the native language of "both" her/his parents is X and they use X
exclusively to speak in the house, and they live in a country where
the native language is Y.

   If one parent speaks in X and the other parent AND the rest of the
child's world speak in Y, which language do you think s/he will adopt as
her/his first?  How well do you think s/he will be in X?

Trilingually yours,

H. Reza Taheri
...!ihnp4!ihuxb!reza
(312)-979-1040