科目試験の結果

次回のレポート締め切りが三月三日なので、
ぼちほち前回の科目試験の結果が出る頃だと思っていた。

普段はほとんど意識していない郵便受けが気になり始めた。
案の定、今日見慣れた封筒が送られてきた。

結果は三勝三敗だった。なんだか微妙な結果である。

西洋史特殊Ⅲ→A　日米比較文化論→B　西洋史特殊Ⅰ→C

教育学　英語Ⅶ　教育社会学はDだった。

持ち込み可の西洋史特殊ⅢがAなのは当然としても、Ⅰが合格だったのは驚いた。
いつかも書いたが、知っていることのすべて（ごく僅か）と、ほとんど「想像」で書いた。

寝る前に、ベッドのなかで古代エジプトに関する本を読んでいるのだが・・
今日から読む本を変えるべきだろうか？

教育学は正直言ってガッカリした。今までの中で、一番よく書けたし少し自信もあった。
諦めると言いながら、未練たらしく引きずってきたが、これで終わりにしよう。

英語は運が良ければ？と期待していたが・・そうは甘くないらしい。

そんなわけで英語の最後の章です。

[68]
6  Reactions of other people

'At the time when I was trying to bring up my children with two
languages, I usually met with resistance from the people around me
and their advice would be to stop confusing my children. In due course
I did give up talking Dutch to them and consequently my children
can only speak Greek. Nowadays people again offer their opinion, but
this time they will say, "Why on earth didn't you teach your children
your own language ?" '
This is the experience of Anke, the Dutch friend who wrote to me
from Greece. It demonstrates that, whatever decision parents have
made with respect to the bilingual upbringing of their children, it
never seems right in the eyes of the outside world. A few parents told
me that in their view there is a general lack of interest in this subject.
Others were convinced that people don't care what language you speak
at home, providing you keep it private. But my main impression is
that Anke's experience is fairly typical. For most parents agree that
there is an almost constant stream of comments, advice, criticism,
and warnings, which are bound to affect them in some way or other.

Who are they?
What do other people know about bilingual children? It appears that
this is one of those subjects about which a lot of people think they
know something. Moreover, they are always volunteering this knowl-
edge. One of the mothers I talked to complained:
 'There are many self-appointed experts around, but the advice people

[69]
give you is never very helpful, even if it is only meant to reassure you
that there needn't be any problems.'
Let us have a closer look at who those people are and at the things
they are telling parents. First of all, the category of 'other people' is
too wide and therefore it makes sense to distinguish between neigh-
bours, acquaintances, friends, relatives, and schoolteachers. They all
play a part in parents' lives and they all have their different reasons
for commenting on a particular course of action in the bilingual
situation.
Neighbours and acquaintances usually do not have a personal interest
in the bilingual development of one's children, while relatives and
schoolteachers have. I will talk about the last two groups later, but
first we will have a look at the comments parents regularly get from
local people. And at the end of this chapter I will discuss the reactions
of friends.

It's never right
When someone overhears you talking a foreign language to your child,
he or she often gets curious and asks you what language you are
speaking and whether the child is bilingual. Especially when children
are small, it is often thought to be rather endearing that they speak
a foreign language. And it isn't threatening yet, for a conversation
with small children is more or less the same in any language and people
can often guess what you are saying to your child. Even so, reactions
aren't favourable all of the time.
  David is English and his wife comes from the French-speaking part
of Belgium. They live in Holland and they have two small girls.
David wrote:

[70]
'Most people think it's rather good that we have a child who seems
to have little problem with two languages. One person was against
it for ideological/social reasons (didn't think it would work in terms
of the child being socially accepted), but has since changed her opinion
when these problems don't seem to have arisen.'

  But he also stated:
 'Some people, chance acquaintances usually, have attitudes bordering
on the aggressive about how these kids of ours will have trouble fitting
in later—at school etc'
  Things tend to get more serious when the children are no longer
toddlers and are approaching school age. All of a sudden, people
around you can start making comments with far-reaching implications,
although they themselves might not quite realize this. Jonneke and her
husband are both Dutch and they live near London.  She recalled:
 'People who live locally have been telling me that I should be speaking
English to my children instead of Dutch. But if I ask them whether
they would speak French to their children if they moved to France,
they react with an indignant "no, of course not".'
 If one keeps a record of all the questions and comments, one soon
discovers a curious dichotomy. The opinion held in general seems to
be that it is very easy for young children to learn a second language.
At the same time, people are very ready to point out that children get
confused very quickly and that bilingual children don't learn either
language very well.

  All parents who live with the bilingual experience have come across
  these varying opinions. But some parents come in for more criticism
  than others. Take for instance those parents who try to keep up a
  language with their children that is not regarded as being very 'useful',
 
 [71]
such as Norwegian or Dutch. They are regarded with far more
suspicion than parents who have created a bilingual French-English
situation. So, if parents insist on a bilingual upbringing for their
children, the languages involved had better be useful ones, for other-
wise the parents are not infrequently considered to be selfish.
  A distinction is also made between parents in mixed-language marriages
and couples who have migrated together. In the latter case
people are more willing to accept that parents want to keep up their
own language, even if they will regularly remind those parents that
the children should have sufficient chance to assimilate the local lan-
guage. Parents in a mixed-language marriage, where one or both
parents speak a foreign language with their children, are more often
looked upon as striving after peculiar ideals. Why would they want
to make their children different from the others? What's good enough
for the rest—to know only one language—should be good enough for
them.
　 But, in whatever situation one lives, or whatever choice one has
made with regard to the bilingual upbringing of one's children, people
love to comment. Ulla comes from Germany, but both her children
were born and raised in England and have an English father. She
had this to say about it:
　　'Whenever people ask me whether I have taught my children to
speak German, and I say "No!", they will say "What a shame!" or "
My god, you missed a chance!" With time I have learned to reply
with "I think that's debatable", and then leave the matter at that.'
There is one group of parents who may expect more reassuring
comments from the people around them than any other group, at least
for a while. Those are the parents who have recently migrated to a

[72]
new country with their children, a position we used to be in ourselves.

'When ice came to England, Hedda and Gideon were eighteen months
and almost three years old. After a few months, when the hustle of
moving house and settling in a neiv country had died down a bit,
people began to enquire how the children were learning to speak
English. And invariably we were assured by everyone around us that
from now on their English would develop quickly and naturally.
  But, as a matter of fact, it didn't, and when it still didn't after more
than a year, those remarks that were meant to be kind and reassuring
—"All young children learn a new language quickly and easily."—
began to have the opposite effect.'

 No doubt, parents learn to live with the comments and criticisms of
the people around them. But I'm sure they all agree with Judy, who
said:
  'The only people who know what it takes to bring up your children
with two languages are the ones who have actually gone through the
process themselves. All the others just haven't got a clue.'

Schools and schoolteachers
Although unsolicited advice from neighbours and other local people
isn't always welcome or helpful, it doesn't need to bother or influence
parents too much in what they do. It starts to matter, though, when
parents receive comments from the schools to which they are sending
their children.

'One month after ice had arrived in London, I dutifully ivent around

[73]
the corner with, three-year-old Gideon to put his name on the waiting-
list of the local school. "You'd better make sure he is speaking
English by the time he starts here", was the remark I was to bring
home with me. "Yes, of course", I answered, but I immediately
wondered what they would do if he didn't.'

  The point about schools is that parents are so dependent on them
as to how they treat their bilingual children. Nowadays there are
many schools and schoolteachers with some experience of children who
speak a different language at home. It often seems that the actual
experience of having had to teach children who either did well or did
not do well as a result of their bilingualism determines the school-
teacher's attitude towards new pupils. This is in itself not too surpris-
ing, but it shows that there is no general rule or consensus on how to
deal with bilingual children. And another result of this is that as a
parent one never knows what to expect.
  Many parents actually report that their children have absolutely
no difficulties at school. In some cases they tell me that teachers had
even encouraged them to practise reading and writing in the other
language at home, as it was thought that it would enhance the
children's language awareness. If, on the other hand, the child shows
even one sign of being slightly behind, the blame is all too easily put
on the bilingual situation. Marie-Luce remembered the following
example:
  'Maxime appeared to have problems with reading at school and
just before the Christmas holidays the teacher told us to stop speaking
French to him at home. Of course we didn't, but we did sit down with him
to read in English. When he went back after the holidays, it soon

[74]
became clear that he had caught up with the rest of his class. The
teacher triumphantly told us that apparently her remedy had worked.'
Schoolteachers can't always be blamed for not knowing how to
cope with bilingual children, for it seems to me that they suffer from
the same lack of information as everybody else. Lack of information
needn't be an excuse for a lack of common sense though. Judy said
she became rather angry at what she thought was bad conduct on
behalf of the teacher. She told me:
'At home we speak English and it has taken Sarah a long time to
learn Dutch. She is a bit shy and doesn't always communicate easily
with other people. One day I fetched her from nursery school and
overheard the teacher say to her "You won't get this back unless you
ask for it in Dutch." That same teacher had spoken both English
and Dutch to her ever since Sarah started there. I thought it was in
rather bad taste and even cruel that all of a sudden a rule was set for

a small child that didn't seem to apply to the teacher herself.'

Grandparents and other relatives
When we think about relatives and their reactions to the bilingual
situation in which we live, the grandparents come first to mind. To
them, of course, it is of great importance to be able to communicate
with their grandchildren. Not that all grandparents can be or want
to be around all that often. It depends on age, health, travelling dis-
tance, money, the overall number of grandchildren, and what have you.
But provided there is regular contact with the grandparents, language
will undoubtedly play a role.
  In the case of mixed-language marriages, the grandparents on either
side will anxiously watch which language or languages will be spoken

[75]
by the grandchildren. And in the case of couples who have migrated
together, the issue at stake for the grandparents is how long will the
original mother tongue be preserved.
  Grandparents, like any other people, have their information on the
subject, or lack of it, and this will influence their reactions. They
may be afraid that the children will become confused, or they think
it all ought to be a matter of course, or they are disappointed in the
results.
  In all those cases where the parents have come from a bilingual
background, the grandparents obviously have some personal experience
in the matter. This fact may make the grandparents more under-
standing or more demanding, but either way they are relying on
memories which may have become unreliable with time. Being in the
middle of a situation is always different from looking back on it, and
circumstances are never the same anyhow.
  There are also grandparents who will try to find out more about
the subject of bilingual children, for their own sake or at their
children's request, as was pointed out to me by my own mother. She
used to work in a large public library in Amsterdam and she told me
that on several occasions she had had the following request for in-
formation: 'My daughter lives abroad and now that she has a baby
she wonders what language she should speak with the child. She wrote
me a letter asking me to buy a book about this subject, but as they
couldn't help me in the bookshop, I decided to come to the library.'
And, at the time, my mother always had to tell these people that there
was no such book available for parents—or for grandparents— who
have to cope with a bilingual situation.
  I found that many of the parents I talked to had brothers and sisters

[76]
who had also got married to someone from abroad or who had moved
abroad themselves. One would suppose that it would be nice to share
one's experiences with such close relatives, but the respective situa-
tions often differ a lot, and so do the opinions.
  Theresa is English, while she lives in France and has a French
husband. She wrote:
  'My brother is married to an Italian and their children were brought
up in Italy and learnt English only at school. He invariably pleads
that fathers don't spend enough time with their children, so it's not
worthwhile bringing them up to be bilingual—unless they hope to
return to their homeland with their family. Nevertheless, he finds it
quite normal to be able to communicate with my children in English.'

Old and new friends
And now we come to the reactions of friends. Unlike relatives or
schoolteachers, they do not have a personal stake in the bilingual
development of one's children. But they are certainly more inclined
to be genuinely interested in the matter than mere acquaintances.
  Friends come in all sorts. If you live in a foreign country, you
could make a distinction between old friends 'back home' and new
local friends. The latter category can then be divided into people who
are born and raised in the country where you are living now and
people who are foreigners themselves. These three groups of friends
tend to react differently to the way parents choose to bring up their
children as far as language is concerned.
  Life-long friends back home are usually most supportive. If your
children are bilingual, they think it is great. If you give up or haven't
even tried, they will also understand. One reason for their tolerance

[77]
might be that if they are capable of understanding and speaking one
or two foreign languages themselves, they may quite like practising
these languages in conversations with their friends' children!
  Also, having friends who live in a foreign country may supply a
nice excuse for going there on a holiday or for sending one's children
to learn the other language. In the latter case, a successful bilingual
upbringing may even spoil some of the fun. The following observation
came from Francoise:
'Now that the children are getting somewhat older, we have ex-
changes with the children of my friends in France. But the French
children who come to stay with us in London don't practice their
English enough really, for my own children will just as easily converse
with them in French.'
  New friends whom one meets among local people are often not more
than superficially interested in one's struggle with languages. The
subject is always good for some small talk, and in the best of cases
one is admired for the effort, but soon the conversation will continue
along more interesting lines. In general, the way to bring up children
is an inexhaustible topic for parents, but, as far as children's language
development is concerned, families who live in a monolingual situation
have little in common with those who live in a bilingual setting.

