One person, one language

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The approach one person, one language , often English one person, one language (OPOL) , is a popular method that is used by parents who try to children in two languages to educate. With the one person to one language approach , each parent consistently speaks only one of the two languages ​​with the child. For example, the mother of the child could speak to him exclusively in French, while the father speaks only English. In this way, the child learns the two languages ​​simultaneously and not successively.

argumentation

Traditionally, the one person, one language method is considered to be the best method for bilingual language acquisition without mixed utterances . The term a person, a language was first introduced by the French linguist Maurice Grammont in 1902. He developed the theory that by separating languages ​​from the start, parents could avoid confusion and code mixing in their bilingual children. This approach is also often used by bilingual kindergartens, where “an educator [e.g. B.] only [speaks] German with the children, while the other educator only works in English. "

George Saunders wrote in his book Bilingual Children: From Birth to Teenagers that the one person, one language approach “ensures that children are regularly exposed to and need to use that language. This is particularly important for the minority language , which has little external support. "

This method was also linked to an early development of metalinguistic awareness .

An alternative to bilingual education is to use one of the languages ​​as a “family language” (for example when cuddling) and the other as “environmental language” (for example when shopping). With the Minority Language at Home (ML @ H) approach, the language spoken at home that is not, or only rarely, spoken outside the home.

implementation

In a study published in the Infant Mental Health Journal , Naomi Goodz found that fathers tend to be more strict about the “One Person, One Language” model than mothers. Even when parents speak strictly according to the “one person, one language” scheme, naturalistic observations have repeatedly shown cases of language mixing in both parents.

Masae Takeuchi studied 25 Japanese mothers in Melbourne , Australia who used the one person, one language approach to support their children's bilingual development in Japanese / English. Takeuchi found that persistence is key to the success of the approach. Most of the children in Takeuchi's study did not actively use Japanese after graduation, and only those children raised by mothers who consistently insisted on speaking only Japanese actively used Japanese as adults.

See also

literature

  • Suzanne Barron-Hauwaert: The One-Parent-One-Language Approach . Multilingual Matters: Clevedon, 2004. ISBN 1-85359-715-5 (especially the chapter The One-Parent-One-Language Approach. What Is It? ), (Accessed on January 26, 2011)
  • Annick De Houwer: Bilingual Language Acquisition in: Paul Fletcher, Brian MacWhinney: The Handbook of Child Language . Blackwell Publishing: Malden, 1995. ISBN 0-631-18405-8 (accessed January 26, 2011)
  • Naomi S. Goodz: Parental Language Mixing in Bilingual Families. in: Infant Mental Health Journal 10.1 (1989): 25-44. EBSCO. Web. 10 Dec 2010.
  • George Saunders: Bilingual Children: From Birth to Teens. Philadelphia: Clevedon Avon, 1988.
  • Susanne Döpke: One Parent, One Language. An interactive approach . Amsterdam: Benjamin, 1992.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Barron-Hauwaert 2004, p. 2.
  2. ↑ kita.de: Bilingual kindergarten: Everything about bilingual childcare. July 10, 2018, accessed December 15, 2019 .
  3. ↑ Saunders 1988, p. 49.
  4. ↑ De Houwer 1996, sec. 4.2.
  5. ^ Doreen Asbrock: Early Childhood Bilingualism. In: Bielefeld Institute for Early Childhood Development. 2006, accessed December 15, 2019 .
  6. ↑ Goodz 1989, 39.
  7. ↑ De Houwer 1996, sec. 4.4.
  8. ↑ Maesae Takeuchi: The Japanese Language Development of Children through the 'One Parent One Language' Approach in Melbourne . In: The Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development . 27, No. 4, 2006, pp. 319-331.