Hello Steve, Paul, and all,

I wouldn't say that the research that Paul has cited is intrinsically unhelpful, but rather circumstantially so: as you have rightfully stated, many or most children grow up monolingually.

That said, I have always been a proponent of children growing up bilingually, and the question remains how best to accomplish that when you need to create bilingual input.

I grew up trilingually, and subsequent language learning experiences would possibly have been far more challenging for me had that not been the case.

As for your psycho- and neurolinguistic- based comments (motivation, interest, wiring, etc.), they, too, remain unhelpful in the absence of  language learning opportunities.    

I'll leave it at that for now, and would recommend that we focus on the possibilities that reseach and anecodotal observations might point to rather than discounting them out of hand.

Michael
www.mauilanguage.com

Sent via Blackberry by Turkcell 


Date: Wed, 22 Jul 2009 07:24:55 -0700
From: steve at thelinguist.com
To: englishlanguage at nifl.gov
Subject: [EnglishLanguage 4581] Re: interesting research - children learning	languages

Yet another research report that i s largely unhelpful to language learning. Few children are brought up bilingual. Kids who emigrate after the age of seven, pick up languages quickly from their peers if surrounded by the language, Yes, your native language is increasingly hard wired, but you can create room for new neural networks to handle other languages, at any age. I have done it many times and observed others do it. The key is the attitude of the learner, his/her interest, commitment and confidence.


It has been my experience, and there is ample evidence that trying to pronounce a new language right from the beginning is not a good idea. I have found it more effective to engage in a lot of listening, repetitive listening to limited content, even listening to the language read slowly at times, as a part of getting used to the language, before trying to pronounce. Russian is hard to pronounce, learning it on my own, listening an hour a day or so on my iPod, I went 18 months before speaking to anyone. Meanwhile I acquired enough vocabulary and listening comprehension to enjoy literature, audio books, news interviews and the like.  Now my pronunciation is considered very good by natives, it certainly was not at the beginning.


Steve


-- 
Steve Kaufmann
www.thelinguist.blogs.com
www.lingq.com
604-922-8514

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