Your kids: What will their language of eloquence be?

Jive Turkey brings up a very valid point. Due to the large immigrant population in the North America, schools in general have long ago adapted to the situation and ESL support is readily available. There’s just not the critical mass of foreign langauge kids in Taiwan’s public schools for this to be an issue with the administration. One-to-one after school Chinese tutorials are what these kids need in the Taiwan context. In the Canadian context, if by the end of junior kindergarten, my son is still having significant English difficulties, I will probably do one of two things (or both): 1) call in the calvary – private English tutor, 2) incrementally increase English in the home and probably sacrifice Mandarin for the short term. [color=yellow]3) prepare to panic[/color]

I was an ESL kid myself (for one year, in grade 5) and I do wonder how I would have fared if I didn’t have that initial year of ESL. I suspect that I would been alright given that my older brother had no ESL and was dropped in at a higher grade. I think this is due to the fact that English and Chinese have drastically different learning curves.

In a study that I’ve read, the researchers tracked the language abilities of American and Taiwanese students from grade 1 all the way to the end of high school. The found that by the end of high school, both groups of students had equivalent language skills in their respective languages. However, the path to getting there was drastically different.

The learning curve for English was something more like a logarithmic function, rising fast initially but tapering off as the years go on. The learning curve for Chinese was something more like an exponential function. Slow moving at the beginning, but once it starts to take off, it really takes off. So for a student to get to 50% of end-of-high-school level English, it might take four years. But to get the other 50%, it takes eight years. For Chinese, it takes about eight years to get that first 50%, but the last 50% takes four years.

The results of this study matches well with my own personal experience. It also seems to agree with many of those that say that learning Chinese is damn damn hard while learning English is much easier. It would appear that for Chinese, one needs to first build a firm foundation before comprehension starts to take off. Many end up quitting before the foundation is complete.

Based on this study and my own anecdotal evidence, I believe Tigerman has done exactly the right thing by first grounding his son with a solid foundation of Chinese.

It certainly was appreciated. I look forward to reading your further posts on his subject.

In fact, it has been a very good topic with lots of good contributions. Its been interesting too because we have so many different perspectives and experiences that are being shared… lots of good ideas.

Hmm…How many kids do you know who fit this description? I didn’t know any kids like that when I lived in Taiwan. I knew a few whose parents were non-native Chinese speakers and who spoke their L1 at home and sent the child to a local school from early on. Some of those kids were in real trouble at school; I don’t think any of them were dong very well. I know or know of a whole lot more of such cases here in HK. These kids learn Chinese, but nearly all of them remain far behind their local peers until they leave school.

[/quote]

Just briefly on that: I know of a couple of cases where the Canadian (it so happens) child was pulled out of school because of parental concerns about the school system or what the child was getting {out of|up to in} it. One is, and the other probably is I think, the child of a poster here, so please weigh in! In both cases, the child was withdrawn from school for “homeschooling”, quickly followed by a return to Canada. In these cases, the system/ the school failed the child / the parents, that much is sure.

The interesting thing here is that both of these kids had the same command of spoken Mandarin as their local classmates: they spoke the language like little natives. Performance at school JT is of course an important index in this society, but linguistically they were doing damn well.

[quote=“smithsgj”]

The interesting thing here is that both of these kids had the same command of spoken Mandarin as their local classmates: they spoke the language like little natives. Performance at school JT is of course an important index in this society, but linguistically they were doing damn well.[/quote]
But they weren’t doing well enough to keep up with their education. Even in the US and Canada, there is often a problem with ESL students developing native like conversational skills, but failing to develop academic language skills. My brother, a secondary ESL teacher in Virginia, sees plenty of kids whose language skills allow them to fit in socially, but who are way behind in reading and writing skills and who may not be able to follow a teacher’s lecture. Many ESL program exit testing systems seem to be geared toward testing general proficiency rather than the academic skills that a child will need in order to merge with his native speaking peers. “Academic” English was long something that was intentionally taught and tested only at the tertiary education level. ESL teachers in N America are now accepting that there are distinct academic language skills that even primary school immigrant kids need to be learning.

