MULTILINGUALISM
My mother language is Indonesian. From birth to adulthood, I speak, think, dream, and write best in Indonesian. But throughout my life, I have enjoyed learning foreign languages. Like many other Indonesian parents, my parents wanted me to speak English. They signed me up to a Canadian school in Malaysia so that I could speak English. Then I was interested in learning Italian, and they sent me to Rome to study the language. I have to say I am lucky to have such supportive parents. I also tried to learn Chinese when I was younger. Learning languages has been a huge part of my life.
Many parents are in a panic in Indonesia, thinking that they may be too late or too early to expose their child to a foreign language. They want their child to be bilingual, and usually, that second language is English. But they fail to realize that most Indonesian children are bilingual. Each of us speaks Indonesian and a local language. For me, it happens to be Javanese. I didn't remember trying to learn how to talk in Javanese, yet I can.
The fact that many Indonesians speak another local language without even trying intrigues me. Why do we bother so much about how we teach English to a child? Why are we so afraid of the implications of raising bilingual children while we are bilingual nations?
A part of Jean Berko Gleason's podcast struck me at the 12:08 mark. Jean Berko Gleason is a pioneer in psycholinguistics - in understanding how language emerges from childhood on; what it says about how we think and who we are. She was one of the first who confirmed that young children know grammatical forms that no one has ever tried to teach them.
She said that there are two sides of the theory about how languages emerge, whether it's more about nature or nurture that influenced someone's language development.
On the one side, people believe that language is innate and hardwired into someone's head. When someone's born, that person has a language acquisition device, and that person will be able to speak without even trying. On the other end, from a behaviorist view, children need to be taught how to speak. Parents need to spend a huge amount of time with children and help shape their language by modeling and giving many different learning activities. In the middle, there is an interactionist view. The interactionist believes that the children have a capacity, but they have to build the brain. The brain develops through interaction with other people.
Which one is the best way to learn a language? If it is innate and hardwired, I could not acquire the Italian language later in life. If it's by learning activities, I wouldn't be able to learn Javanese. Could it be by interaction? It kind of makes sense. I had many opportunities to interact with friends in the Javanese language.
In this podcast, Jean Berko also mentioned a TED Talk called The Birth of a Word. Deb Roy, a father who was also an engineer at MIT, researched how his child learned how to speak a language. He videotaped his entire house for 24 hours a day, for 3 years, nonstop. From the data, he analyzed how many times people around his child said the word 'water' and how the child developed from babbling to pronouncing “water” perfectly.
From this TED Talk and this podcast, I gained a new understanding that to teach a child a foreign language, interaction with people is crucial. Language is not innate, but it is developed through interaction.
