Author: Anarela Mondragón

This year the Argentine film El secreto de sus ojos (English: The Secret in their Eyes) won the best foreign film category at the 2010 Academy Awards. The film was directed by Juan José Campanella and was based on the book La pregunta de sus ojos (English: The Question in Their Eyes), written by Eduardo Sacheri in 2005.

The movie tells the story in flashback form of a thirty year quest to solve the brutal rape and murder of a woman in Buenos Aires, Argentina. When officials erroneously charge two immigrant workers with the crime, a federal justice agent vows to find the true killer and embarks on a quest for justice. True justice is ultimately served, in a rather unconventional way.

When accepting the Academy Award, director Juan José Campanella jokingly said, “I want to thank the Academy for not considering na’vi a foreign language”, alluding to the fictional na’vi language in the movie Avatar.

In addition to winning the 2010 Oscar for best foreign language film, El secreto de sus ojos (The Secret in Their Eyes) was also awarded Spain’s 2009 Goya award for best Latin American film. To date the film is currently Argentina’s second most successful film at the box office.

Additional nominations in the Best Foreign Film category included: La Teta Asustada (The Milk of Sorrow) -Peru; Un prophéte (A Prophet) -France; Ajami -Israel; and, Das Weisse Band (The Ribbon) -Germany.

Yes, I’m aware of the irony and hypocrisy inherent in my previous statement.

In one of my previous posts, I mentioned my personal experiences and disillusion with what I was told was “bilingual education” (although it was not), and my complete change in philosophy about bilingualism. Over the years it has taken deep retrospect and inner reflection to unravel the lies and myths about bilingualism and bilingual education that had been thrust upon me as a child.

When I was in elementary school, some of my teachers used to criticize me for the way that I pronounced words. In fact, at one point I was retained because my teacher claimed that I did not understand English, although I understood everything that I learned in my class and was often bored because I had already learned much of what had been taught. I can also remember other teachers who told my mother not to speak in Spanish to us at home because it would only cause confusion.

I was raised to believe that my bilingualism was a deficit, and later “untaught myself” all that I had learned. Many years have passed and I now firmly embrace bilingualism for myself and who I initially thought …my own children.

But when my little baby girl first started to speak, I became worried. I became obsessed with worry that speaking two language in front of her would cause confusion or language delay. I began to only start to read to her in English. Then I began to start to speak to her more in English. And then one day I just began to speak to her only in English.

One day, however, I sat in front a parent of a student in my classroom, passionately explaining the theory behind the notion that bilingualism isn’t a detriment to the language development of children.  And it just hit me square in the face that I was nothing but a hypocrite, advocating for something that I didn’t practice on my own child.

Later that evening I went home and began to bring Spanish back into our home and interactions with my children.  There were times when that negative voice in my head reminded me of all those lies and myths I had been taught about bilingualism. But I had faith and I continued to use two languages.

Since then I have put  my child in a bilingual classroom. Today when I look at my bilingual child is who is learning to read and write in both languages, as well as my bilingual and biliterate students, I am ashamed that at one point I didn’t have enough dedication and commitment to initially foster bilingualism in my own daughter.

I’m glad that I have gone through this awakening, and I urge all bilingual educators who also have been in a similar situation to stop and evaluate their deep-seated views about bilingualism. If we don’t teach our own children to be bilingual, why are we even really bilingual educators? Is our heart really in the right place?

About the Author: Marta Jimenez is a third grade Dual Immersion teacher in Southern California. She has taught for ten years and has taught kinder through third grade in a Dual Immersion program as well as a transitional bilingual education program. During her vacation, she also loves to travel extensively throughout Latin America.

You Might Also Like:

Voices of Bilingual Teachers: Marta’s Story

Secret Diary of a Bilingual Educator: Linguistic Discrimination in the Schoolhouse

Daily Dose of Anti-Bilingual Passive Aggression

LA’s Little Tokyo Looks to Save Struggling Newspaper: A century old Japanese community newspaper is in peril of shutting down.

