Op-Ed: Teaching Languages? You could and you should.

Redick Dun April 26, 2021; 3 mins to read

A mother is teaching her son new words, Kristen Butler

Imagine that you are teaching your son to speak English. In front of him, you hold

a red object, which you clearly know is an apple, and at the same time, you open

your mouth and say ‘apple’. After a few times, it seems like your child is able to

identify the object, because from now on, everytime you say ‘apple’, he uses his

finger to point at the right object. You are satisfied with what you have done; in

fact, you deserve to be proud of yourself, but you still underestimate your ability as

a natural linguistic teacher. You can do a lot more than that.

Researchers have found that children, starting from infancy, are learning new

languages by having language experience. By as early as 17 months, infants tend to

associate a new word with a new object rather than the one that has already been

associated with a word. For instance, if there are two objects in front of him, one is

an apple and the other is a banana, your son would be more likely to match the new

word ‘banana’ to the yellow object as he already knew that the red object is an

apple. This matching heuristic is called disambiguation, and language experience

plays a significant role in the development of it.

What would happen if you say ‘manzana’(spanish word for apple) while your son

already knows that the object in your hand is an apple? He would start to learn a

new word from a new language! Monolingual children might learn English words

faster than bilingual or trilingual children do, but in a given time period, the

amounts of words they could learn across different languages are very close. It

means that parents/caregivers are definitely capable of raising their children as

bilinguals or trilinguals, while the parents/caregivers are not necessarily required to

speak those ‘additional’ languages fluently.

I still remember that in high school spanish class, every time I was trying to

memorize the spanish word for pencil which is ‘lápiz’, the english word ‘pencil’
would dominate my head and refuse the entry of a new vocabulary. Things could

have been different if I had learned spanish when I was younger.

It is not a must-do thing to teach your children multiple languages; different

aspects of parenting also need attention. However, if you want to be more than a

normal parent, teaching your children to speak an additional language is the most

practical method. Imagine that, if one day after school, your child asks you to sign

on their failed spanish test, would you still be proud of only teaching him english?