A common interest
The third category of friends are those who are foreigners themselves.
Bilingual families are bound to meet other bilingual families who
happen to live nearby. Whether or not parents are actively looking
for other parents who come from abroad, sooner or later their paths will
cross. Some of the other expatriates will become friends, and a common
 
[78]
interest will be the bilingual upbringing of the children. However, a
common interest needn't imply a common policy, as Tjitske told me.
She and her husband came from Holland to live near London some five
years ago. According to her:
  'It all depends on who is considered to be the "expert". Parents with
younger children will sometimes ask me how I cope. Other mothers
regard themselves as more successful in keeping up both languages
and tell me I'm not strict enough. We all draw our lines differently
and we all have very much our own way of dealing with the bilingual
situation.'
  Still, I believe that parents living with children in a bilingual situa-
tion should share their experiences. This is easier for those who live
in a large metropolitan area, where there are bound to be more expa-
triates, than for those who live in smaller, more secluded communities.
Yet, a sense of isolation—the feeling that one is the only person with
this particular problem—may at times be experienced by any parent or
child, wherever the family live.
  I hope that this book will help parents and children feel less isolated,
and that it will make them realize that to be or to become bilingual is
in fact a common interest to many millions of people all over the world.

英語の続き

科目試験の勉強のためにしばらく、レポｰﾄを書くのをやめていた。
そのせいで、なかなか「レポートモード」にもどらない。

再提出のレポートが２本と新規のレポートが２本。
それで終わりなので、急ぐ必要もないのだが・・

一度緊張の糸がとぎれてしまうと、元に戻すのが大変だ。
早い話、「辛いレポート作り」が嫌で、
どこかにそれらしい資料や、レポートの原形になるような書き込みがないだろうかと、
「ネット漁り」ばかりしている。

最後には諦めて、コツコツと本を読んで、パソコンに文章の細切れを溜め込んで、
レポートを作ることになる。
五年間そんなことの繰り返しなので、いい加減分かっているのだが・・

なかなか懲りない。

[52]
5  Becoming bilingual?the children

New parents who have decided on a bilingual upbringing often
wonder whether one way of going about it is better than another and
they may be looking for guidance on how to proceed. So in this
chapter we shall take a look at the various strategies that parents
can adopt to make learning easier for the children in a bilingual
household.
  Before going on to describe a number of possible strategies, I want
to emphasize that there is not really one 'best' way of proceeding with
a bilingual upbringing. What is the right way for one family may
not work for another. Also, I think that most parents who are in a
bilingual situation have a 'gut feeling' about what they would like to
do with respect to the bilingual upbringing of their children and how
they would like to do it. I firmly believe that parents should trust
their own feelings and judgments?and share them with other
parents?and not let 'experts' tell them whether these feelings are
'right' or what the 'best' method would be.

Strategies
One strategy that parents can adopt is the one-person-one-language
method. This is where one parent speaks one language with the child,
and the other parent another language. It is a strategy most commonly
applied by parents in a mixed-language marriage. Indeed, if the partner
whose native tongue is the local language doesn't speak the language
of the partner who comes from abroad, it is the only possible way to

[53]
proceed. An example would be a French mother and an English father
(who doesn't speak French) who live in England and who want their
children to be able to speak both French and English.
  A second strategy is to use one language (the foreign language)
in the home and the other language (the language spoken locally)
outside the home. This is the strategy usually adopted by parents
with a single-language marriage. For them it usually feels most
natural to communicate within the family in the original mother tongue,
and then to use the local language for all contacts outside the home.
This method can also be applied by parents with a mixed-language
marriage in cases where both partners are reasonably fluent in each
other's language.
  If either of these two strategies is used, then the child learns two
languages at the same time, which is known as 'simultaneous acquisi-
tion'. According to a third strategy a child learns the second language
after learning the first, otherwise known as 'successive acquisition'.
Only one language is used with the child up till a certain age and
then the other language is introduced (between age three and five,
for instance).
  A fourth strategy is to adopt no particular strategy at all and to use
the two languages whenever and wherever it is most convenient:
factors such as time, topic, person, and place decide which language
is spoken. In a way this 'strategy' is being used by almost all parents
some of the time. For, even if parents choose one of the first three,
it is practically impossible to be consistent at all times in all situations.
If you are able to switch languages, then you find that in daily life
you are constantly required to do this.
On the following pages a number of families describe how they have

[54]
applied these strategies and how successful, or not so successful, they
were in doing so.

The one-person-one-language method
Among the parents I talked to, there were two who told me that they
had sought professional advice on how to bring up their children
with two languages. One mother said she had talked to a child
psychiatrist about it, the other to a pediatrician. The advice both
experts had come up with was to keep the two languages strictly
separate: the one-person-one-language method.
  This is the strategy described in many academic case studies of
bilingual children and it is the one that child-care experts tend to feel
that they can recommend. And certainly, in mixed-language marriages
where only the partner from abroad is bilingual and the 'local' parent
doesn't speak the foreign language, it does seem the only way to
establish a pattern in the bilingual language development of the child.
  One parent who has been using this strategy is Simone. She is
French and has been living in England for eleven years. She is
married to an Englishman and she describes his knowledge of French
as 'very limited'. Their little daughter is almost three. She wrote
this about their experiences as a family living in the South of England:
I speak only French to her and her father speaks in English. She
started nursery school at two-and-a-half, because I felt that her English
was not developing as quickly as her French. I am with her every day
and there are some situations she has not experienced in English-
for example going to the swimming pool, taking a plane, etc.
'We still speak to her as before, but I have already noticed that she
shows more interest in English, for example she asks what her father

[55]
is saying, or how he says certain words, often while looking at pictures
in a book. When our daughter reaches a comparable level in both
languages, I think I might limit her French to mealtimes and when
she is with me only, although it is too early yet to make a decision
on this.'
  Another parent who wrote about her experiences with this strategy
was Joelle. She comes from Switzerland and French is her mother
tongue. She has lived in England for almost twenty years, married to
an Englishman. They have two teenagers. She wrote that she and
her husband have always spoken English together, even though he
speaks excellent French. They made a conscious decision to bring up
the children bilingually and chose the one-person-one-language strategy:
'With Olivia I spoke French and my husband spoke English. She
spoke very well by the time she was eighteen months?two years,
always addressing me in French and her father in English.'
  She then continues:
'However, things gradually changed because my son refused right
from the start to speak any French at all. I spoke French with my
daughter and son till they were about five and two-and-a-half respec-
tively. Then my son started kindergarten and he would not even
really answer me if I spoke French?but we went on for about a year;
longer.
  'We decided when our son was about three-and-a-half that it was
more important for him to talk and master one language rather than
mess around. I found it too much of a strain to deal with both children
different languages so we went over to speaking English.'
  It is clear that there are some problems with this strategy. Does
one really want to keep the two languages strictly apart for different

[56]
roles, even if those roles are so closely linked together, such as being
a spouse and being a parent? One obvious result is that one of the
parties involved may feel left out. Joelle:
'We both think that one of the probable reasons our son wouldn't
speak French was that my husband and I always spoke English together
and he felt excluded from our "intimate relationship" language.'
The problem is not always between parents and child. If the mar-
riage is going through a difficult patch, then the bilingual situation can
make the problems between husband and wife worse. As one mother
put it, the situation of speaking one language with the children from
which the spouse is excluded may lead to the 'creating of a secret
society in one's own house'.

Inside and outside the house
The next strategy, to use one language inside the house and the other
one for outside contacts, is generally easier to maintain and it is the
natural one to be adopted by parents with a single-language marriage.
And by applying this strategy one particular problem can be avoided:
there is no chance of someone feeling left out. For this reason it also
makes sense for parents in a mixed-language marriage where both
partners speak the foreign language to use only that language in the
house.
  However, one other problem may arise, namely that the children
may find it difficult to learn the local language, and therefore may have
a much more difficult time adapting when they start going to school.
For this reason, parents who apply the 'inside-outside' strategy often
wonder whether they only need to teach their children their mother
tongue or whether it is also up to them to introduce the language

[57]
spoken locally.

'Once we had decided to keep up Dutch with the children, thin was
to be our only language of communication at home, while they would
have to learn English at playgroup and through socializing. For a
while this seemed to work, except that the children picked up English
very slowly. One day, however, Gideon declared that he wanted to
practice his English at home. As by that time he had kept his mouth
shut at playgroup for more than six months we reluctantly gave in,
thinking that it might give a boost to his confidence.
  Bathtime was chosen as the English conversation hour and on the
very first occasion Gideon did actually start to chat in English.
Obviously, he had already acquired some command of the language
but had been waiting for the right time and place to practice it. But,
whether or not it was beneficial for his confidence, it soon ruined
mine. For a child's world contains umpteen interesting objects and
activities whose English name I did 'not happen to know: soap-dish,
all sorts of bath animals, jumping on one foot, to mention just a few.
Moreover, lots of objects or areas in the house have acquired a sort
of proper name in Dutch, such as "pappamammaskamer" for our
bedroom.  From the start I was mixing English and Dutch to an
extent that I had never thought possible.   After a short time we
abandoned the English conversation hour and reinstated the Dutch-only
strategy.'

  In families where only one language is spoken at home, while the
other language is reserved for contacts outside, the children usually
achieve a reasonable fluency in the home language before they begin

[58]
to acquire some fluency in the 'outside' language. The development in
the two languages will usually overlap to some extent, however, and
this brings us to the next issue.

Successive or simultaneous acquisition?
The point is often raised whether children should learn two languages
at the same time or one after the other. In practice, there is often not
much choice in this matter. When a family moves from one country
to another with children who have already acquired one language, the
job of learning a second one quite clearly comes after they have already
acquired a first language.
  But parents whose children are born after migration, or parents with
a mixed-language marriage often wonder whether one way is better
than the other. Should a child have a firm basis in one language before
the second one is introduced, or can a child deal with learning two
languages at the same time from the very beginning? Several parents
offered their opinions on this matter, while describing their own
experiences with doing it one way or the other. One of them was
Kerstin, a Swedish mother of two little daughters who were brought
up with English and Swedish from the start.
She wrote:
  I think it is not more difficult to learn two than to learn one
language from the start. As babies have to acquire a language any-
way, there is no reason for them to believe that an object, for example,
has only one name.
  'The older one very confidently switches between the two languages
and seems to feel equally at home in both, although she sometimes uses
English words, puts Swedish endings on them, and puts them into
Swedish sentences. The younger one doesn't talk yet, but understands

[59]
both languages very well indeed.'
But Simone, the mother who wrote about her experience with the
one-person-one-language method, also reported:
  'It is more work for the parents who have to make a conscious
decision of speaking the one language, whenever and wherever, and
it is certainly more work for the child who has to learn twice as much
as another child.'
The fear of confusing the child if he or she is confronted with two
languages from the start is also quite frequently mentioned by parents.
But even if the foreign language is used exclusively at home, the local
language always plays some role in the child's life, through contacts
with the outside world. The only way to create a situation where the
child really learns one language after the other?the successive acquisi-
tion strategy?is to begin by speaking the local language at home and
to introduce the foreign language at a later age.
  In a way it seems a rather unlikely situation for parents who have
a common foreign mother tongue to speak the local language with the
children. But those who want their children to integrate as much and
as quickly as possible may do just that. However, the consequence
often is that the children do not learn the foreign language at all.
  For parents in a mixed-language marriage the situation is different,
especialy if they have always spoken the local language to each other.
If they feel uncomfortable about the one-person-one-language approach,
the choice can be made to adopt the 'successive acquisition' strategy
and to start off with the local language, while the foreign one is
introduced at a later age. This situation was described by Anna
Maria. She is Italian and is married to an Englishman. As he doesn't
speak any Italian, they have always used English together. They have

[60]
one eight-year-old daughter. Anna Maria wrote:
T had conflicting thoughts about teaching a baby two languages at
the same time. I thought it might be confusing for the child at a
particular stage in life before having acquired certain rooted structures.
Because my Italian at the time had lost its fluency and the baby would
have been in touch with an English community first before an Italian
one, the choice to speak English to her was made on those bases.
  'At the age of four my daughter was presented with the Italian
language and she has been learning it since then?so she is now taught
in Italian, but we still carry on talking to her in English at home. She
can now read, write, speak, understand, and think in either language.'
In the case of successive acquisition, a child more often seems to be
taught the language more or less formally, rather than picking it up '
naturally'. In mixed-language marriages where the father is the
'foreign' parent, this strategy appears to be particularly appropriate.

