Progression

As I mentioned before, I didn’t really look into childhood bilingualism when we got started with S over 4 years ago now. This was partially due to me assuming kids would just naturally learn a language if you only just exposed them to it as much as possible, and partially due to us buying, fixing up and moving into a new house during my pregnancy – there was no time to actually do any research, as our lives had been completely taken over by midwife appointments, getting baby stuff, house hunting, renovating and moving.

S finally was born and we were blissfully happy in our new house, sleep-deprived as anyone with a new baby in the house, though hopefully a little less freaked out than your average first time parent. We naturally fell into what I later found out is called OPOL (One Person, One Language), though found it pretty impractical in its extreme form. So, while I spoke German to S most of the time, I made exceptions when we were with monolingual friends and family or when The Husband had to be in the loop. Still, for about 18 months this worked like a charm and S started saying words in both English and German.

As I had O just after S turned 2, I also started getting sidelined by a major health scare and bilingualism slipped more and more to the back of my mind. In practical terms, this meant that she got away with slowly but surely speaking English only, although she continued to understand German just fine. I was shocked and disappointed by this, as I had unknowingly expected her to become a - what mostly seems to be called - balanced bilingual, but might also be referred to as equilingual, rather than the receptive/passive bilingual she was turning into. Various people, mainly those whose kids had turned out to be receptive bilinguals themselves along with people who were neutral if not hostile to our efforts, very much discouraged me from wanting and expecting much more than that.

Which, for me, was not an option.

Wanting my kids to be fluently bilingual really was, from the start, a no-brainer. I’ve always loved learning languages and would have loved to attend an international school to get more language instruction than I got in the regular school stream. Plus, we’ve got friends and family in Germany, and it’s unthinkable to me that my kids would not be able to converse with them.

The Husband, himself monolingual, has always been supportive of raising the kids to be bilingual, though, as it quite recently turned out, he is not nearly as committed to the whole thing as I am. Still, he agreed to take it to the next level, and S in particular, now expected to speak German, mostly does so with me and sometimes also with O. I have recently also started to ask him to say things in “Deutsch, bitte!”, but he’s not entirely clear on what word belongs to what language just yet. He also doesn’t always have the German vocabulary to say everything he can already say in English, so I'm not expecting too much from him. I mainly want him to get used to it now, before he follows S's example of completely giving up speaking German. He is now at the age where this had start to become an issue for her.

For now, we continue to muddle along. It seems to be working out though, as we are seeing improvements. I am now reading up on the topic, and find it encouraging to see that our kids are living the research results. Intuitively, it may be worrisome when they:

• use words from both languages when making sentences;
• use the syntactic rules from the dominant language (English) when speaking in their minority language (German);
• show resistance to speaking the minority language; and
• switch to English with other German-speaking children as soon as the adults are gone.

But really, it just is them going through normal phases in the development of bilingualism. It gives me hope that we are on the right track and that the kids still have a good chance of progressing out of the receptive stage and become truly and fully native-like in their ability to speak German. Or at least somewhat close to it :)

I am not yet ready to accept much less. I am, however, ready to question my newest assumption that S is showing signs of using German as a second language. Thanks, you guys, for pointing me in the right direction :)