My academic Chinese skills are just ok. I can write compositions that are generally well organized but with sentence grammar errors that the reader will have to tolerate. I can participate in discussions that won’t require too much patience from native speaking participants. I can follow lectures in fields of knowledge that I’m interested in. I can read textbooks at the secondary school level in most subjects, and I can read academic works on language teaching. I think a major reason I can manage to do these things with a language I didn’t start learning until age 22 is that I had already done it all in my first language. Imagine how it feels for a child or teenager who can’t manage to do these things in his first or second language. And unlike me, because that child has native conversational skills, everyone assumes that he should have native skills for academic language.

Excellent post, Jive Turkey.

I still doubt that a kid would be THAT far behind in Chinese class while being deeply immersed in Chinese, but I think your views are solid and worth thinking about. Your post describes some drawbacks of the ML@H strategy quite clearly.

This said, if indeed the child living in a ML@H home will be behind his peers in Chinese class, maybe it’s just the price to pay to for choosing English as a language of eloquence while living in Taiwan.

Chinese immersion programme!! What’s the name of the school? This is the first I’ve ever heard of such a thing in Canada.

Heh…

Calvary

Cavalry

I used to get those words mixed up a lot too! :laughing:

[quote=“Maoman”]Heh…

Calvary

Cavalry

I used to get those words mixed up a lot too! :laughing:[/quote]
Once an English teacher, always a spelling nazi.

As earlier with UK/US, it was just a typo. That’s my story and I’m yada yada yada. :raspberry:

Here’s the school in Calvary :wink: :

schools.cbe.ab.ca/b609/mandarin.htm

Strictly speaking it’s not an immersion programme because only 30% of the teaching is done in Mandarin. But for that percentage of the time the kids are immersed! At the time we signed up, it was more like 50-50, with “science” being taught in English (it’s a special science school, too) and “humanities” in Chinese. Those categories strike me as odd at primary school level but there you go.

The bit about the scheme being intended for non-native speakers is new too. I guess if we applied now, they might turn my son down.

Under that original scheme, I wonder when they would have expected the English academic skills (as discussed by JT) to kick in, and how. Presumably the Chinese skillset would not be culturally bound to da zhongguo zhuyi, standing to attention, Confucianism and all the other features of Taiwan primary school life, but it would have to pretty much rely on rote mem, cos how else do you do Chinese?

JT, I would ascribe the lack of success of my Canadian friends’ children to cross-cultural issues (in particular, difficulty of communication between the parent and the teachers). I hear what you say about the academic and the conversational being discrete aspects of language learning; but what preparation or training goes on in the average local Taiwan household for learning? None, of course, as most parents here don’t see it as their responsibility to teach their kids anything very much at all :smiling_imp: So it’s hard to see how the implicit mL@H (please use a little m peeps, as majority language at home is also a possible strategy) that goes on in a Canadian household can be responsible for the problems.

A possibility: the fact that the Canadians did prepare their kids for learning, but for the wrong kind of learning, may have upset the applecart? It’s not that all the local kids had been hothoused and buxibanned up to the eyeballs, in case you were wondering, cos our boy had no special classes, a relaxed kindy, and nothing academic from me unless you count bedtime stories, and he always comes top of the class :rainbow: (admittedly a very small class!)

[quote=“Tigerman”]
Also, he was never limited to speaking English only with me in Taiwan. I frequently take my boy with me when I go to Carnegie’s (on weekend days) and other places and events. .[/quote]

Glad you made that clear! He may have great taste in music, but we wouldn’t want him dancing on the bar!

太誇張了吧! I am in favour of mL@H over OPOL, other things being equal. But the choice of theoretical model pales into insignificance when compared to having a positive attitude, wanting the kid to be bilingual or monolingual, whichever is best for him; offering lots of opportunities to use (eg) English over summer or with friends of the family here, and generally being a cool dad. T/man’s done all that, and it sounds like the tigercub’s English is pretty bloody good, from my reading of the posts.

A very interesting thread!

