Bilingualism: Chinese and English 雙語的孩子: 中文與英文

How do kids really become bilingual or trilingual 怎麼樣才能夠給孩子有效的雙語教育? That is the questions faced by both cross-cultural and bi-cultural parents. The more I think, which is not too often, the more I realize how much of an influence social norms have on our children 環境很重要. It can of course mold their behavior and world outlook, but more important to this post, it can determine which language or how many languages they speak.

Sometimes it doesn’t even matter where they are raised. Friends of ours, American wife / Japanese husband 日本丈夫 / 美國妻子, are raising their son in Japan. They are reluctant to send their son to the American school there because the standard is to speak English only and regard Japanese as a language of “the natives.” Since children spend more waking hours at school than at school 因為上課的時間很久所以會影響孩子的態度, regardless of how much Japanese language training he got at home he would end up not really being fluent in the language because it would just not be the thing to do in his social circles. That is one reason why we home school 家校 our children and it seems to be working. Our children all speak Chinese with each other at home but they can speak English fluently as well 我們的孩子都是雙語的. We can carefully give them a blend of social environments, Chinese-speaking and English-speaking, young and old.