Switching languages
Parents who are involved in a bilingual upbringing are bilingual
themselves and this means that children hear their parents speaking
different languages to different people. If, then, a parent uses only
one particular language for communicating with the child, the child
still knows that this doesn't reflect the parent's way of communication
in general.
  The fourth strategy?to use no strategy at all and to speak either
language whenever and wherever it is most convenient?doesn't seem
very suitable in the initial stages of a bilingual upbringing. But
parents who use one of the other three strategies often report that a
child at some point refuses to speak the foreign language, the language

[61]
that has been exclusively used for contact between parent and child.
One of the reasons for this may well be that if the parent is seen, or
rather heard, by a child to switch languages the child wants to do
the same thing.
The example a parent is offering a child can also have a positive
effect. As an answer to my question whether she would describe her
child as being or becoming bilingual, Simone wrote:
  'It is rather early to say, but what is sure is that she is completely
fluent in French while living in England. She does not seem to mind
speaking two languages?indeed she hears me speaking both, depend-
ing to whom I am speaking. As things stand now, I would think she
has every chance of becoming bilingual.'
  It is often said that the various strategies only work if parents are
really strict about keeping the languages separate. I think better
advice to parents would be for them to be flexible, for only then can
children learn what it means to be bilingual: to be able to switch
languages according to needs and circumstances.

Rules
One question I asked the parents was whether they had any specific
rules for dealing with the bilingual situation at home. It seemed to
me that this was the sort of thing that would be interesting and helpful
for new parents, or for those who are faced with a particular problem.
But the answers turned out to be different from what I expected.
  Only a few parents told me that they had any specific rules. One of
them was Angelina, a Spanish mother who lives in London. When we
talked about how parents can provide enough stimulating material in
both languages?in this case reading material?she told me:

[62]
'My way of making it attractive for them to read in Spanish has
been to buy Spanish cartoons. I don't allow English cartoons in the
house, so you could say I have bribed them into reading Spanish, for
otherwise they would probably have seen no use in doing so.'
Generally, though, parents who tried to create some kind of regula-
tions often encountered some unexpected consequences. The problem
with rules is that children have unique ways of drawing up their
own principles that are bound to counteract their parents' intentions.
It was Janine who told me the following story:
  ' "Now that you are in France, you must speak French", Rachel's
grandmother had said when we were there on a holiday. My daughter
actually made an effort but, the next time grandmamma came to visit
us in England and I had hoped for a follow-up of the French lesson,
Rachel decided: "Now that you are in England, you must speak English
to me." '
  The one rule that was mentioned frequently was this: out of
politeness, parents will not speak the foreign language in the company
of children or adults who would not be able to understand it, especially
at home or when being invited to someone else's house. One of the
first times that we tried to apply this rule at home the following thing
happened:

'After we had been living in London for eighteen months and Gideon
was just starting to express himself in English at playgroup, we
invited one of his playmates over for lunch. Our Dutch au-pair asked
the little boy via kind of sandwich he ivied like and then posed the
same question to Gideon, also addressing him in English. Gideon burst
into tears and cried (in Dutch): "Scot is English so you speak to him

[63]
in English. But I am Dutch, so you must speak to me in Dutch."'

The bilingual development
One mother noted about her children:
'To be bilingual still means for them that their command of the one
language is better than that of the other, while even their best lan-
guage is never quite as good as it would have been if they had had to
know only one language. So it always seems a matter of gaining on
the one hand and losing on the other.'
Whatever strategy or rules are being applied, it is almost always
the case that, at any one time, the child is more fluent in one language
than in the other. The respective languages spoken by the child will
each feature as the more important or 'dominant' language in different
stages of the child's bilingual development. Whether both languages
are spoken at home from the beginning or whether it is only the
foreign language, the language spoken at school will gradually take
over for most or all purposes. The use of the foreign language may
even disappear altogether for a shorter or longer period of time. We
may see this happen in particular with children of primary school age.
The important thing to remember is that bilingualism for a child
is not the same as bilingualism for an adult. First of all, for a child
bilingualism is even more of a process than it is for an adult, and in
relation to children we should therefore always talk about becoming
rather than being bilingual.
  Secondly, there is a difference in degree of proficiency. When saying
that a child knows two languages, one means to indicate that she or
he has a certain fluency in those languages in accordance with her
or his age. A child doesn't have the same command of a language as

[64]
an adult. By age five a child will have acquired most basic language
skills, but there remains a lot to be learned with respect to vocabulary
and more complex sentence structures, whether a child is learning
one or two languages.
  Cecile, who is French and lives in Oxford, England, with an English
husband, gave the following description of the bilingual development
of her two sons, who are now seven and three-and-a-half years old:
'My older son learned French first; but when he went to playgroup
at two-and-a-half he became very fluent (and better) in English. During
that period we also stayed five months in Spain where he went to a
nursery school?he learned a lot of Spanish but forgot it within four
months of coming back.
  'Since going to nursery and primary school, English is the dominant
language, the one he can use with all the "nuances", subtleties, etc...
His spoken French is more basic?he could not really have a proper
conversation with an adult in French for instance.
'My younger son, who is now three-and-a-half, started to speak
English when he was two-and-a-half; he now seems to know the
French equivalent for the most basic words?but his sentences tend to
be in English. And with both of them, they will answer in English
even if we speak to them in French.'
Another important point to realize is that the different languages
being learned during the bilingual development will have an influence
on each other, also referred to as 'interference'. Parents are often
aware of this interference, as shown in the following account. Elisabeth
and her husband are both English. The elder of their two boys is now
almost six years old. The family have lived in Holland since before he was born. She wrote:

[65]
'Vocabulary is probably more limited in each language than it would
be if only one was spoken. English words are used in Dutch sentences
and vice versa, also word order mistakes occur quite often, expressions
are literally translated and used in the other language, which can give
a rather untidy effect.'
  The influence of one language upon the other and the actual mixing
of the two languages are sometimes regarded as the more worrying
aspects of a bilingual development. The fear of children getting con-
fused appears to be related to the fact that bilingual children often
seem to be mixing the two languages.
However, even in adult bilingualism it is unavoidable that some
degree of interference between the two languages occurs. But I also
think that parents can help children to reduce some of the mixing that
takes place. They can point out some of the differences between the
two languages?for instance by playing games, such as 'Who will guess
the French for ... ?'?and they can gently correct their children's
language use. Most importantly though, as the children get older and
develop their linguistic skills, a lot of the interference will disappear
of its own accord.

Temperaments and talents
At some of the interviews I did, parents would begin or end the con-
versation by commenting that of course it all depended on the children
themselves. They would remark that children have different tempera-
ments and talents, and that some of them thrive in a situation where
others feel quite bewildered. As Joelle put it:
  'Olivia liked it and Benedict didn't! But I think that tempera-
mentally they are very different anyway?Olivia is an extrovert and

[66]
Benedict an introvert.'
  Not all parents realize to what extent their children's characters
may influence the course of events. When parents abandon the attempt
to bring their children up bilingually, they may feel that they them-
selves are to blame for not being consistent enough or for not dealing
well with some of the difficulties. They are not helped by those parents
who, successful in bringing up their own children with two languages,
believe that the procedure that has worked for them will work for
others too.
  Until quite recently, children from a bilingual background were
often perceived as having a handicap. And if these children didn't do
well at school, their bilingualism was seen as the cause of their failure.
Nowadays, however, it is assumed that children with average intelli-
gence will be able to cope with a bilingual upbringing and will even
benefit from it in other learning situations.
  But intelligence alone cannot explain children's reactions to bilin-
gualism. Children have an innate ability for learning language, but
those with a talent for language?especially for its communicative
and creative aspects?will learn a second or third one more easily than
others. Some children, for instance, seem to have 'an ear' for different
languages and pick them up effortlessly, but other children may have
a much harder time before they can express themselves adequately.
The difficulty is that parents, at the time when they opt for a
bilingual upbringing, often don't yet know their children's tempera-
ments or talents. This is true for those who decide to create a bilingual
home environment for their children from birth onwards and it is
also true for couples who move abroad with young children. But as
the children grower older parents gain a lot of first-hand experience and

[67]
recognize that individual children have different talents and react in
different ways to similar situations. Parents should therefore always
try to choose a course of action that best suits their own and their children's needs.

英語Ⅶの４

科目試験が終わってあっという間に一ヶ月が過ぎてしまった。
次のレポートの締め切りが迫ってきた。

次は日本史特殊を履修しようと思っているのだが、なかなか良い参考文献が見つからない。
ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）にはいくつかの情報があるのだが、「検証」のしようがない。
たいていは根拠となる本や論文が明示されていない。
「間違っている」ことはないのだろうが、「全面的に正しく」ないかもしれない。

「ウィキペディアを参考にレポートを書きました」と正直に書けば許される・・筈もなし・・
参考文献が見つかれば、後はそれほど苦労しなくても良いのだが・・

[39]
4   Deciding against a bilingual upbringing

When I phoned people and asked if I could interview them about their
experience of bringing up their children in a bilingual home environ-
ment, the answer would sometimes be: 'Yes, but my children are not
bilingual.' I would then explain that I was not only interested in
the 'success stories', but in all the experiences of the parents concerned,
whether or not they had brought up their children with two languages.
It subsequently appeared that people were very willing to talk about
their reasons for not going through with a bilingual upbringing
for their offspring. So before we discuss how children can become bilingual,
let us first have a look at how and why some parents have decided
against a bilingual upbringing.
  How do parents choose what is important when bringing up children ?
Well, they all have different childhood memories, they all reach parent-
hood via many different routes and for many different reasons, and
they ail expect different things from life. All these things influence
the way parents raise their children, and the bilingual upbringing is
only one of the many aspects about which parents have to make up
their minds. By looking at some of the decisions against a bilingual
upbringing and trying to find out more about the reasons behind those
decisions, I feel new parents will then be able to make an informed
and responsible choice.

Options
When I arrived to do the interview, Ingrid and John were both present.

[40]
For a whole evening we sat and discussed the pros and cons of a
bilingual upbringing. Occasionally, the conversation took another
direction as we talked about my beloved Amsterdam, where they had
lived for a couple of years in the same part of town where I grew up.
But I was there to hear about bilingual children and their parents'
experiences, and by the time I left I had learned a lot. I also knew
more than ever before that no two interviews on this subject would
be the same.
  John is English, and comes from a bilingual English-French back-
ground. He studied linguistics at university, but he no longer works
in that field. Ingrid is Norwegian and was brought up in Norway.
They met in Switzerland while they were both working and studying
there but they have lived in England for most of their married life.
They like learning different languages, as is illustrated by the fact
that the two of them learned to speak Dutch when they lived in
Holland.
  All this so far is fairly typical of a couple in a mixed-language
marriage. What makes these people less typical is that?notwithstand-
ing their own interest in and talent for languages?they decided
against a bilingual upbringing for their children. Ingrid began:
'When my oldest was born, I actually did talk Norwegian to him,
as we were living in France at the time and we didn't have that much
English around anyway. But we came to England when he was
eighteen months old and from then onwards I have only spoken English
to him and his younger brother.'
  John continued:
'I am against a bilingual upbringing in principle, as I think that
communication is difficult enough as it is and it implies taking risks

[41]
with a young mind. I have seen adverse results in the past and I
don't want the children to get confused. I have a background in
linguistics myself and I believe that learning different languages is a
talent. For those who have such a talent, it can always be developed
at a later age.'
  Ingrid then added:
'I love English as a language and it felt silly at the time to be the
only one around to speak Norwegian to the child. Moreover, who needs
Norwegian as a language?'
  Their two sons are now teenagers. According to the parents, the
elder of the two, if not bilingual English-Norwegian, certainly has
developed a flair for languages and finds speaking new languages easy,
although he doesn't like studying them the academic way. And in
spite of the fact that the children went to English-speaking schools
while the family lived in Holland, he still picked up some Dutch, if
only through watching television. As far as the younger one is con-
cerned, the parents are convinced that English is the only language he
will ever like and need.

