Transcript

Sean Pert:

I work with bilingual children, mostly from a Pakistani heritage background. Children will hear codeswitching, very frequently from their parents, because they’re living in a bilingual world. So they will use English, for example, when they’re out shopping, and they will hear Mirpuri, their home language, when they’re talking to friends and relatives. And often the community have parents where one parent would speak Mirpuri, another would speak Punjabi, and all of them would speak English to some degree.

Many professionals, and indeed parents, believe that bilingualism is a disadvantage, particularly for education, because education tends to be delivered in the medium of English. Many parents say to me ‘Are you going to look at my child’s English skills?’, and I reply ‘No, I’m going to look at their strongest language, which is your home language.’ Parents are quite surprised that once children have a foundation home language, I don’t need to see them anymore because they naturally acquire English spontaneously using their own resources and the strategies and techniques that they’ve learnt via acquiring their home language.

It isn’t bilingualism itself which causes speech and language problems, they just happen to have difficulties in the same way as other monolingual English children do. Children who hear two languages in their community are very likely to do that themselves. So, for example, they would insert content words, particularly, into a grammatical frame, but the grammatical frame itself would maintain the integrity of the home language that was selected.

So, for example, in Mirpuri, which is a Pakistani heritage language, they have the agent, the patient and the action in that order. So, for example, ‘The girl is eating a banana’ would be ‘[SPEAKING MIRPURI]’, and that’s literally ‘The girl banana eating’. In codeswitching, children are just as likely to say ‘A girl banana eat [canipy]’, that way they’ve inserted the English lexical items of ‘girl’ and ‘banana’ and what the children do there is do a dummy doing verb, just doing, to hold the gender agreement and the morphology.

This is very sophisticated and this is something that children from around the age of three and a half are able to do, which, not coincidentally, is the same age that monolingual English children become able to use morphology confidently. So we can see that children who are able to insert English words into their home-language frame are sophisticated language users and therefore are not cause for concern. Interestingly, children with specific language impairment who are bilingual are unable to integrate two languages together; and children who don’t codeswitch in this way are therefore good candidates for further investigation to see if they are having difficulties with their language acquisition.

Actually, bilingual children have an advantage in that they can see that the surface pattern is exactly that. So an item like ‘banana’ they’ll hear it called ‘banana’ and ‘kela’, so they can see that it’s a surface lexical item that’s attached to a deeper meaning. So bilingual children have this unique perspective, they can see both sides of the linguistic labelling system. They're also exposed to two different syntax and grammar structures when they're hearing English and Mirpuri, so they very quickly become adept at acquiring languages.

It’s interesting that children who remain bilingual seem to have an advantage when it comes to acquiring additional languages and also in their metalinguistic skills in general.