Les Kelloucq en voyage

Raising bilingual children

Tonight I attended a seminar entitled “Twist or Jive? The relationship between bilingual children’s two languages”. This was being held in one of the Sorbonne buildings in the Latin Quarter, an area of Paris I don’t visit very often. The speaker was Annick de Houwer from the University of Antwerp, a Belgian linguist and authority on the matter.

A couple of thoughts, back from the seminar. First of all, there are so many worlds co-existing in this city, as in any city, that they feel like parallel universes that rarely meet. One world is this intellectual, academic world where people devote their whole life to very specialized questions. It has its own rules and codes. It is a world I was on track to join at some point, but I quickly chose another path. To me now from the outside, this world seems both alluring and also a little silly. But it was nice to sit there, listening to this woman and soaking in what she was saying without the usual need to take notes and report later.

So I won’t report on what she said except to say that the “one parent/one language” theory seems pretty much out the window. That’s fine with me as we decided early on that we were not going to speak our own language to the children, but do it on the way that felt more natural to us (i.e. English at home and French outside, at least when we are in France). We have never read books about raising bilingual children; we have gone with our gut feelings. So far, so good.

kelloucq le 24.11.08 à 22:26 dans Actualités -
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