A bilingual background
Not all the people I talked to were as articulate in their opinions as
Ingrid and John, but most of them were very definite as to why they
hadn't brought up their children with two languages. It may come
as a surprise, but among the parents who decided against a bilingual
upbringing were quite a few who came from a bilingual background
themselves. One of them was Janine. She comes from the French-
speaking part of Belgium, but she spent her childhood in several
different countries.  She met her English husband in Brussels eight

[42]
years ago, but soon afterwards they moved to London together, where
all their four children were born. She told me her reasons for not
speaking French with her children:
  'English comes very naturally to me. Although French is
the language I have been brought up with, English has been part of my
life for a long time. I lived in Cyprus when I was a teenager and
went to an English-speaking secondary school there. John was learn-
ing French when we met and he speaks it reasonably well, but our
common language has always been English, even in French-speaking
surroundings. I would feel like a stranger in my own house if I spoke
French to my children. Eventually I would like my children to speak
French, but only time will tell whether I will regret that I didn't bring
them up with two languages from the very beginning.'
  A substantial number of the parents I talked to were the offspring
of a mixed-language marriage themselves or they had moved abroad
with their parents when they were young. How does the first-hand
experience of having been brought up with two languages influence
the decision for one's own children? I found two distinct patterns.
Among parents who come from a bilingual background, some are
particularly proud to continue the tradition of a bilingual upbringing
and make a conscious decision to do so, as we saw in the previous
chapter. Others, however, don't want to repeat the experience of a
bilingual home environment with their own children, as they have
come to feel so at home in their new language that it would be rather
artificial for them to switch back to their original mother tongue.
Mieke was twenty-one when she migrated from Holland to Australia
with her parents and younger brothers and sisters. Six years later
she married an Englishman and settled in England.  She said:

[43]
  I had adopted an English way of life, including the language, before
I had children. I never really considered teaching my children Dutch
and they have never shown much interest at all. I thought it was more
important for them to learn good English and it also seemed to me
that Dutch wasn't a very useful language to know.'

The utility principle
The usefulness of a language, also referred to as the 'utility principle',
has now been mentioned a couple of times. So let's talk a bit more
about this 'utility principle', as it crops up in almost any conversation
about bilingualism.
  Is it possible to say that one language is more useful than another?
English functions as a means of communication for many different
people all over the world and one could indeed say that it is a more
useful language than one that is spoken by only a small number of
people. French is also thought of as a very useful language to know
and the effect of this is that to bring up one's children to become
bilingual English-French is usually thought of rather positively. But
in cases where Danish or Dutch are being kept up by the parents it
is often considered to be nothing but an extra burden on the child
to have to learn such a language.
  Dutch people themselves often point out that their language is not
very useful and, generally speaking, they do not stand up for their
own language. As we have seen in Chapter 2, Dutch native speakers
are usually quite proud of their ability to speak foreign languages
and they find it difficult to think of a reason why anyone would want
to learn their language. Similarly, Dutch people who live abroad are
often not strongly motivated to keep up the language with their

[44]
children.
  One of them is Marian, who comes from Holland and lives in the
south of France with Georges, who is French. We know each other
from the time when we were both students together in Amsterdam
and she is one of the parents to whom I sent a questionnaire. She
wrote :
  When Georges and I first met twelve years ago our language of
communication was English. Upon settling in France together, our
common language soon became French. Our three boys, now seven,
five, and three years old, were all born in France and we both have
always talked French to them. Sometimes I wonder: "Is it through
laziness or lack of discipline that I never even tried teaching them
Dutch?" It was by far the easiest thing to do to bring them up with
just French. Moreover, who needs Dutch other than the people who
actually live in Holland? Also, the house is often full of people who
speak many different languages, so the children are used to hearing
the various sounds. I just hope when they start learning other lan-
guages at school that because of this they will get the idea pretty
quickly.'
  We have to remember, though, that the practical usefulness of a
language is not the only criterion that determines whether it is
preserved by its native speakers. It is people's attitude towards their
own language more than anything else that decides whether a language
continues to be used, and a great number of languages spoken by only
very few people are known to have survived in many places in the
world, at many points in history, and for many different reasons.
However, the study of minority languages?and the reasons behind
the loss or preservation of languages?is a subject in its own right,

[45]
and as this book describes individual families, rather than overall
trends or theories, it's a subject that falls outside its scope.

Firmly rooted
A common characteristic of bilingual families is that at least one of
the parents doesn't live in his or her country of origin. For some
people, moving abroad is a once-in-a-lifetime event. Others develop a
taste for it and travel around quite a bit before deciding to settle. The
latter group of people may have accepted or may even be pleased with
the fact that they don't have strong roots. But when they become
parents they may still find it important that their children are firmly
rooted in one particular place and in one particular language.
Lotte comes from Denmark and she is a sister of one of the other
parents I interviewed. She lives with her English husband in a small
university town in the North of England and they invited me to go
and stay so that I could interview them and a number of other bilingual
parents they knew. Lotte told me:
  I was brought up in a middle-class family in a large European city
and came to England when I was twenty. My husband is English, but
he lived in Holland and Germany during part of his childhood. Neither
of us has a strong emotional attachment to any particular place of
dwelling. But our children are born and raised in a small northern
English town, which I think must have an effect on their outlook on
life. Even if they never return here in later life, they will feel they
have their roots in a very particular spot and nowhere else.
'The children are not bilingual, but as we regularly have foreign
guests and travel abroad with the whole family, I know they are
familiar with different languages and different cultures. I think it is

[46]
more important to bring up your children with tolerance and respect
for other ways of living than for them to be fluent in another language.'
An interesting thing about this family is that Lotte's husband is a
lecturer in Italian and most holidays abroad are therefore spent in
Italy. If the children are familiar with another language, it is Italian
rather than Danish! During my stay with them my impression was
that these parents were certainly trying to bring up their children
with minds open to other people, other languages, and other cultures,
but that the Danish language and culture were not made to figure very
prominently.
  A similar reason for not bringing up the children with two languages,
at least not from the earliest moment onwards, was given by Christine,
as she also considered it to be very important for her children to
become firmly rooted in one language. Christine is English, but she
lives in Holland and is married to a Dutchman. She spoke mainly
Dutch to her children, who are now eight and five years old, until
they started going to school. Christine's decision is particularly note-
worthy, for one would not really expect an English parent to give
up speaking English with the children, especially if the other language
is usually considered to be a rather less useful one. But she wrote
to me:
  'When the children were small, I felt that the most important factor
was for children to have a mother tongue and to be emotionally based
in the language of their homeland and culture. I thought it was more
important to master one language 100 per cent than two languages
per cent. The social and emotional tie with the 100 per cent lan-
guage was to be weighed against the risk of feeling in a no-man's land
with two: neither belonging wholly here nor wholly there.'

[47]
However, she also added:
'Latterly I have changed my mind and attach less weight to this
point of view.'
  It seems that she is now more confident that the two languages can
coexist and therefore is speaking English with her children more often.
And in fact the evidence collected during my interviewing suggests
that two languages can and do happily coexist in many bilingual
households.

Postponing
Of course, yet another possibility for parents is to postpone the decision
on a bilingual upbringing till some later date. For if parents decide
against a bilingual upbringing when the children are young, it doesn't
necessarily mean that they oppose all bilingual experience later on.
Rather, they want to wait until the children are somewhat older so
that a better assessment of the children's abilities can be made. Also,
some parents feel that the children's own opinion should have some
weight and that it is up to the children themselves to express the need
for getting to know another language.
  Mary is English and has lived in France since her marriage to a
Frenchman fourteen years ago. Their house is in a small village north
of Paris. She had the following story to tell:
  'When my oldest son was born, I knew I was going back to work
and that a French woman would be looking after him. For that reason
it didn't seem right to start speaking English to him from the very
beginning. When he was eighteen months old, I stopped working and
I thought maybe now is the time to start with English. But the baby
still didn't talk at all, so I felt he needed encouragement in one language

[48]
rather than being confused with a second one. As it turned out, he
didn't start to talk until he was three, and later he also had some
problems at school.
  'Looking back I know that an extra language would have been too
much of a burden for this child and I am glad I never persisted. Now
that he is eight, he has English classes at school. I think he likes them,
because his friends are also learning English and now his own back-
ground gives him a bit of an upper hand.'
  To give the children a fair chance to express their own needs rather
than to force anything upon them, was one of the reasons put forward
by this next father for not talking Dutch to his children when they
were small. He is Dutch and his wife is English and they have always
lived in England. It is fairly difficult in any case to keep up the
father's language if he is the only parent who comes from abroad. But
this father also had the following considerations:
　　I want my two boys to find out for themselves about possible
advantages and disadvantages. So far they haven't been to Holland
that often, but last year they stayed there on their own for a while,
and probably this will happen more often as they get older. If they
decide they want to learn Dutch after all, I will of course give them
my support.'
　The problem is of course that?whatever parents decide with respect
to the bilingual upbringing?the children's future is being decided for
them. As they grow older, children may make choices themselves, but
such choices will always be based upon what they already did or did
not learn from their parents. Monolingual children (of bilingual
parents) may gradually discover for themselves the advantages or
disadvantages of knowing only one language, but learning a second

[49]
language at a later age is never the same as being brought up with
two languages from the very beginning.

Giving up
Living with two languages will affect children in many ways and some
of the effects may not always be positive. But I think that problems
will usually not be caused by a bilingual setting per se, but rather by
a whole set of circumstances, and it all very much depends on how
an individual child reacts to a certain situation.
  Some parents told me that, because of various problems, they had
stopped speaking their own language with their children, and thus
had given up on the bilingual upbringing. But usually this had
happened when the children were still quite young and before conflict
situations had had a chance to grow out of hand. An example of this
was offered by Ulla. She lives in London, but comes from Germany.
She met her first English husband while living in Switzerland.
She remembered:
  'The older boy was born in England, but soon afterwards we moved
back to Switzerland and we stayed there for another two years. During
that period, there were lots of different languages around all the time.
On our return to England, I felt the child had been messed around
enough. We all needed a break and sticking to one language only was
an important part of that. By the time my second boy was born,
English was so firmly established as the language of the house that
the question of speaking German to my children was never really
raised again.'
  Strictly speaking, giving up on a bilingual upbringing is not the
same as deciding against it from the very beginning. But on more than

[50]
one occasion I noticed that the arguments parents would put forward
against a bilingual upbringing had only been formulated by them
after they had actually given up. In fact, giving up on a bilingual
upbringing is a reality that many parents may face at some point
during the bilingual upbringing.

Disadvantages
In describing why parents decide against a bilingual upbringing, I
have mentioned a number of the possible disadvantages: it is taking
an unknown risk by making them learn a less useful language, parents
are putting an extra burden on a child; by not having one mother
tongue, a child doesn't acquire firm emotional ties with a language or
culture; J children should be allowed their own choice.
  Not surprisingly, parents who decided against having two languages
for their children were usually more specific in spelling out the dis-
advantages. During my conversations with them, some people actually
started telling 'horror stories': cases of bilingual children who ended
up being quite disturbed, who had problems with stuttering, who were
severely behind at school. However, in my search for material I did
not go by hearsay information and I myself have not come across
any children with serious problems resulting from their bilingual home
environment.
  On the whole, the arguments against a bilingual upbringing seem to
me somewhat less convincing than the arguments in favour. Children
have an innate ability for learning and growing and I have come to
believe that through a bilingual upbringing each child's potential?
rather than being restricted or overburdened?can be developed even
more. However, there is no rule that tells parents whether they should

[51]
opt for a bilingual upbringing or decide against it, and parents should
feel free to make their own decision.