Tahoe Parents Introduced to Kings Beach Two-Way Immersion Program: Tons of parents show up for a meeting and orientation about the Dual Immersion program. Too bad such an orientation wasn’t given to parent prior to starting the program?!

Paramedics Hail Hero Boy  Who Translated For Injured After Deadly Arizona Bus Crash: A fourth grade boy was given an award by firefighters and paramedics after assisting with translation for passengers injured in a deadly accident.

Sign Language Has Babies Talking: Sign language classes for babies and parents teach kids to communicate at a younger age.

School’s in Class By Itself: A school in Brooklyn plans to teach Spanish, French, and English.

This blog was initially created as a creative outlet for a bilingual educator who sometimes just needed a place to vent about some of the struggles that she experienced in the field of bilingual education. Initially the blog wasn’t consistently updated because it was a bit hard to fight the fight all day long for quality bilingual education and then come home to blog about it.

Since then the original author has decided that there are many people who also have a great story to tell, and has decided to move in another direction! She has teamed up with one of her most trusted colleagues to continue to collaborate on Multilingual Mania and other web projects. We’re also considering bringing in a few more of our colleagues into the mix, so this means that Multilingual Mania will provide a more comprehensive and diverse perspective about bilingualism and multilingualism.

We’ve come to the conclusion that sometimes we are sick of hearing ourselves talk about bilingual education all day long, so we want to hear a variety of other perspectives in addition to our own! You might have noticed that over the past couple of months we have a few additional contributors who have been welcomed as writers on Multilingual Mania. You will be hearing more from these writers (and others) as time goes by!!

One final big change that we will be making soon is that we are planning to also include writers who write predominately in other languages. Because we are based in Southern California, we will first start with writers who write in the Spanish language. Some of the writing will be translated, while some may not. We’re still working out the details as to whether or not languages other than Spanish will also be included.

If you are also interested at any time in contributing writing to Multilingual Mania, please do not hesitate to contact us at multilingualmania(at)yahoo(dot)com and we will get back to you as soon as possible! Interested writers must (obviously) hold the perspective that multilingualism is an asset, of course!

I joked (sort of) last time about how we might be implementing the One Parent One Language approach at the eleventh hour with our kids, pursuant to a potential job offer in Montreal. I think we need to keep at it for a few more weeks before I’ll be able to say anything significant about how that is or is not working. In the mean time, some reflections on what we have been doing all this time…

Part 1: the musical

I mentioned before that we used to sing our kids to sleep at night in French. We were so consistent with this, actually, that I occasionally experience moments of nauseating vertigo when I realize that they don’t even know some of the really ubiquitous children’s songs I grew up with! How did that happen?? Digging into the farthest reaches of my brain (actually, I have to dig into iTunes and a well-loved book of French songs), I recall that we sang Au claire de la lune to them just about every night—once I got over the fact that it had been used as the theme song for the movie Sade a few years before. (Yikes!) We were very big fans of “go to sleep now, everybody’s doing it!” songs, obviously, so Fais dodo Colas mon petit frère and Dodo l’enfant do made nightly appearances, as well. Beyond that, I’d say we also had about twenty-five “second-tier” songs which we performed regularly, if not every day, including such classics as Frère Jacques, Vent frais, Une souris verte, Savez-vous planter les choux, Une poule sur un mur, Pomme de reinette, and Un éléphant qui se balançait.

In English there was… well… Hush little baby, don’t say a word… and… well, Elmo’s Song figured prominently in weaning our first child and getting her to sleep in her own bed! (I wasn’t singing it, though—the CD player was). We also sang The Eensy Weensy Spider, The Ants Came Marching, Five Green and Speckled Frogs, She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain, Someone’s in the Kitchen with Dinah, Rocky Road (and a bunch of other PP&M songs, I’m sure). Apples and Bananas (a.k.a. Ooples and Banoonoos), and—frequently—the chorus of No! by They Might Be Giants. In the car, It’s the End of the World as We Know It became my theme song when confronted with our daughter’s numerous, varied and strident complaints about anything and everything imaginable. With CD accompaniment. (Do you think I might come to regret that someday?)

