Multilingual Early Language Transmission (MELT) - Mercator ...

the best one to raise a child multilingual? And what are the best strategies to continue to be
a multilingual person? What are the conditions to become a permanent multilingual adult?
Grosjean (2010) presents five strategies that parents can follow to promote bilingual
children:
one parent - one language strategy;
home - outside the home strategy;
one - language-first strategy;
language - time strategy;
free - alternation strategy.
The best known (and also commonly used in pre-schools) is the first strategy "one parent-
one language." Each of the parents speaks a different language to the child (for example, the
father Dutch and the mother Frisian). Based on this strategy, common practice in day-care
centres includes that the practitioners accommodate which language they will speak to the
children (for example, one caretaker speaks Breton and the other one speaks French). The
child is able to discern the two languages and to make the necessary separations faster and
more efficiently. Grosjean (2010) thinks it’s a fine strategy in the very first months of
language development, when children are primarily with their parents. But as soon as the
children go out into the outside world this strategy can become a problem. The minority
language will eventually have less and less input, children hear and use the majority
language much more. Children don’t want to be an outsider, when they speak the minority
language in a majority language environment.
The second strategy is also well known, the “home-outside the home” strategy. The child
speaks one language (the minority language) at home and a majority language outside. The
child learns and practices the community language at school while the parent's native
language is learnt at home. The majority language will take care of itself outside the home
through day care, school, friends, other family members, peers and watching television. In
mixed families however, one of the inconveniences of this strategy, according Grosjean
(2011), is the fact that one of the parents will probably have to speak his or her second (or
third) language to the child so that everyone speaks just one language in the home.
The third strategy Grosjean (2010) describes is the “one-language- first” strategy. Usually the
first language is the minority language. Parents make sure that every contact the child has,
with other caretakers, family members, playmates, television, and so on, has to take place in
the minority language. Once that language is well accomplished parents allow the other
(usually the majority) language to be acquired. The acquisition of the majority language, the
community language, happens usually very fast. This strategy is successful when the family is
surrounded by a well-organized and quite large minority language community so that the
child is given all the language input he or she needs.
Some immersion methods shows some overlap with the “one-language- first” strategy.
Immersion programs may be categorized according to age and extent of immersion.
Cummins (2000) describes different immersion programs used for instruction by classroom-
teachers.
64