If eloquence is indeed an actual higher mastery of a language that mere fluency, I want my children to make up their own minds. After having a whole set of educational priorities defined for me by my folks, I want my children to attain eloquence on their own initiative. I want to explore and define what their interests are, and then try and encourage them in those fields, rather than force feed them expensive hoighty-toighty higher learning.

To that end, I am more interesting in teaching them about the world around them, and seeing what stimulates them, rather than instruction in some abstract ‘quality education’. Extra reading is essential, but so is a masterful analysis of the true nature of human beings.

My daughter attends a Chinese preschool and has been there for about three years. Before school our neighbor looked after her for a few hours several times a week from the time my daughter was about nine months old. She speaks fluent Chinese at school, can translate for me (my Chinese stinks), but also has the ability to explain complex stories and plots in English. Every evening she gives me a rundown about the soap opera of a life that she has at school. I’m from the States and my husband is from Scotland so English is the only language spoken at home. At one time she would play by herself in Chinese, but now when she’s playing she’ll speak English. If she has a DVD with language options, she’ll watch it once in English and then depending upon her mood, in Chinese. She says that some things are funnier in Chinese. I don’t get it. I’m not bragging, sort of, but I’m just wondering if she’s going to be totally screwed up later in life because she’s spending most of her day speaking and learning Chinese and then only about four hours a day speaking and practicing English. I worry that she’ll have dodgy English and drop her articles and Ss.
What really irks me, sort of off topic, is the reaction she gets from locals when she speaks Chinese. She was made here, born here, and goes to school here. Why shouldn’t she speak Chinese? When I saw a Chinese person speaking English in the States I didn’t make a fuss about it. It sort of gets my goat up, but then I have to consider that some people have very little exposure to life outside of Taiwan.
As far as elementary school is concerned, we’d like for her to continue to learn Chinese but we’ve decided to move to Tien Mu for this. There’s Shi Dong elementary that has about 50 international students in attendance. If we stayed in our current area, she’d be the lone foreign child. Being half African American and Scottish, she wouldn’t exactly blend.
Does anyone have any suggestions about keeping her English strong as well as her Chinese? I try to go over things that she’s learned at school with her in English so she’ll have the vocabulary to express what she’s learned, but I don’t know if it will be enough.
Thoughts and nice comments would be appreciated. Also, how can I tell what is her first language? Sometimes she’ll speak in her sleep in Chinese and sometimes it’s English.
Thanks,
JCG

By half of the parents, at least. :wink:

The distinction, which I’ve not seen here as yet, is good written ability. In my case I want my step-daughrer, who’s first language is Thai, second is at this stage very basic English and ideally Mandarin a third, to read and write primarily in English. She is getting an English education at a international school and to my utter amazement (she’s been going for three days) is apparently head of the class on recognising written (English) words.

I think reading comprehension is fairly easy in all three languages, but good writing in English is not as easy, or rather the standards of written profficiency are much higher, on average, for English.

Ummm . . . I’m also an editor, so I fecking hate reading crap!

HG

Catsmama, Cat speaks only English the whole time she’s home; English is her language of preference for watching telly (and she can explain the plot in English of something she’s seen in Chinese); she plays by herself in English… what on earth are you worrying about? Why do you feel the need to “go over” what she’s “learned”? She’s at pre-school for crying out loud, just let her have fun; if you’re taking her “studies” that seriously then I think you must be going a bit native.

I so agree with what you say about the reaction of locals to a foreign-looking girl speaking Chinese – we get it the whole time and my wife’s Taiwanese ffs. But to be honest, you seemed slightly bewildered by her bilingualism yourself. If you are bragging a tiny bit for having such a cool daughter, I say good on you… but I can see no problem whatsoever.

She’s not going to “lose” English like if you were living in the USA and speaking some obscure dialect in the family. She will always be motivated to learn and use English, even if she spends her whole childhood in Taiwan.

From what other posters have said here, she’s far more likely to hit problems with academic Chinese once she hits elementary school. I think that’s pretty unlikely in your case, but good luck and keep us posted.

[quote=“TheGingerMan”] If eloquence is indeed an actual higher mastery of a language that mere fluency, I want my children to make up their own minds. After having a whole set of educational priorities defined for me by my folks, I want my children to attain eloquence on their own initiative.
[/quote]

Hats off to that, I totally agree!