英語Ⅶの３

翻訳ソフトのことを書いていたら、偶然に試用出来るソフトを見つけた。
ATLAS　V14　富士通のサイトからダウンロードできる。http://www.fmw.co.jp/v14/

メルアドを登録すれば、ダウンロードページのURLを送ってくる。
英文を保存したファイルごと翻訳してくれるし、翻訳文の印刷もしてくれる。
３０日間試用出来るので、さっそく・・・

It wasn't until he was almost four years old and still showed very few signs of learning any English?in spite of first having been going to a day-care centre and later to a playgroup for more than two years altogether?that we had to acknowledge that bringing up one's child with two languages is not just a matter of course, that it might pose too many problems for the child involved, and that we had to make a conscious decision as to whether or not we wanted to keep up our mother tongue at home.

「訳」　彼が４歳近くにもなり、まだ最初に、全体で2年間以上デイケアのセンター以降に私設保育園に行きますが、 どんなイギリス人についても知るほんのわずかな兆候を示すまで、私たちは、2つの言語をもっている人の子供を育てるのが、 もちろん問題であるだけではなく、かかわった子供のためにあまりに多くの問題を引き起こすかもしれなくて、 家で私たちの母国語を維持したかったかどうかに関して意識的な決断をしなければならなかったと認める必要はありませんでした。

彼が四歳近くにもなり、それまでに最初は保育園へ、後にプレイグループへと、合わせて二年以上も通っていてにもかかわらず、 依然として英語を覚えそうな気配がほとんど見られないという事態にいたって初めて、 二カ国語が身につくように子供を育てるというのは単に当たり前と行ってすまされる事柄ではなく、 それは当の子供にあまりにも多くの問題を投げかけることになるかもしれず、 家庭で母国語を使い続けたいか否かについて私たちは冷静な判断を下さなくてはならない、と認めざるを得なかった。

うむ～かなり微妙な感じだが～「参考」ということで納得しよう。

3  Why parents opt for a bilingual upbringing
[24]
As I explained in Chapter 1, my definition of a bilingual upbringing is
that the parents involved have chosen to create and to maintain the
bilingual situation as opposed to a situation where parents and children
just have to adjust to it in order to survive. In this chapter, I want
to look at why and when parents decide on a bilingual upbringing.
Is it essential to resolve upon a course of action before the child is
even born? What are the advantages of being bilingual? What
happens in the case of a drastic change in circumstances, such as a
divorce? The reasons why parents decide to bring up their children
with two languages are manifold. And, as we shall see, there are also
many ways in which the decision can come about.

Making a choice
'For me and my husband, a bilingual upbringing wasn't a conscious
choice from the very beginning. We never thought about the matter
very much until we noticed that our children weren't reacting very
favourably to the fact that they had to cope with two different lan-
guages. Until then we had more or less considered the bilingual
upbringing as a fact of life, because the language of communication
between ourselves, and thus the language we spoke to our children,
was not the language of the country where we lived.
  Our children's difficulties forced us to think carefully about their
bilingual upbringing, but we didn't change our course of action. We
have now made a conscious decision to keep up the Dutch language,

[25]
and this is still the language in which all four of us communicate most
freely and easily at home. At the same time, we trust that by learning
English in the outside world, and especially at school, our children will
stand every chance of becoming native speakers of that language.'

  There are also many parents who do sit down and give the matter
considerable thought well before the birth of their first child. I found
this particularly true for couples who have different mother tongues.
In theory, couples with a mixed-language marriage are in a position
to define the problem in advance, to weigh the advantages and dis-
advantages, and to assess the feasibility of a certain course cf action.
Of course, practice may prove to be different from theory and the
original choice may need to be reconsidered. But these parents are
very likely to have considered the pros and cons of a bilingual up-
bringing from the start.
  Gaby is Dutch and her husband is English. They have lived in
England since their marriage and their children are now five and
two-and-a-half years old. Their common language is English. Gaby
told me:
  'We did think and talk about the possibility of a bilingual upbringing
before the birth of our first child. I come from a bilingual background
myself, but both of us felt it was a good idea to bring up our children
with two languages and that we would have to do it from the very
beginning. It was now or never. Also, we thought that the kind of
mental training it involved for the children would benefit them.
  'And if I had any doubts about the feasibility of it, they soon
disappeared after the arrival of my first baby. I could never have
talked to him in any other language but my own. As a new mother

[26]
I had already enough to worry about, and therefore I didn't want
to have to bother about speaking a foreign language or to wonder
whether I was using the right words or sentence constructions. David
understands Dutch, so he doesn't need to feel excluded when I am
talking to the children, but he always speaks English to them himself.
Our children have had a truly bilingual upbringing from the very
beginning.'
  So far the older one, a boy, has responded better than the little
girl: he is capable of keeping the two languages separate and speaks
both of them, while the girl understands both English and Dutch,
but will only speak English. Of course, these children are still young
and only time will tell whether the parents will be able to stick to
their original plans.
  Another mother, with two little daughters, described how she had
come to her decision to speak her own language with them. Kerstin
is Swedish and is married to an Englishman. Their two girls are now
five and one. She wrote:
  'It made a great difference to me when, not long before my first
daughter's birth, I realized that I was going to speak Swedish to a
Swedish child?I mean that I realized suddenly that the child would
be as much Swedish as English. It then came totally naturally to me
to speak Swedish to her. Until then I had unconsciously thought I
would be speaking Swedish to an English child and that would have
been much more difficult to keep up.'

Taking a risk
But how are we going to find out whether these decisions and pro-
cedures will have worked by the time the children have grown some-

[27]
what older? One way is to look at a different though similar case
of a family with older children: here is a mother who took the
decision to have two languages in the house quite some time ago.
Annick comes from France and she has lived in England for almost
twenty years now. Her husband was born in Germany, but he was
brought up in England. Their children are fifteen, thirteen, and ten
years old. For all three of them English is the more important
language, but they all speak French fluently. I asked her how and
when she decided on a bilingual upbringing. This is what she
answered:
  I actually thought about it before they were born. I had seen two
examples in my immediate neighbourhood which helped me to decide:
one family succeeded in bringing up their child with two languages
right from the very beginning, and the other waited until the age of
seven and then the child refused to speak French. My main reason
for speaking French to them was that I knew that whatever I was
going to do English was going to take over anyhow. So I thought,
the more French I get into them the better. At the same time I was
warned that a lot of children who speak two languages don't know
either of them very well and can have all sorts of difficulties. But I
was prepared to take the risk.'
  Annick said she took a risk, but obviously she has succeeded in
bringing up her children bilingually. Parents often worry about this:
whether they are actually taking a risk and how great that risk is.
The fact is that there is still not much known about the effects of a
bilingual upbringing in the long run, for the bilingual input can never
be singled out as the one cause of a person's achievement, or failure,
in a certain area of life.

[28]
I think the important thing to remember is that the language
development of a bilingual child is different from that of a mono-
lingual child and that, as we will see in the following chapters, some
problems may indeed arise. But we will also see that, if parents take
their time and don't make a great fuss about it during some of the
more difficult periods, a bilingual upbringing can be a happy experience
for parents and children alike.

Visits and visitors
One reason why Annick and her family have been rather successful
in maintaining both languages is that over the years they have spent
almost all their holidays in France and have had a constant stream
of French visitor to their house in South London. As a matter of
fact, practically all parents mentioned this as an important reason
for embarking on a bilingual upbringing: the children should be able
to communicate with the relatives who live abroad.
  Travelling is now comparatively easy and cheap, and I found that
many families see their relatives quite regularly, either visiting the
original home country of one or both parents or having visitors from
abroad. There often seems to be a smaller or larger group of people
'back home', consisting of relatives and friends, with whom we want
to stay in touch. Some of our friends will get by in one or two
foreign languages, but many of them don't. And the grandparents
and cousins will usually speak only one language, while they are often
the people that parents want their children to become particularly
close to.
  Rosella is Italian and lives in England, married to an Englishman.
I am sure that she spoke for many other parents when she said:

[29]
I wanted my children to have a close relationship with the grand
parents on both sides. And I realized that they could only love their
Italian grandmother in the same way they loved their English grand-
mother if they could feel comfortable when speaking Italian.'
  She then continued:
  'It has worked for my daughter, who is the eldest of my three
children. She is now eight years old and although English is her best
language, she will speak Italian to my mother, who stays with us in
England regularly. But my four-year-old son has declared that he
finds Italian too difficult to speak. Also, all the cousins who live in
Italy happen to be girls, so he tends to stick to his father a great deal
when we are there.'
  Not only do parents want their children to be able to communicate
with the grandparents, but parents also hope that grandparents will
provide a natural impetus for the children to practise the foreign
language, as Kaska pointed out to me. She and her husband are yet
another example of a mixed-language marriage: Kaska comes from
Poland, her husband is Dutch and they live in England, just outside
London. Their language of communication is English, but Kaska has
been speaking Polish to their daughter. She said:
　　'My parents are coming to visit us in a few months' time. I am
looking forward to their stay because it will provide a natural setting
for speaking Polish. Up till now I have mainly talked in Polish with
my daughter, who is now three-and-a-half, and she understands it
perfectly well. But since she started playgroup half a year ago, she
just wants to speak English. Having the grandparents around will
hopefully make it more worthwhile for her to speak some Polish again.'
Another way to ensure that children will practise the other language

[30]
is to let them stay abroad on their own with their grandparents?or
other relatives or friends. The age at which children will feel confident
enough to do this will vary a great deal and it also depends on how
well they know the people they are visiting. But if hosts and guests all
feel comfortable about it, such visits can be a great success all round.
There may even be an added bonus for the parents in that it gives
them a chance to go on a holiday elsewhere. It was Magda, who is
also Polish and lives in England married to an Englishman, who first
mentioned this to me. Her two children are eight and five years old.
She said:
　'Up till now we have spent almost all our holidays in Poland. But,
frankly speaking, I want to see a bit more of the world myself. The
plan for this summer is that the children will go to Poland together
to stay with my parents. This way they have a chance to see the
family and practise their Polish, while there will still be time and
money left for us to go elsewhere for our holiday.'
　　Holidays abroad?or having visitors from abroad?offer a natural
opportunity for a language to be used and practised, and I feel it is
very important for a child to be able to see some point in learning
or keeping up a second language. The fact that more and more parents
are now choosing to bring up their children bilingually, and are doing
so successfully, may actually have a lot to do with travel being so
much easier.
One begins almost to wonder whether parents could in fact leave it
to those holiday occasions and forget about the bilingual upbringing
at home. The point is, however, that a language can't be learned from
scratch within the time limit set by a holiday period. It is true that
children can tremendously improve upon their command of a language

[31]
over a two, three, or four week period, but only if the basic knowledge
of the language is there. A parent who was quite explicit on this
matter was Angelina. She came from Spain to live in England and
marry an Englishman almost twenty years ago. She had the following
observation:
　'My children have been accepted in Spain as Spanish children, be-
cause they can speak the language when they go there. Communication
must be given a chance, otherwise people are less interested in you
as a person. If we had gone to visit my relatives and friends in Spain
with the children just speaking English, they would never have had
a chance to become fully integrated in the lifestyle of the people we
know there. And because they were accepted and integrated, they
learned to speak the language even better.'

A matter of taste
In my search for information on parents and bilingual children I often
came across families where one or both parents seemed to have a
particular interest in languages. ; Such an interest may not be a
necessary condition for marrying someone from abroad or for moving
abroad oneself, but it certainly helps/) And for many people it is by
no means a mere coincidence that they end up living in a country
where the language spoken is the language they studied at university.
Parents with this kind of background and keen on studying lan-
guages themselves are usually very enthusiastic about bringing up
their children bilingually. But like all other parents they have to
adopt a pragmatic standpoint on the matter. These parents had
certainly succeeded in doing so: Marie-Luce is French, her husband is
English, and they both teach French at a university in the North of

[32]
England. Both were at home when I arrived to interview them.
Marie-Luce:
  'When we met we were both fairly fluent in each other's language,
but although we have lived in England since our marriage we have
mostly communicated in French with each other. When Maxime was
born it was fairly natural for both of us to speak French to him, for
that was the language of the house. Moreover, we wanted to establish
French as a language before he would be exposed to English, which
he would learn in any case. Also, we reckoned that if English had
been his first language, the need to learn French wouldn't have been
half as strong from his point of view. So for Maxime, and for his
younger brother, French was the first language.'
  Her husband continued:
  'Nowadays, however, English is a lot more around in the house, not
least because the two boys, now six-and-a-half and four years old,
always talk English to each other. I also speak English more regularly,
for instance when playing with the boys, as their games become more
intricate and technical each day. And we are both convinced that
conflict situations are to be avoided, as language development should
be natural and we want to be careful not to build up any resentment.'