So we probably sang more to them in French than in English, overall, and we were also more consistent in our approach; we covered the standard corpus of French children’s songs much more thoroughly than we did American children’s songs, largely thanks to that song book! We stopped singing to them at night… sometime. I don’t know when, exactly, but it had something to do with a trip to Europe and jetlag. And possibly also with a growing itchiness to reclaim larger and larger swaths of the evening for ourselves. And maybe also because they like to read to themselves before lights-out, now, too. But we left that book out the other day after tallying up our list of Big French Hits, and the kids threw themselves upon it with great rejoicing. They didn’t remember the tunes, necessarily (and one of our children is tone deaf, although I won’t say which one), but they remembered… singing. And the words seemed familiar, so they spent an hour picking their way through the lyrics, and then accosted their father with the book when he came home. They all curled up in bed together at bedtime that night and sang songs instead of reading stories, falling right back into our behavioral and linguistic patterns of yore.

To the extent that our goal has generally been to provide cognitive and cultural materials with which the kids could eventually, one day, construct their own bilingualism, I’d say that our efforts with music have paid off as expected. They have an ingrained fondness for these songs, and enough remembrance that they can (successfully!) delve back into them when fancy strikes. Impending moves aside, now feels like a nice time to revisit singing in French: both kids are demonstrating a somewhat higher-than-usual level of curiosity about French these days, anyway, and I think they’re both at a place where they can start to match their aural memories with words on paper and learn some interesting things about French spelling and grammar. (Not to mention that it’s high time they began to embrace that slightly black humor which pervades so many French children’s songs!) I have a feeling, too, that now might be the last good chance we have to wring some learning out of all of those lullabies: at six and eight, the days of their really being interested in singing some of those “baby” songs with us might be numbered!

Next time… Planting Seeds of Bilingualism: the movie. (A guided tour—with statistics!—of our DVD collection.)

About the Author: Christine Thuau is mom to two kids (8 and 6) who might, with a little bit of luck, be bilingual someday! She is currently working as a freelance translator and editor, and has a doctorate in medieval French literature (yes, really). She enjoys reading, walking, gardening, photography, painting, writing, baking and the internet—among other things.

Find Hundreds of Songs for Children in French:

French Songs for Children

Additional Posts Written By Christine Thuau:

Bilingual Parenting: It’s About More Than Just Bilingualism

Bilingual Parenting: A Laissez Faire Approach to Raising Bilingual Children

I’ve always loved Dr. Seuss books ever since I was a small child. I love the pictures, the rhymes and the story lines. I can’t even choose which one of his books is my favorite, but I can remember clearly that his books were some of the beginning books that I learned to read as a child.

My father loves to tell the story that he bought me a set of books when I was young that contained many books by Dr. Seuss. I can remember my father reading them to me over and over and over, and I can remember feeling so proud when I was able to read many of the words by myself.

At one point my father took me to the bookstore and I saw many of the Dr. Seuss books that he had been reading to me.”Daddy, why are my books up there on the shelf? How did they get there?” I asked.

“They aren’t your books,” he claims that he explained to me. “The publishers make many of the same books and sell them to many people”.

Apparently I was so upset by this piece of news that I just flopped right on the ground into a fit of hysteria. I can remember feeling so sad for a while, because I had thought that I actually had a personal relationship with Dr. Seuss and that he had written the books especially for me.

I still have those books and I love to read them over and over again every once in a while. I also loved to read them to my students when I was a classroom teacher, reading them in both English and Spanish. Initially when I first started reading the books in Spanish to my students, I was nervous about the translation. However, I found that in many cases translators were able to capture the brilliance of the original piece and many times were able to maintain the integrity of the rhyme.

Every year around this time,  schools across the nation celebrate Dr. Seuss’s birthday (March 2) with a variety of literacy activities called the Read Across America Day. Parents, teachers, community member and special guests come to schools and read aloud the brilliant pieces of work written by Theodor Suess Geisel. Kids love it. Teachers love it. Parents love it. We all love it.

