Bilingual Immersion

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. It’s Adrienne McGovern calling from Chula Vista, California.

Welcome to the show.

How are you doing there?

Yeah, what’s going on in Chula Vista?

So, a little bit of background.

I’m Mexican, fluent in English and Spanish.

My husband is Creole, and I sort of not very diligently am attempting to raise my daughter bilingual.

So I didn’t really expose her to, you know, 100% Spanish like some parents do.

She was around it, but not 100%.

So now she’s in dual immersion school.

And recently I kind of had a moment where I’m like, oh, my gosh, I think she actually might start being bilingual.

And so what happened was, you know, usually when somebody, you know, thinks in English, they’ll like hurt themselves or drop something and they’ll say, oh, or they’ll say,

And so my daughter dropped something and she said, aye.

And I’m like, that’s what I say when I’m thinking in Spanish.

So I didn’t know if there was something to that, to say I and E when you drop something or make a mistake,

Versus O and which is what I guess somebody would say in English.

We could probably kind of predict the future for your daughter if she continues in this school.

She probably will never be perfectly bilingual in both languages

Unless she gets complete immersion in both languages for long periods of time.

So it’s cool.

She’s going to continue to do what she just did when she dropped something on her foot or whatever it was that she did.

She’s going to keep borrowing from the most memorable parts, at least as far as her education and her life goes,

From these different languages and using the term or expression that fits the circumstances and first pops into her head.

And sometimes there’s no rhyme or reason to that.

And she’ll slowly find that behavior modified by what you do and your husband does and what her classmates and her teachers do.

And so she’s going to develop this little kind of bilingual idiolect of her own,

Where her bilingualism is going to be a little different than the person next to her

Because there’s no such thing as exact bilingualism,

Where two people share exactly the same level of bilingualism

Unless they’re in exactly the same circumstances.

Right, and even for me, I mean, English is still my strongest,

But I still have a pretty darn good level of Spanish.

Yeah, if you want to really get her bilingualism to be strong,

Take her for a couple months in the summer to Mexico

And just dump her right into the environment with family and friends.

That’s what they did to me.

Exactly. Yeah, there we go.

That worked, huh?

It’s a great model. I highly recommend it.

But the same also holds true for the English.

If you want her to have that really strong English,

She needs to spend a couple months each year in a completely English language situation

With friends and family, people that she loves.

And this kind of off and on of these two languages will keep reinforcing month in and month out.

And your question was, was that moment when she said,

Aye, rather than -oh or something, was that a sign of her emerging?

Incipient bilingualism.

Yeah, I would think so.

It is a little bit, yeah.

I mean, that was my experience when I lived with an Argentinian for many years.

I would start to do things like that without thinking.

You would adopt the behavior of the people around you, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Is it true incipient bilingualism if you’re using an interjection?

I don’t know.

We do know that interjections are taught.

They’re not actually instinctive.

You don’t come out of the womb with these interjections.

You learn them like you learn words.

And so she learned this interjection from somebody who speaks Spanish.

It could have been you.

That’s her mother.

Oh, yeah.

It was me.

I’m the queen of I and E.

There we go.

The queen of I and E.

I also thought it was interesting that, number one, they’re both vowels.

And number two, like, why do you say O and U in English and I and E in Spanish?

I don’t know if you guys have that information or if it’s just, I don’t know, more common.

There’s a lot been written on this, and we could spend way too long talking about it.

But Charles Darwin actually was one of the people who wrote about this,

And he talked about the natural fear response, for example, shapes the muscles of the face in such a way.

Most humans will make the same fear response face, that if they’re issuing a sound from their mouth,

It is likely to sound similar no matter where they are, what languages they speak. And this is

Oversimplifying, but generally that’s true. So the fear response sounds do kind of tend to be the

Same in all the languages. The surprise response sound tends to be the same in all the languages,

But they’re modified by the lexical inventory that the person has at their disposal. And they’re

Modified again by what they learn and hear from the people around them. Yeah, she’s hearing her

Mom did that. So she’s not, so I isn’t some kind of gut instinct kind of thing that popped out of

The lizard part of her brain, you know, it’s nothing like that. I wouldn’t say lizard. I was

Thinking Mexican, but okay. No, I was just talking about that primitive part of us, that part that’s

Still worried about the wolves, you know? Yeah, yeah. I just thought it was, it was, I mean, I was

Very pleased with it. I was very excited that she was, you know, because it’s, you have a split

Second to make a sound like that when something doesn’t go your way. So I was very happy to

See that it wasn’t just, oh, mommy wants me to translate red into Rojo now.

Exactly.

And that’s a really nice moment. I mean, it reminds me of the moment when they first learned

To read. My son went through this and the utter delight my wife and I had when my son

Just started to learn, just reading because he wanted to. And you’re like, oh, yes, it’s

Working. It’s working.

Right. Well, thank you so much. I love the show. Keep doing what you’re doing. And I

I always have a question when I hear this show, but I guess I’ll have to pace myself.

Well, Adriana, thank you for calling, and keep us up to date on how she’s doing in the bilingual school, all right?

Awesome. I will. Thank you so much.

Take care now.

Thanks for calling.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

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