Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 exptools 1/6/84; site ihuxb.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxj!ihnp4!ihuxb!reza 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 {} 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