I was recently looking online for information about Dr. Seuss and I discovered that he was the son of German immigrants who faced discrimination during the time of World War I. You can find additional information about his biography as well as fun activities for children on the Seussville website.

Not only has Dr. Seuss touched the hearts of millions of generations of children in English, but his books have also been translated into fifteen additional languages. I conducted a brief search on Amazon and I found some of the following multilingual Dr. Seuss books:

Books in English

Books In Spanish

Books In French

Books In Chinese

Books In Japanese

Books in Korean

Books in Russian

Books in Polish

About the Author: Melanie McGrath is a bilingual education fanatic. She passionately thinks, lives and dreams about multilingual education every waking and sleeping moment of her life. Seriously. Melanie is an administrator of bilingual education programs, and considers herself to be an advocate for students, parents, teachers, and others in the struggle for quality bilingual education programs.  As founder of Multilingual Mania, she’s doing all that she can to help create a multilingual and non-racist society one day at a time.

A child will first learn in the parents home language and then as he or she spends more and more time outside the home, for example at day care and school, they will start to learn the language of their environment. Of course as with anything there are concerns, such as whether or not kids who are bilingual take more time to learn how to speak. I think that has more to do with each child and their home environment. In my own world I have been surrounded by many children who are raised bilingual and everyone has had different experiences, much like children raised in monolingual homes. It’s true that initially there will be some confusion, but kids will soon figure it out and will do just fine, they will soon be able to speak and think in both languages, and will separate the two instinctively.

I once had an experience with one of my nieces that will illustrate that not only do these children understand both languages even when they don’t yet speak both, they also think in both without conflict. We would speak as much Portuguese as possible around my niece, and as a result her first words were Portuguese and the language she basically communicated in, but since we would speak to each other in English when we thought she wasn’t paying attention , she understood us when we spoke English (to our surprise). When she was about 2 years old, my sister-in-law realized she ran out of milk in the house and in a effort to get my attention to go get the milk without my niece noticing, she turned to me and said, “Oh, there is no M-I-L-K“, spelling out the word. Well my niece turned to us and said, “nao ha leitinho?” which, translated, means “there is no milk.” Up until then my sister-in-law had sometimes voiced concerns that maybe making such an effort to teach her daughter Portuguese could be detrimental, but it was clear that she was not having a problem learning both languages. Not to mention that we were impressed that she knew what we were spelling milk at the age of two.

The gaps that bilingual children may experience when they first start school will soon be filled, and they will figure it out. I also differ from the thoughts that a bilingual child thinks in only one language and then translate into the language being spoken. That was never true for me. I for one always remember thinking in whatever language was being spoken at the time, even if it was both. I would process my thoughts in both languages without any conflict. There are so many benefits from growing up bilingual, not only in the work place, but also in your personal growth that it really is a wasted opportunity when a bilingual parent chooses not to pass that knowledge on to a child. I really can’t think of a negative aspect of being bilingual and most people that do will find it that if they dig deep enough those concerns are usually political, rather than linguistic.

About the Author: Silvia Pinho is a project manager for office assistants, a writer,  and also provides Portuguese/English translation. She is located in Portugal.

I want to talk eventually about the decisions we’ve made regarding how we’ve raised our children to be (or not to be?) bilingual, but I should first start out by describing where they actually are on the mono- to bilingual spectrum.

Our daughter, who is eight and a half, was an early speaker and reader in English, and she currently works well beyond her grade level at school. She understands nearly everything of what people say directly to her in French, and she picks up a lot from conversations she overhears, but her speaking skills are fairly limited. She can carry on a conversation, but she has to articulate her end of it in very basic phrases. Consequently, she’s reluctant to speak with people she doesn’t know well; she’s a perfectionist by nature, and a big talker, and it drives her crazy that she can’t produce exactly the same dialogue in French that she would in English. Her accent is exactly right, however, and she has an intuitive grasp of French sentence structure. She reads simple things in French, but it’s a fairly laborious process for her.

