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

unfortunate that such rules exist. Such rules communicate a negative attitude towards
children's home languages. Children may interiorize such negative attitudes and
consequently stop speaking the home language altogether. Teachers should also realize that
children under age 6 might not have the necessary cognitive maturity to be able to reflect on
what language they are speaking to their friends at school and to be able to change their
habits from home. Even for adult bilinguals it is exceedingly difficult and unnatural to speak
another language X to someone they have always spoken language Y to. It is a good thing,
then, that in Yann's school the teachers allowed him to speak Breton to children he speaks
Breton to outside of school.
As I said earlier, many people believe that early child bilingualism leads to all sorts of
psychological problems and confusion. There is more and more scientific evidence, though,
that children who hear two languages from early on are generally performing better on all
sorts of tasks than children who hear just a single language. Also, the millions of bilingual
children who perform well in each language and who are doing fine at school are evidence
against the ill-founded idea that somehow, learning two languages early on is bad for you.
Positive attitudes normally support bilingual development. In Yann's case, even though his
preschool is monolingual, the teachers there have positive attitudes towards his bilingualism
and towards the minority language, Breton. In Pelle's case there are similarly positive
attitudes all around. Yet Pelle does not speak the minority language, Frisian. Obviously, for
bilingual development to flourish additional factors play a role. These have to do with the
language input, that is, with how often children hear each of their languages and in what
circumstances.
The role of language input
The importance of frequent and regular language input
In order to learn to speak a language children need to hear it a lot. Children cannot learn
language from the air. Unfortunately, prominent linguists used to claim otherwise, but these
claims were not founded on any real evidence. It is now very clear that if children do not
hear a lot of a language they cannot learn it well enough.
Parents may not be sufficiently aware of this. Many parents do not consider the importance
of how much they talk to their children. They simply assume that children will talk in the
language they speak to them. In a monolingual situation it doesn't matter all that much how
often a particular person speaks to children - there will be plenty of other people speaking to
them. In a bilingual setting where often only one or two people speak a particular language
to children it becomes very important that these people speak that language a whole lot.
In Pelle's case there are positive attitudes towards child bilingualism and towards both
Frisian and Dutch. Yet Pelle does not speak Frisian. This is because Pelle simply does not hear
enough Frisian and so doesn't have enough learning opportunities. Only his mother regularly
speaks Frisian to him, but not every day. Only occasionally does Pelle hear other people
speak Frisian to him.
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