Pretending not to understand the ML
Sept 17, 2015 19:43:36 GMT 9
Post by James Harland on Sept 17, 2015 19:43:36 GMT 9
This morning I read this useful Bilingual Monkeys post: bilingualmonkeys.com/if-at-first-you-dont-succeed-you-may-be-the-minority-language-parent. I like the 'buckets metaphor' used there, and it is interesting to see how using a gradual approach to pretending not to understand the ML, a ml parent got her child to speak the ml to her.
I actually only heard of this "pretending not to understand the ML" approach at the weekend, but in a stronger form, where the mother of a would-be-trilingual one-year old said she was planning to ignore anything the child doesn't say to her in Portuguese!
In fact my sister raised two bilingual sons, and she was very much against the idea of pretending not to understand the ML. Still, her two boys, now of young secondary and older primary age, always talk to her in the ml.
Until the weekend I was happily responding to my children's ML using the ml, thinking it was the right thing to do. However, I have not been satisfied with the results, as my nearly four-year-old twins have pretty much exclusively been speaking to me in the ML for the last six months, which they know I understand as my wife and I use the one-parent-one-language approach.
Since the weekend, I've been experimenting: pretending in a playful way not to understand them when they answer my questions in the ML. I haven't been doing this completely consistently, but maybe about half the time the girls speak to me. The results have been mystifying: With one daughter the results have almost been instantly what I hoped for - she started using individual English words at the start of the week and yesterday was cracking out more complex phrases "I want to put numbers on the wall." (foam letters in bath). But my other daughter has been reacting more like the child in the article I referenced above, saying she doesn't know how to say it in English, and more often than not refusing to, even if I feed her some of the words or phrases she needs.
So I'm now wondering how to proceed. I don't want to abandon the whole project, but I'm wondering whether to go to the step-by-step approach suggested in the article, for the sake of the child who says she doesn't know. Or maybe to plough ahead with my current pretend-not-to-understand-answers-in-the-ML approach, and hope that the use of the ml by the one daughter will provide some of the input the other daughter needs to break the language barrier. What I'm afraid of in the latter case is of the daughter who is currently refusing to speak the ml digging her heels in and making it a habit to refuse.
I know it's early days (only 4 days of trying the pretending-not-to-understand technique), but I'm worried about getting this right early on.
I actually only heard of this "pretending not to understand the ML" approach at the weekend, but in a stronger form, where the mother of a would-be-trilingual one-year old said she was planning to ignore anything the child doesn't say to her in Portuguese!
In fact my sister raised two bilingual sons, and she was very much against the idea of pretending not to understand the ML. Still, her two boys, now of young secondary and older primary age, always talk to her in the ml.
Until the weekend I was happily responding to my children's ML using the ml, thinking it was the right thing to do. However, I have not been satisfied with the results, as my nearly four-year-old twins have pretty much exclusively been speaking to me in the ML for the last six months, which they know I understand as my wife and I use the one-parent-one-language approach.
Since the weekend, I've been experimenting: pretending in a playful way not to understand them when they answer my questions in the ML. I haven't been doing this completely consistently, but maybe about half the time the girls speak to me. The results have been mystifying: With one daughter the results have almost been instantly what I hoped for - she started using individual English words at the start of the week and yesterday was cracking out more complex phrases "I want to put numbers on the wall." (foam letters in bath). But my other daughter has been reacting more like the child in the article I referenced above, saying she doesn't know how to say it in English, and more often than not refusing to, even if I feed her some of the words or phrases she needs.
So I'm now wondering how to proceed. I don't want to abandon the whole project, but I'm wondering whether to go to the step-by-step approach suggested in the article, for the sake of the child who says she doesn't know. Or maybe to plough ahead with my current pretend-not-to-understand-answers-in-the-ML approach, and hope that the use of the ml by the one daughter will provide some of the input the other daughter needs to break the language barrier. What I'm afraid of in the latter case is of the daughter who is currently refusing to speak the ml digging her heels in and making it a habit to refuse.
I know it's early days (only 4 days of trying the pretending-not-to-understand technique), but I'm worried about getting this right early on.