I've noticed that whenever the subject of our raising our daughter multilingual comes up, I tend to try to say as little as possible about it. I should note that usually this subject either comes up with monolingual families, or families where one (or both!) parents are bilingual but for whatever reason are not passing that skill to their child. The comments we get are usually expressions of being impressed, acknowledging what a good idea it is, and then dismissing it as something too difficult for them to manage or consider (yes, even the bilingual parents say this!).
It's in my nature to try to not make other people feel bad. I see multilingualism as a definite plus, so much so, that it sort of makes me feel bad that another family isn't reaping the benefits of raising their child multi-lingual.
I don't actually say anything to devalue what we're doing. But I don't linger on the subject either. I find there are times when our multilingual parenting intersects with another subject that is being discussed, and as I listen to myself venture down that path, I become aware of the fact that the other parent cannot relate.
Take language learning and homeschooling for instance. There have been times when I was discussing reasons for wanting to homeschool our daughter, and the conversation naturally led to language learning. One of the many reasons we are (yes, are, not will be!) homeschooling is to allow equal exposure to all of our languages.
One of the first pieces of advice you hear when being encouraged to speak your native language to your child is that once they go to school, they will quickly catch up with their peers and pick up the mainstream language. This is definitely true. It's so true, in fact, that unless the parents are careful and have a clear plan in place, the mainstream language will replace the minority language. If all of the child's friends only speak the majority language, and the child spends all day every day immersed in the language of their friends, and then the child is allowed free access to media in the mainstream language, the mere fact that mom and/or dad address the child in the family language will not be enough to counter all of the exposure and motivation to speak the majority language.
At first, the child may reply in the minority language, but after years of no extra enforcement, the purpose of maintaining the family language will begin to be lost on the child. The child will then start to respond in the mainstream language even when being addressed in the family language. Best case scenario, the child becomes a passive bilingual, able to understand but not to express herself in the target language. If the family relations get strained for whatever reason, or if the child moves away for an extended period of time, even the ability to understand the language may be lost on the child. And then you have a family reunion of the elder relatives being forced to speak in sometimes broken English (for example) because there is no other way to communicate with the child. Then you have a situation where inside jokes and family anecdotes told in the native language are completely lost on the child, who no longer gets the nuances of the language, even if he still retains some vocabulary. Then you have an adult who says "I used to know this language, but..."
So with all of this knowledge in place, homeschooling is the way we are choosing to encourage ongoing exposure of our family languages, right along English. I have yet to meet a homeschooling family who can relate to this reason for homeschooling. And so I try to curb the extent to which I am enthusiastic about homeschooling for the purpose of raising a multilingual child.
I wonder if this is bad, or just neutral. Will this somehow negatively affect my daughter if she overhears one of these conversations and wonders why I didn't explain how homeschooling helps us stay a multilingual family?
I once participated in a multilingual parenting webinar where I wrote in a question about best practices on incorporating language learning into the homeschool. I got a lot of fumbling around with best guesses, because the participants were not homeschoolers and didn't know how homeschooling would affect multilingual parenting - for better or for worse.
My linguistic goals for our daughter are not very steep. I don't expect her to reach college level literacy in Polish and Spanish. I do expect her to be prepared for college level work in English, if she chooses to pursue that route. So the core curriculum and resources we will use will be in English. But the discussions surrounding the lessons will continue in our native languages, and the supplemental materials we bring in can also be in Polish and Spanish (say, videos or books on the subject we are learning, or - better yet - traveling to a place where our heritage languages are spoken, to explore a lesson on history or geography.)
One aspect of homeschooling that I don't fuss over is foreign language. On one hand, there is a Polish Saturday school I want to send our daughter to (maybe as early as next year). We do have access to media and even Rosetta Stone in Polish and Spanish, which we could incorporate into a "language lesson". But why decontextualize it like that? The truth is, Polish and Spanish will not be our daughter's "foreign languages". They will be her native languages. She can utilize them right along English in pursuing history, science, literature, etc.
One method of homeschooling, Classical, stresses the study of Latin for the purpose of easing the future study of other Romance languages. Honestly, I scoff at this idea. Unless a person goes into medicine, why take that extra step of Latin? Why not go directly to the living Romance language that can be used in travel, in business, in culture? And how about the hundreds of other languages in the world that are not based on Latin? Are they in any way less important to know? Of course not!
This shouldn't be any surprise to me, but this is truly the story of my life - straddling two camps that are complimentary but simply do not have an established community that overlaps them both. It's like having to put on my homeschooling hat when in homeschooling circles, and my multilingual parenting hat when in multilingual settings.
It's predicaments like these that feed into the very title of my blog - Hodgepodge Parenting! :)