Language and culture
Language can't be isolated from the rest of life. A nation's language
is inextricably linked with its culture and there is no way of separating
the two I found people very aware of this. During almost every
interview my informants would sooner or later bring up the re-
lationship between language and other aspect of life. The relationship
isn't always simple or straightforward, but parents frequently men-

[33]
tioned the fact that one can't talk about the circumstances of a
bilingual upbringing without looking at what it means to live with two
cultures as well as two languages.
Francoise comes from France, lives in London, and has an English
husband. She simply stated:
  'Language is a way of life. It's food, discipline, children's bed-time,
the way you spend your free time. My children know both ways: in
England they know how to be English children, in France they can
be part of the French community.'
  An important reason why parents want their children to become
bilingual is that they want them to be familiar with the culture of
the other country. For people who feel strongly about their back
ground, teaching their children their own language is a way (though
it is not the only way) of transmitting their own identity.
  Johan's parents moved from Hungary to Australia when he was nine
years old. As an adult he moved to England and through his education
and training English has inevitably become the language in which he
expresses himself most fluently. However, he has always regretted the
loss of the Hungarian language and culture by his family in Australia.
His wife is also Hungarian and moved from Hungary to England upon
their marriage. I spoke to her and she told me:
  'We decided that the children should be brought up with both
Hungarian and English. For me and my husband Hungarian has
always been our main language of communication, although I speak
English fairly easily as I worked in a London office for a number of
years before our first daughter was born. Both of us have always talked
in Hungarian to our daughters, who are now eight and six years old.
At the same time, English has gradually taken over as the more

[34]
important language for the girls through school and social contacts.
My husband, however, is quite strict in his efforts to keep up Hungarian,
even by practising reading and writing the language with them,
something he had to re-learn as an adult.'
  The decision to keep up a foreign language is different for couples
with a single-language marriage than for parents in a mixed-language
marriage. It is easier for parents with a common native tongue to
use this with their children than for a parent who is the only one who
speaks the other language. But, especially after the children have
reached school age, it always needs a certain commitment on behalf
of the parents to see to it that their own language and culture are
passed on to their children.
Suso and his wife come from Catalonia in Spain and together they
have lived in England for fourteen years now. He pointed out that
his children, who are now thirteen and ten years old, were not bilingual
in Spanish and English, as I first assumed, but in Catalan and English.
The Catalan language has been preserved in Spain in spite of many
years of oppression and it seems that this couple try to continue the
tradition, even far away from their country of origin. I was given the
impression that Suso's determination to do so has had the required
results so far. But he also insisted that just keeping up the language
is not enough, for he said:
  'If you want to teach your children your own language, you have
to teach them about your culture as well. Some immigrants don't even
know their own history and then you cannot expect the children to
feel proud of it.'

[35]
Changing circumstances
The decision to bring up one's children with two languages is hardly
one that can be taken once and for all. Changing circumstances and
unexpected reactions from the children may force parents to alter
course. Whether parents decide to teach their children two languages
simultaneously, whether they put them through the process of learning
a second language after the first has been established, or whether they
want to keep up the first language after the children have acquired a
second one, parents have to opt for a bilingual upbringing time and
again. And it always needs an effort on the part of the parents to
see to it that their children become or remain bilingual.
Jeanette moved from Holland to marry an Englishman when her
children were nine, ten, and twelve years old. Her story:
  'My first concern was that the children would learn English and I
actually started teaching them while we were still living in Holland.
We sat down for an English lesson twice a week and I even gave them
some homework to do. Before we moved to England, we spent a short
holiday there, but at that time the children were quite disappointed
when they found out how little they already knew of the language.
After we had settled, however, and they had started school, English
came along fairly quickly, especially for the boy, who is the youngest
of the three. They have all received remedial teaching at school and
from the beginning we made an effort to speak English at home
during mealtimes.
  'And now, after three years the problem has reversed 180 degrees.
My main concern now is to keep up Dutch, and it is turning out to
be more difficult than I had anticipated. I would have thought that
my children had reached an age where a language is so well established

[36]
that they wouldn't forget it. But this is true only if you really make
an effort to keep it up. Also, we live in the North of England and we
have to make quite an effort to go to Holland. For this reason the
children don't get as much practice as I would like them to have.'
Jeanette's case isn't all that extraordinary. Circumstances may
change more quickly and more drastically than we sometimes like to
think. She is not the only mother I talked to who moved abroad with
her children to marry again. For younger children the transition
might be easier, but it is true that children don't necessarily learn a
new language quite naturally or automatically. And keeping up an old
one is even less automatic, for the language spoken at school will
gradually take over as the more important one for the children.
At any given time, life may force us into a sudden change of direc-
tion. What happens after a divorce, or when one of the parents dies,
and the surviving parent considers returning to his or her country
of origin? None of the parents I talked to actually mentioned the
possibility of becoming a single parent?and therefore of wanting or
needing to return to the country of origin?as a reason for bringing
up their children with two languages. After all, we can't predict or
guard ourselves against all possible events in life. But the eventuality
of going back to one's own country can be in the back of one's mind.
Many considerations will come to bear upon such a decision, and
language will only be one of them. Let us see what the reality looked
like for someone who had to face this situation.
  Mushi moved from England to live in Paris fourteen years ago when
she married a Frenchman. They separated five years ago when the
children were seven, three, and two. She explained her situation to
me:

[37]
'I considered going back to England, but it turned out to be im-
possible for me to find either a job or suitable housing there. Here
I can at least earn some kind of living by teaching English as a foreign
language. The children understand English and I will sometimes speak
it with them, for one consequence of the separation has been that I
myself speak a lot more English and far less French than when
I was still married. But my children are basically French children. When
they were born I decided they should become firmly rooted in one
country, for I never had that experience myself. It is important to
me that my children should feel at home here, even if for myself I
have given up hope of becoming fully integrated into the French way
of life.'

Advantages
So far I have suggested a number of reasons and circumstances which
affect how parents decide upon a bilingual upbringing for their
children. Up till now, it seems as if the reasons that were mentioned
were all at least as much for the parents' sake as for the children's.
It won't come as a surprise, though, that parents who are in favour
of having more than one language around usually also produce a
long list of the advantages this has for the children.
  When asked about the advantages of a bilingual upbringing, one
father simply wrote down 'legion'. Others were more specific, and
the answers given most regularly were: 'knowing two languages
makes it easier to learn a third or fourth', 'later it will benefit them
job-wise', 'increases self-confidence', 'makes them more tolerant and
open-minded', and 'more choices and more chances'. And Anne, who
brought up two children in France while she and her husband both

[38]
have English as their mother tongue, wrote:
'The obvious advantages are that two worlds are open to you rather
than only one. Besides being able to communicate verbally with
everyone, from the dustman to the distinguished neighbours, the
mentality of the people of a particular country becomes familiar to
you through language. Therefore, later on, in the working world for
example, you are not only able to converse but also able to understand
and cope with people'.
  Only one parent I talked to was somewhat more cynical when asked
about the advantages of a bilingual upbringing for the children them-
selves. She remarked:
  I used to study languages and it is true that people with a bilingual
background were often streets ahead of the rest of us. No doubt it
is very useful if you want to become a simultaneous translator. But
how many of our children will actually choose that as a profession?'

英語Ⅶのテキスト２ 訂正

最近は９つの翻訳サイトを横断して翻訳できる、cross translation をよく使っている。       
関西弁の翻訳などがあって、ついつい、勉強以外の余計なことをしてみたくなって、時間を浪費している。       

翻訳ソフトを買ってみようかと、考えることもあるのだが、 翻訳の精度を考えると、なかなか決断できないでいる。
ネットの翻訳がもう少しましになれば（いろいろ助けてもらっているのに、何ですが・・）考えよう。       

[10]
           On being bilingual? the parents

'Since we came to       live in London ice have made many new friends.
From the beginning we were introduced to lots of people and generally
we have been made to feel very welcome.  Yet our relatives and old
friends back in Holland are not very far away, and we also go to see
them or they come to see us quite frequently. And sometimes I begin
to wonder whether it is in fact possible to do both things: to settle in
a new country and to hang on to old ties. Will I not somehow get lost
in the middle, losing out on both sides?
  It's the same with the languages I use every day. I want to practice
and improve my English as much as possible, but I also want to carry
on speaking Dutch at home. And the same question arises: will I
gain by having both languages, or will I end up with not having
either properly?'

A bilingual       upbringing begins with one or both parents being
bilingual. But what does it mean 'to be bilingual’? The parents I
interviewed found it quite difficult to define the term in just a few
words, but they had some clear ideas on what it means to live with
two languages. In this chapter I describe how they experience being
bilingual. As we shall see, some of them tried to define some kind of
standard, a degree of proficiency to be achieved in the foreign language.
Others were rather more concerned with the emotional ties one can
have with different languages.

[11]
To be bilingual: why and when?
Before introducing some of the parents and their views on life with
two languages, I will explain why and when I myself first started to
think about being bilingual.

'I learned several       languages at school and later continued at uni-
versity to be trained       as a translator. However, at the time I never
thought about the subject of bilingualism or regarded myself as a
bilingual person. The languages that I was learning were technical
chunks of knowledge, similar to what I had learned in mathematics
or geography. Even when I was studying to become a translator and
I was speaking, reading, and writing a foreign language almost every
day, I just considered the use of a different language as a professional
skill. It wasn't until I had moved abroad and had to live with two
languages that I began to think about the subject of bilingualism and
also began to experience the emotional impact of a bilingual situation.'

  For some       people, however, proficiency in a language is always       the
important requirement. This may mean that they consider bilingualism
to be a goal that cannot be reached. One person who expressed this
view was John. He said:
'No, I am not bilingual, for I don't believe that such a thing exists.
One can be entirely fluent in a foreign language, but one will never
be able to express oneself equally well in both languages in all spheres
of life.'
There were other parents who treated the matter rather more lightly
and who called themselves bilingual, because I can express myself
equally well in both languages', or because 'when I speak a language
   
[12]
I think in that language and I don't translate from the one into the
other', or 　Ｉ　switch without thinking'.
  Most people who have lived in a foreign country for a considerable
period of time will get a reasonable command of the new language,
but they won't necessarily feel that they have become bilingual. One
of them is Marco, who comes from Italy and has married an English
wife. He explained:
' We came to live in England eight years ago. At the time when
we met, my wife's Italian was better than my English, and Italian
has remained the language of the house. At my job I speak English,
but I feel that for social purposes my English vocabulary is limited,
also because a number of our friends are Italian. In my view you are
bilingual when you speak a foreign language and other people don't
realize straightaway that you are not a native speaker. I think that
I fall short of that standard, but my wife certainly meets it.'

The emotional       factor
when asked how they would define their own bilingualism, many
parents also mentioned a variety of emotional factors that decided
for them whether or not they considered themselves to be bilingual.
Angelika's mother tongue is German. Her answer to the question
whether she would describe herself as a bilingual person was:
  'Well, I wouldn't. I describe myself as very fluent in English, but
not bilingual. In fact, I don't really know what bilingual means,
because when I speak English, even after twenty years and all the
studying I have done in this country and all the reading, I do not have
the same feeling for the language that I have for German. I very
often just use English words without having any of the association of

[13]
feelings and experiences that I have when I use German words? I
suppose these associations come from early childhood experiences.'
And Angelika also noticed: 'You see, I can swear in English at
great length. It doesn't mean anything to me, it is just an exclamation.
It could be "ooo" or "aaaa", it is just letters. I know that now is
the time when you ought to say something rude, but the word itself
is not rude to me.'
  It is clear that one's attitude to a new language can be expressed in
many ways. Rosella put it this way:
  'English has become my stepmother-tongue.'
  And her smile indicated that she wasn't quite sure how much she
liked this relationship.
  Fred, on the other hand, had one of the most positive views of
bilingualism that I came across. He is Dutch and he has a French
wife. They met and got married in France, but they have lived in
Holland for eight years now.
'To be bilingual gives me a sense of power and achievement. Also,
I find it relaxing: when I get home from a long day's work and can
switch to speaking French instead of Dutch, it almost feels like going
on a holiday in France.'
The next comment was made by Janine, who moved to England from
the French-speaking part of Belgium:
  'I consider myself to be bilingual, because I understand English
jokes.'
  This sounds to me a pretty good reason for considering oneself
bilingual, as humour is often closely bound up with language. But
Janine also added:
  'Although I understand English jokes, I don't always think they are

[14]
funny.'
  Gaby, for her part, told me that she considered herself to be bilingual
Dutch-English, although:
  'I don't always understand English jokes and my husband will often
say, "I will explain later", for it usually concerns jokes that don't
permit a public explanation. But I probably would have had the same
problem, if I had remained in Holland and had just spoken Dutch.'

