I never thought of myself as having much in common with Spanish-speaking immigrants to the United States. I was born in Iowa, to parents of Western European ancestry, and I am a classic example of the monolingual American whose only exposure to another language came from a brief high school foreign-language class.
That is, until I met my current wife, who is from the Philippines and bilingual in Tagalog and English. Since then, I’ve been trying to learn Tagalog with very modest success.
When my wife became pregnant, I thought it would be a great opportunity to improve my new language skills. After all, our daughter would learn Tagalog (pronounced Ta-GAH-lug) beginning with the simplest words and phrases, and I could learn along with her as my wife spoke it to her. I would never master it as well as our daughter would, but it seemed like a great way to learn.
So as I changed my daughter, fed her and rocked her, I practiced my Tagalog, using the words and phrases that my wife used and that I was learning myself. I spoke English, too, but I’d guess as much as half of what I spoke was Tagalog.
A few weeks ago, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which I attended as a science writer, I sat in on a session about early language development. Our daughter, now 14 months old, is just beginning to learn words, so the topic was of obvious interest to me.
When Erika Hoff, a professor of psychology at Florida Atlantic University, spoke about her studies of Spanish-speaking immigrants who spoke English to their children in hopes of better preparing them for school, one of her conclusions took me aback. She found that children whose native Spanish-speaking parents spoke primarily English benefited very little from this input. They picked up most of their English proficiency from native English speakers whom they encountered outside the family. On the other hand, when native Spanish-speaking parents spoke predominantly Spanish, the children received a big boost in their proficiency at Spanish.
In other words, to learn a language well, a child needs to hear a native speaker. Someone who struggles with a language isn’t much of a model. That’s a poignant finding when it comes to immigrant families, especially because parents are often told to speak English to their children in hopes of putting them in the best position to succeed when school begins. But it seems to be of little benefit, and those same children, if they never gain proficiency in Spanish, can lose the ability to speak comfortably with extended family, and even their own parents.
And it resonated with me. I realized that in speaking Tagalog to our daughter, I was doing her a disservice. I had been relying on others to supplement my relatively sparse example – her babysitter and daycare providers, but as her father, I realized that I have a responsibility to provide the best example that I can, so she can grow up with two strong languages.
When I returned home from the conference and discussed this with my wife, she told me she’d also had some concerns. My broken Tagalog wouldn’t just blunt her English, it could sow some confusion. My wife put it bluntly: “When she’s 3 years old, we don’t want her asking, ‘Why does Papa talk funny?'”
From now on, I’ll try to restrict my Tagalog practice to conversations with my wife and in-laws. And when she is well on her way to mastering English, I can start again with my daughter.