[quote=“smithsgj”][quote=“TheGingerMan”] If eloquence is indeed an actual higher mastery of a language that mere fluency, I want my children to make up their own minds. After having a whole set of educational priorities defined for me by my folks, I want my children to attain eloquence on their own initiative.
[/quote]
Hats off to that, I totally agree![/quote]
Hmmm. I partially agree. Leaving it entirely up to the children is a bit of a cop-out. It’s like the parents who say “We want our kids to choose a religion they’re comfortable with”, all the while failing to provide them with a grounding in or understanding of any religion. End result? Kids have no religion, and more distressing, no understanding of any religion, which was surely not the parents’ intention.

Some things require more than a kids’ own initiative - parental guidance, discipline, and love are often necessary to produce the desired results. Do you want a Tiger Woods? His spectacular success was grounded in his father’s guidance. Mozart and Bach? Same thing. Oh yeah, and Brittany Spears, too. :stuck_out_tongue:

But getting back to educational priorities, it often takes kids until their teen years and sometimes not even then, to take their own initiative in defining educational priorities. Parents shouldn’t be observers in the process, but participants, IMO.

well i dont think gingerman was saying he and his partner would NOT provide guidance

Great thread going here. My two cents. First, a few links. For those interested in language acquisition (OPOL, mL@H, etc.), check out the Multilingual Children’s Association. You could spend the better part of a day in there reading just the links off the FAQs. And yes, they have a discussion forum. Second, a PDF file of Laura-Ann Petitto and Kevin Dunbar’s recent findings in educational neuroscience on the subject of bilingual brains (the first nine pages are relevant). Here are the summary paragraphs regarding previous and new findings:

[quote] We found that (1) early (before age 5) bilingual language exposure is optimal for dual language development and dual language mastery (Kovelman & Petitto, 2002). (2) Those bilingual children who are first raised monolingual from birth and who are then exposed to a new language between ages 2-9 years of age can achieve the morphological and syntactic fundamentals of the new language within their first year of exposure. However, this rapid acquisition of new language fundamentals is possible only when extensive and systematic exposure to the new language occurs across multiple contexts, for example, in the community and home, with far less optimal dual language mastery being achieved if exposure comes exclusively within the classroom (Kovelman & Petitto, 2003; Petitto, Kovelman & Harasymowicz, 2003). (3) Bilingual children exposed to two languages from birth achieve their linguistic milestones in each of their languages at the same time and, crucially, at the same time as monolinguals (Holowka, Brosseau-Lapré & Petitto, 2002; Kovelman & Petitto, 2002; Petitto & Kovelman, 2003; Petitto, Katerelos, et al., 2001). (4) Bilingual children exposed to their new language between ages 2-9 years of age exhibit “stage-like” language development in their new language. Surprisingly, this stage-like development is highly comparable in content to the stagelike language development typical of monolingual children acquiring the language from birth, differing of course in the age when it occurs given the later exposure to the child’s other language (Kovelman & Petitto, 2003). (5) Importantly, introduction of the new language does not ‘damage’ or ‘contaminate’ the home language of the child (Petitto et al., 2003).

In both behavioral and brain-imaging studies, we found that the age of bilingual language exposure has a significant impact on children’s dual language mastery. Remarkably, early age bilingual exposure has a positive impact on multiple aspects of a child’s development: linguistic, cognitive, and reading. Children who experience early, extensive, and systematic exposure to both of their languages quickly grasp the fundamentals of both of their languages and in a manner virtually identical to that of monolingual language learners. As adults, these bilingual individuals, in addition to their good behavioral performance on language tasks, also show that their brains are processing their two languages in a similar manner, and virtually identical to monolingual adults. The field raised concerns that early bilinguals may be linguistically, cognitively and academically disadvantaged. Our findings suggest that early bilingualism offers no disadvantages; on the contrary, young bilinguals may be afforded a linguistic and a cognitive advantage. Early dual language exposure is also key to skilled reading acquisition. Moreover, learning to read in two languages may afford an advantage to children from monolingual homes in key phoneme awareness skills vital to reading success.[/quote]
For what it’s worth, I think it’s far more interesting to hear what’s in this thread and others like it – research is great and all, but there’s nothing quite like real world experience. To wit, in case you missed them, some of the older Forumosa threads on children and language acquisition are [url=Does Your Kid Spontaneously Translate? [url=What language does mama speak? [url=Immersion experiences with young kids (2 & 4)? and [url=Is Mandarin taught in your home? :wink:

But on to eloquence. Here’s what the OED has to say on the matter (slightly different from the Wiki def):

BTW, there’s a rare usage of the word that denotes a group of lawyers – “an eloquence of lawyers.”

As pointed out several times on this thread, eloquence is rare even in one language. Eloquence would seem to involve familiarity with many rhetorical conventions and strategies, a rather sizable vocabulary and attendant proficiency in word choice, outstanding public speaking and composition skills, and a propensity for metaphor verging on the poetic. In Chinese, imagine a speaker trying to convince an audience of something – speaking with great power, then dropping precisely the right proverb at just the right moment during the speech - with the result that the hearers do mental oohs and ahhs. In English, listen to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s “I Have a Dream” - or read “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” And then there’s always Plato-cum-Socrates doing the dialectic two-step with his interlocutors, esp. in the Phaedrus.

So are we really talking about eloquence here? Or is it a matter of “Which language would I like my child to be more / highly proficient in?” And the deeper question, which sjcma raised in relating the immigrant experience, “Does part of this stem from my fear that my child will become local, i.e. foreign to me?” Whereas many immigrant parents try to prevent their children from becoming “too local,” the children usually become bilingual and bicultural to a far greater degree than the parents ever did (or ever wanted). Chaos theory meets language acquisition in the margins of culture. While I’m not presuming to answer these questions, IMHO, parenting involves regularly questioning your own motives while being flexible enough to refigure goals and expectations along the way.

In this household, we’re OPOL, and it works well for us. Smell the Mitten has no problem speaking English to me and my folks, Chinese to Smell the Wife, and Taiwanese to the babysitter. Of course she mixes – perfectly natural, and when she learns the appropriate word or phrase, she swaps it in – happens all the time. Does she get 30% of her waking hours in the minority language? Definitely. And her little brother hears English from me constantly – only two months old but he always smiles when I say “hello.” As for forcefulness, vocabulary, rhetorical skill, critical thinking, public speaking, and expressive/persuasive writing, well, down the line and if I’m still alive, we’ll see. Verbal/linguistic isn’t the only intelligence, even though it and logical-mathematical still have quite a bit of currency in traditional education systems and mindsets. As for right now, I believe I have successfully fostered a love of reading (story time every single night, monthly trips to Taipei Public for more books, her own little bookcase) and she’s starting to read a bit on her own (been doing about ten minutes a day on phonics for the past year), but that could go anywhere, and most of the time, well, we just play.

Eloquence as a parenting objective? Nothing wrong with that - cognitive (reasoning) skill and affective (emotional) expressiveness are worthy objectives in any language. As Maoman pointed out, there are indeed children whose parents want them to be concert pianists, doctors, etc., and children who go on to fulfill their parents’ dreams (which, in some cases, coincide with their own).

So what steps to take for eloquence? As your daughter grows up, you could encourage her to become active in speech and forensics and acting, learn lots of words and practice discriminating in their usage, practice writing in all forms (particularly persuasive essays, which you will definitely want to submit to various places since eloquence is always an audience value judgment), and read extensively (probably wouldn’t do to have her speaking the way James Joyce wrote, though). Sounds like a lot of work – and it’s worth keeping in mind that unrealistic / rigid parental expectations have alienated many a child. But offered as a possible direction, well, she might just go for it and one day put us all to shame. Not that we were ever all that good to begin with. :smiley:

Great, great post smell-the-glove, especially those links you provided. Too much information to digest though!! :astonished:

An excellent point. It’s always a fine line for us trying to balance high expectations for our children but not so high as to unduly burden them.