One person, two identities
'From time to time, speaking a foreign language has made me feel
a bit insecure in my social contacts. I still experience this, although
now less often than when I first started living abroad. It isn't that I
don't feel competent enough in the other language. Rather, I wonder:
is it because of what I said or how I said it that someone suddenly
stares at me as if I have just arrived from outer space?
  One problem is that, personally, I am not a very good actor and
sometimes I think that one should be in order to speak foreign lan-
gauges properly. I still try to speak English as if it were Dutch,
which means that I talk too quickly and don't choose my words
carefully enough. But, if I did slowｗ down and talk more       deliberately,
it somehow wouldn’t quite feel like me.'

  My own       experience is clearly different from that of one of the       other
parents. His mother tongue is also Dutch and he made the following
remark:
  'When I speak French I feel French, and when I speak English I
feel English. Language can be an artistic expression of oneself, and
I think the way you express yourself in another language is more

Important than speaking it flawlessly.'
  There is definitely a link between language and identity which
is well worth exploring if we really want to understand what it means
to be bilingual. Do different languages represent different aspects of
one individual? I am inclined to believe that there is some truth in
this. Of course, it's not true to the same extent for everyone, and
for some it's probably not true at all. And equally, it is also true that
one can have different identities and play different roles within the
scope of one and the same language.
  However, one mother gave me a striking example of how her little
daughter acted out different aspects of herself through using different
languages. The use of an imaginary person or playmate is a well-
known phenomenon in child psychology. This little girl used this
'technique' to come to terms with the fact that she was living with
two languages and two different sets of values, and I think it shows as
if through a magnifying glass something that applies to many bilingual
people. Madelon, the mother, is Dutch, but she lives in England. This
is what she told me about her daughter:
  'Charlie must have been about two-and-a-half when one day she
spotted a small English girl on a playground who seemed very well
behaved and didn't dare to do any wild things. It appears that she
also overheard the girl's name, which was Laura, and from then on
she used this name to refer to her imaginary English counterpart. If
she was Charlie, she was a wild and naughty Dutch girl; if she was
Laura, she was quiet and polite. By the way, it's quite probable that
these two characters also reflected her noisy Dutch mum, and her calm
and self-possessed English nursery teacher.
'With time we learned how to live with those two persons and they

[16]
would even be used as a means to escape from unwanted situations.
"Go and fetch Laura", I sometimes told Charlie if there seemed no
other way to stop her making a nuisance of herself. Later on, Laura
became super-Laura and grew out of reach. And when one day my
daughter said to me: "She doesn't really exist, but don't tell anybody",
I knew she was growing out of this phase.'

And what about the       mother tongue?
All the comments quoted so far have focussed on the acquisition of a
new language, and two factors have emerged as deciding for parents
whether or not they consider themselves as bilingual: the emotional
relationship with the new language and the proficiency obtained. But
what about the fluency in one's mother tongue? Among all the different
'definitions' given by the parents I talked to, one of the most revealing
was: 'Yes, I consider myself to be bilingual, because I'm still fluent in
my mother tongue.'
  When I first heard this answer to my question?'Would you describe
yourself as bilingual?'?I hadn't lived abroad long enough myself to
personally experience the possible loss of one's mother tongue. And
until then I had often thought that people who no longer seemed
capable of speaking their own languages easily and fluently were either
just pretending or were a bit stupid. With time I have come to realize
that keeping up one's own language isn't as easy as it seems. To be
or to remain fluent in a language one needs practice and if one settles
permanently in a new country with a new language such practice isn't
always available.
  Genevieve moved from France to England some twelve years ago
and she is married to an Englishman. She described her situation quite

expressively:
'When I came to England I started working for a British company.
I was speaking English all day; in fact my job entailed talking all the
time on the phone and so on. At the time I didn't have any French
friends in England and I started forgetting my French to a certain
extent, and every time I went back to France it took me a while to
adapt again. Everybody was saying I was speaking French with an
English accent; lots of words were escaping me.'
  She wasn't the only one who had felt this happening to her. Many
parents complained that their mother tongue had become rusty or that
they had to search for words. This was certainly truer for those
who were the only one in a marriage speaking the foreign language,
as in Genevieve's case. But even couples who had migrated together
noticed that the new language would stealthily begin to replace the
old one, especially when they talked about experiences that belonged to
the new life abroad, such as a job, a new area of studying, or children.
The way a language can have the monopoly in certain areas of one's
life is also illustrated by Grete’s remark:
'I lived in Holland when I was a child. I have lived in England as
a wife and mother. My Dutch is a child's Dutch, and my knowledge
of English words is probably greater, for I use words in English that
I may never have used in Dutch.'
  Another comment to be heard was that language changes all the
time and it is impossible to keep in touch with the new words and
phrases entering a language. Angelina:
'A lot has changed in Spain since I left twenty years ago and the
language has evolved accordingly. I simply do not have the vocabulary
to talk about the new political situation. At first it felt a bit awkward

[18]
but, as I go to Spain regularly, I feel I am catching up now.'
  For some parents even accent had become a problem. Rudi has been
married to an English wife for fifteen years now and they have always
lived in England and spoken English together. He observed:
  'When I am in Holland, people no longer recognize me as being
Dutch. Nowadays I get more comments on my accent in Dutch than
on my accent in English. I would need at least three weeks in Holland
to learn proper Dutch again but, although I pay regular visits, they
never last that long.'

A foreign       accent
On one occasion, when I had come to interview a mother about how
she was bringing up her children with two languages, I thought after
about five minutes: 'This must either be the wrong address or I
should have been talking to the father as the parent who comes from
abroad, for the person I'm talking to must be an English native
speaker.' We had just been chatting before starting with the actual
interview, so I hadn't asked yet for details such as country of birth
or date of migration. It turned out that this mother had moved to
England from Poland in her early twenties and at the time hardly
spoke any English. She had married an Englishman, who didn't speak
her language, so they had always communicated in English.
  For me, this was obviously one of the most amazing examples of
someone speaking a foreign language with an accent that could not
be distinguished from a native speaker's and it showed that one needs
only one exception to disprove the rule that 'adults cannot learn to
speak a foreign language with a native accent'. However, in general it
is true that when speaking a foreign language most adults can im-
      
[19]
mediately be detected as a non-native speaker by their accent. And if
for some parents accent can become a problem in the mother tongue,
one would expect that for many more parents it would present quite
an obstacle in the foreign language. In answer to the question whether
she would describe herself as bilingual, Anke wrote:
'In one way, yes, because I speak Greek as easily as Dutch. On the
other hand, I only have to open my mouth and people will say to me,
"Oh, you're a foreigner, aren't you?" That's not what I call being
bilingual.'
  I myself share this sense of frustration with Anke, and I am sure
that there are many more like us. Sometimes it seemed that particularly
those parents who had mastered quite a good accent would add: 'And
of course I will never learn to speak without a foreign accent.' A
bit surprisingly, however, I found that relatively few parents took
accent into account when I asked them about their bilingualism. More
often than not accent was completely omitted from consideration. Or,
when people tried to judge their own degree of bilingualism, many
appeared to consider their pronunciation less important than their
fluency, their ability to think in the second language, and their feelings
towards it.
  On reflection I felt this was more than a bit surprising, for in dis-
cussions about bilingual children, a 'perfect' accent in two languages
is often seen as one of the greatest rewards of a bilingual upbringing.
Undoubtedly, someone who has been brought up with two languages
is far more likely to have a native accent in both of them than some-
one who acquires a second language in later life, but the observations
made by bilingual people themselves may indicate that accent is perhaps
less important as a 'reward' than is sometimes suggested. And even

[20]
for children, acquiring a native accent in two languages isn't always
a completely straightforward process.

Learning the hard       way
So far I have talked about 'being bilingual', but I believe that bilingual-
ism is a process rather than a state: almost every day you come across
a new expression in the second language, or you discover a subtle
nuance you didn't know before. At the same time you need to make
a constant effort to keep up the mother tongue if you want to try and
prevent odd little mistakes from creeping in.
  When you are in a learning process, you need helping along. How
do native speakers react when someone tries to grapple with their
language? People whose mother tongue is English may not be very
interested in learning other languages themselves, but they are ex-
tremely used to other people learning to speak theirs. They will never
laugh at your mistakes and they will allow you to muddle on, while
waiting politely and patiently until you have found the right expression.
  This is all very nice but it's not too helpful. At times I would like
them to correct a mistake or help me find a word I am desperately
looking for, but? with one or two exceptions? they simply never do.
Also, in a conversation, native speakers of English don't always realize
that you might have difficulties in understanding them, probably
because few of them have ever tried to understand another language
themselves.
  The reaction can be quite different in another country. Take the
Dutch for example. Dutch people are rather proud of their ability to
speak foreign languages. On the other hand, they can't understand
why someone would want to learn Dutch.  Anyone wanting to learn

Dutch in the Netherlands after having moved there from abroad might
have a similar experience to Judy's:
I had to make it clear to people that I absolutely wanted to learn
Dutch. We took a crash course just before we moved to Amsterdam
and made an effort to communicate in Dutch from the very beginning.
But it's not easy. For one thing, people will always answer you in
English if they possibly can. But you can ask them not to do that.
Then they might tease you if you make a funny mistake. And once
they have decided to speak to you in Dutch, some may resort to address-
ing you in an oversimplified manner, as if you were an idiot.'
  I can't say what it is like in other countries or when other languages
are involved but it seems that, when learning either English or Dutch
as a foreign language, you should not expect too much help or sympathy
from a native speaker. Whether you meet with polite silence or are
ridiculed, you are out there on your own, learning the hard way.    

Speaking and       understanding, writing and reading
In this discussion of bilingualism, I have only referred to the ability
to speak two languages. However, for a more accurate description one
should distinguish between speaking and understanding on the one
side, and writing and reading on the other.
Few people have equal abilities in all four skills in both languages.
For one thing, it depends on how the language has been learned. For
those parents who learned the second language via an academic ap-
proach at school, this may mean that reading and writing the language
presents less difficulty than speaking it, especially when first arriving
in the new country. People who pick up most of the new language
after their arrival often acquire an excellent command of the spoken

[22]   
language, while their ability to read and write it may remain rather
limited.
  I was told by quite a few parents that when they spoke a second
language they no longer translated from the one language into the
other, but that this was still the case when for instance writing a
letter. At the other end of the scale I came across people who said
they had grown so accustomed to writing specialized papers in English
that they could no longer really do the same thing in their mother
tongue.
  Understanding and reading? what are known as the passive skills?
are usually considered to be easier than the active skills of speaking
and writing. Yet, anyone can be caught out by the intricacies of a
foreign language. As Angelika said:
  'Even now I can come across a book in English where on each page
there are about six words that I have never seen or heard before,
which can be quite a distressing experience.'
Annick comes from France and has lived in England for many years
now. She talks English fast and easily, in a way as if it were French.
She said:
  I read more easily in French than I would in English. I find it
more pleasant, probably because in some ways maybe it is less of a
struggle, although reading in English doesn't appear to be a struggle
on the surface.'
  Even understanding a foreign language is quite difficult sometimes.
Even after you have lived in a country for many years, a dialect or
local accent can still present a problem, perhaps when you go out
shopping, or even when you are in your own home watching television.
Another difficulty can arise when you join a group of three or four
 
「２３」
people who are having a conversation. The speed of the talking,
the jokes and colloquialisms may at times baffle even the most seasoned
bilingual person.

'However, I have discovered for myself one       big advantage of living
with a foreign language: I find it easier to switch off. When I am
working in a library, or when I am getting tired or bored at a party,
I can regard the spoken ｗord around me as       mere noise that can be
ignored at will.'

英語Ⅶのテキスト

試験の結果はまだ分からないが、英語の勉強をコツコツと続けている。
運良く？合格していればテキストの勉強は「無駄な努力」になりそうだが、
習慣化してしまって、僅かな時間でも勉強しないと、なんだか落ち着かない。
それに「勉強して」悪いことは何もないし・・

辞書を頼りに、一行づつテキストを訳していくのだが、いかんせん自分の訳が正しいのか間違っているのかが分からない。
「だいたいこんな意味かな～」ぐらいの訳は出来るのだが・・文法的・語法的に正しいのだろうか・・単語の意味は？
悩み始めるとそこで止まってしまう。

そんなとき翻訳ページを頼っている。臨機応変、ＴＰＯのある訳は期待できないが、文法的には、意外にしっかりしているように思える。

テキストをテキスト化？したので、私のように困ったときは使ってみてください。
必要な部分をコピーして「メモ帳」に貼り付ければ、書き込みもできるし・・・

１０ページぐらいずつ載せましょう。　「ワード」にしっかりスペルチェックはしてもらったが・・
間違いがあれば自分で訂正してください。（あたりまえか・・）
誰か英語の得意な人が「サクサク」と訳して、ブログにでもしてくれないだろうか。
などと、切に思うこの頃。

The bilingual experience
A book for parents EVELINE DE JONG

1   Searching for information

'When I moved with my husband and our eight-month-old baby from
Amsterdam to Vancouver, the matter of a bilingual upbringing was among
the least of my worries. Our life was too much taken up by
the practical issues of moving house and settling in Canada to have
much scope for contemplating the language development of Gideon.
It wasn't until he was almost four years old and still showed very
few signs of learning any English?in spite of first having been going
to a day-care centre and later to a playgroup for more than two years
altogether?that we had to acknowledge that bringing up one's child
with two languages is not just a matter of course, that it might pose
too many problems for the child involved, and that we had to make
a conscious decision as to whether or not we wanted to keep up our
mother tongue at home.

By that time, we had had our second child, we had moved to London,
and we had settled there on a more or less permanent basis. People
started suggesting to us that we should give up speaking Dutch, at
least to the children thus making it easier for then to adapt to the
English-speaking surroundings. So far we have rejected that possibility

[2]
and we still speak Dutch with our children, but at times we feel that
we have to defend ourselves for doing so!'
Sources of information
Why isn't a bilingual upbringing just a matter of course?
And how does that correspond to the fact that millions of children all over the
world grow up with two languages, seemingly without problems?
And, as for the advice and comments that I receive from people around me,
why do they never seem to be quite to the point? In short, what is
known about bilingual children ?
An obvious place to look for answers to these questions was in books,
and I began my search for information by consulting the child-care
manuals on my shelf that had helped me during the early years of
parenthood. However, I found that on this subject the books were
silent. Is growing up with two languages still regarded as exceptional?
Or does it just happen 'naturally', so that there is no need to write
about it?
I found another source of information in the existing academic case
studies of bilingual children. These case studies supplied me with a
wealth of linguistic detail, but they didn't deal with any of the sorts
of problems that we and our children were experiencing. Moreover,
they typically reported on 'success stories', often describing children
of parents who themselves were linguists, and I felt that these studies
had very little to offer me. I was trying to find out more about the
day-to-day issues that arise in a bilingual home environment.
I also asked parents in a similar situation about their experiences.
The problem with bilingualism, however, is that there are so many
variations on the theme. This is true for practically all the issues

[3]
parents face when bringing up their children but I felt it more acutely
with regard to the bilingual situation. When seeking advice from
other bilingual families I found that their position was never quite
the same as my own: they had come for a short stay only, or they
had migrated quite a long time ago; the parents involved spoke a
different foreign language; they had a much better, or worse, com-
mand of the local language; the children had been born in the country
where the family was now living, or when the family had 'moved'
countries their children were much older than mine.
Still, I decided to press on with interviewing other parents, and I
also sent questionnaires (containing the same questions as were asked
during the interviews) to those people I couldn't visit personally.
Gradually a picture emerged of parents and children who were ex-
periencing a bilingual situation that was similar to my own, and it
was from all these families taken together that I learned most about
all the issues that can play a role in a bilingual upbringing.

Parents and children
Parents and children are the two main parties involved in a bilingual
upbringing and both parties of course have plenty to say on the
subject. Being a parent myself, I was first and foremost interested
in the experiences of other parents who were right in the middle of
bringing up their children with two languages. Parents, of course,
would be able to supply information on the reactions and problems of
their children as well as on their own dilemmas and decisions.
I was also interested in hearing from the other party concerned?
the children?so I thought it would be useful to talk to adults who
had grown up bilingually. By coincidence, when I first embarked upon

[4]
my search for information, I seemed to meet quite a few of them.
They were always very willing to share their memories with me, but,
apart from the fact that memories tend to become unreliable with the
passing of time, the somewhat vague childhood recollections didn't
reveal very much about how the situation as a whole was dealt with,
let alone how it was experienced by their parents.
So I decided not to include their accounts in this book and instead
to rely on present-day parents as my informants on the subject of a
bilingual home environment. Very interestingly, however, through
the stories of those people who had experienced a bilingual childhood
in the past, it gradually became clear to me that the situation in which
they had grown up with two languages was usually rather different to
that of children in bilingual families today. One observation in
particular made me realize the differences that are involved.

Gertrud, who is now in her fifties, came to England in the 1930s
and she, like many others, grew up with two languages. She told me:
'One thing we all learned from a very young age onwards was to act
as interpreters for our parents.'
When I heard this, my reaction was: 'But up till now, I have always
had to act as an interpreter for my children ! Why was their situation
so different from my own? The answer is that one of the reasons why
people become bilingual is migration and people move abroad for
different reasons. Broadly speaking, one could call it a difference
between compulsory and voluntary reasons. On the one hand there
were and still are many families who migrate in order to escape
from war, poverty, and unemployment. On the other hand there are
growing numbers of people, especially within Europe, who move
abroad because of marriage or a career, or because of the plain wish

[5]
to widen their horizons.
People who move abroad of their own free will have different aims
when settling in a new country than those who are forced to migrate.
Compulsory migration often means that one either tries to integrate
oneself and one's children into a new country and a new culture, or?
as is also often the case?isolates oneself from it. People who have
moved voluntarily often aim at combining the different influences,
such as culture, food, and, of course, languages. While in the case of
forced migration the bilingual situation is one that just has to be
coped with, parents who have migrated without having been com-
pelled to do so often actively wish their children to become bilingual.
This made me realize that it is worth making a distinction between
children who are growing up bilingually and children who are brought
up bilingually.

Growing up bilingually versus a bilingual upbringing
For those who live in the Western world, where monolingualism rather
than bilingualism seems to be the norm, it often comes as a surprise
that?as estimated by linguists?at least half the world's population
is bilingual. Often the reason for bilingualism is migration, but even
more often the language spoken at home is not the same as the one
spoken outside because of political, economic, or geographical reasons.
Sometimes several official languages exist side by side in one area or
one country. Sometimes a language is imposed as the official one for
public life, while different ethnic groups cling to their own languages
in their home environment.
A common characteristic of all these situations is that the children
growing up in them will have to adjust to the bilingual or multilingual

[6]
environment. If the parents also come from a multilingual background,
it might well be that living with two or more languages has become
a way of life over a number of generations. However, in the case of
forced migration or in the case of recent political and economic changes
within a country, parents usually know only one language, while the
children have to learn a different one at school. But whatever the
cause may be, growing up bilingually means that there is no choice:
for the children and parents concerned it is a fact of life and they
will have to cope with it as well as they can.
A bilingual upbringing, on the other hand, is an option that can be
considered by those parents who have migrated to a new country on
a voluntary basis and who are already reasonably fluent in two lan-
guages before they have to start contemplating the bilingual upbringing
of their children. There are many permutations but two general groups
fall into this category: partners who have moved abroad together and
have a common mother tongue ('single-language marriages'), and
people who have migrated on their own and have married someone
who has a different mother tongue ('mixed-language marriages').
Provided both partners?or at least one of them in a mixed-language
marriage?are more or less bilingual, these couples can make a con-
scious decision to bring up their children bilingually.
In practice the choice isn't always straightforward. There are
many degrees of fluency in a foreign language, and there are
numerous circumstances which will influence the decision. But the
main difference between growing up bilingually and being brought
up bilingually is that the parents involved have chosen to create and
to maintain the bilingual situation as opposed to a situation where
parents and children just have to adjust to it in order to survive.

[7]

This book is concerned with the issues of a bilingual upbringing
rather than with growing up in a bilingual environment. It does not
describe families who are bilingual because they live in a part of a
country where a minority language is being spoken next to a national
language (e.g. Welsh-English or Frisian-Dutch families), or because
they live in a country such as Switzerland or Belgium where several
national languages exist side by side. This book describes the ex-
periences of those parents who?by moving abroad?have created a
bilingual home environment for themselves and their children, and
who are in a position to make choices with respect to the bilingual
upbringing of their children.

Temporary or permanent settlement
When talking about parents who are faced with the choice of a
bilingual upbringing for their children, we have to consider those who
have moved on a temporary basis as well as those who have moved on
a permanent basis. One important difference between those two groups
is that parents who move temporarily can sometimes decide to avoid
the bilingual issue altogether by leaving the children back home
(boarding school), or by sending them to a local school where the
curriculum is taught in the home language (French Lycee), or by
enrolling them in an international school where they cater for children
with many different mother tongues. This is especially true in the
case of families of diplomats and employees of multinational com-
panies or large international organizations, as funds are often made
available to send the children to these schools.
Another difference in the bilingual situation between permanent and
temporary residents is illustrated by the following remark. It was

[8]
made by a Norwegian mother, whose husband was in the Norwegian
diplomatic service. The couple lived in London with their small
daughter for two years and she said this about the situation:
'I think it is very good for my daughter to become bilingual, for
English is a very useful language to know. We hope to keep it up
once we are back in Norway and it may also be helpful when we are
posted to another country.'

These parents made the choice for their daughter to become bilingual,
but it was a choice of a different kind. To them the question of keep-
ing up Norwegian didn't even arise, only the usefulness of learning
English. Parents who move abroad on a permanent basis can't choose
whether or not their children should learn the language of the country
of residence. The decision to be made by them is whether or not
they want to keep up their original mother tongue.
Of course, the fact remains that many people do not know before-
hand if their stay in a foreign country is going to be a temporary
or a permanent one. It is not uncommon to begin with a two or three
year stay, and only after this first period is the decision made to stay
permanently or to go back. But I think that parents who are con-
templating a bilingual upbringing for their children?whether they
have moved abroad temporarily or on a permanent basis?can learn
most from the experiences of those families for which a bilingual
home environment has become a permanent reality, in particular where
the reactions of the children to the bilingual upbringing are concerned.
And, while I only interviewed parents who had settled with their
children on a more or less permanent basis, some of these had travelled
around before they had decided to settle, others had made a move
abroad during an in-between period, and again others had moved for

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the first time when the children were already a bit older.
So the issue of moving abroad with children?and what it entails for their
bilingual development?will crop up regularly on the following pages.

About this book
Let me conclude this introductory chapter with a comment made by
Angelika, one of the parents I interviewed, for it touches on many of
the issues that will be raised in this book. She said:
'At the beginning I thought it would be very nice if the children
could be bilingual. I felt we owed it to them, ourselves, our friends,
the middle class. The kinds of things we had to go on were only what
I knew about children of diplomats and it was always said that they
were all terrifically bilingual and able to speak seven or eight languages
fluently. So I thought we should follow in their footsteps. Well, we
didn't get very far, I must admit.'
Angelika's comments show that she made a conscious decision in
favour of a bilingual upbringing for her children. But Angelika, like
me, found there was little or no information of a practical kind avail-
able and she assumed?like everyone else?that it would all be just a
matter of course. She also strongly implies that it wasn't that simple
after all. Will this also be the conclusion of this book?
In a sense, yes, for to bring up one's children with two languages is
not always easy. As a matter of fact, if my own two children had
reacted as if learning two languages was indeed easy and natural,
this book would never have been written. Yet, by the end of the book
it will be evident that many parents find bringing up their children
bilingually well worth the effort.