Our son is almost six, and we sense that he is perhaps not quite where his sister was at this age. When she was almost six, our cumulative family exposure to full-day public school added up to only one year, and we were still singing our kids to sleep with French children’s songs at night and letting them watch DVDs in French during the day. When our French grandma came to visit, the kids were home all day, too. While I’m a big, big fan of having both of the kids out of the house at school all day, it does really cut back on their exposure to French. (As does our ban on television and video games on weekdays. No, they’re not watching PBS Kids or playing Mario Cart when they’re supposed to be doing their homework, but they’re also not watching French DVDs or doing French activities on the computer, either.) In any case, our son—who, if anything, began reading even earlier than our daughter, but spoke a bit later—understands about half of what people say to him directly in French, and replies exclusively with a handful of memorized phrases. He is a most excellent reader in English, though, and seems to also have an innate understanding of French phonetics. He can sound out simple words and phrases—which is a miracle to me, since I have to say that we’ve done almost no instructive reading with him in French at all. Our son is, if anything, even more of a talker than our daughter (in English), and consequently even more reluctant than she is to deploy his rudimentary French in conversation. He has SO MUCH to say; the sheer volume dictates that he use the most expedient means available to him!

What is a bilingual mother to think of all this?

I have to say that I basically feel unconcerned that they are not yet bilingual. If I had to establish a concrete goal, it would be this: let them be bilingual—or at least fully competent in conversational French—by the time they’re old enough to be out and about on their own. Say, thirteen or fourteen years old. Having taught French to adults who were acquiring it as a second language, I know that the hardest things to master are pronunciation and syntax. (Actually, one of the toughest hurdles for a lot of language learners is accepting that other languages have different syntax.) Our kids have those two things hardwired into their brains; when they decide that they want to really pursue learning French, they will be miles ahead of people with no exposure.

So I guess you could say that we’ve taken a laissez faire approach to raising bilingual children. They’ll get there eventually, and hopefully they will enjoy the process and be glad that we gave them some time and space to make it their own project—being literate and fluent in French will be something they can take pride it when it all finally comes together.

But here’s the thing, and the joke is definitely on us parents: we may very well be moving to Montreal this summer…

Coming soon: implementing the One Person One Language approach with elementary school-aged children! Can it be done??

About the Author: Christine Thuau is mom to two kids (8 and 6) who might, with a little bit of luck, be bilingual someday! She is currently working as a freelance translator and editor, and has a doctorate in medieval French literature (yes, really). She enjoys reading, walking, gardening, photography, painting, writing, baking and the internet—among other things.

Other Posts by Christine Thuau:

Bilingual Parenting: It’s About More Than Just Bilingualism

The California Spanish language arts standards that we were using to guide the project are written in Spanish and we were discussing how to translate some pieces  into English so that we could make a user friendly document accessible to English-speaking administrators. We were mainly speaking in English, but at times we were reading aloud the standards in Spanish and discussing some of the content in our table group.

At one point, I stood up from the table and walked quickly to another table to get my computer. I turned and asked one of the colleagues, “How do you say artículo determinado in English?” Two of my colleagues at the table began to have a conversation as to whether “artículo determinado” and “artículo definido” were two different ways to say the same thing.

Suddenly, a manager at another table turned around and said, “How do I know you aren’t talking about us in Spanish?”

For a moment I felt a flash of anger, and I almost turned around to say something to her, but I decided against it because lately I have been trying to not have immediate emotional responses to such things. I had already pushed a couple of buttons throughout the day because I had the audacity to urge that we have an “English learner lens” when we look at creating valid and reliable assessments.

Instead of saying anything, I just looked at my bilingual colleagues at the table and we gave one another “the eye” that we were all very aware of what she was actually saying to us.

If I had a penny for every time that I have heard someone make a comment that they are unsure as to whether people in another language might be talking about them, I would definitely be able to go into early retirement. I mean-give me a break-I think that it is a tad bit arrogant to assume that people sit around and flip into another language in order to talk about you right in front of your face. I’m sure that it has happened before, but I bet that most of the time that people are actually doing what language is designed for-to communicate with one another about something.

I used to think that I was being too overly sensitive and reading racism and discrimination into something that was said innocently, but over the years I’ve come to the conclusion that most of the time there is always a passive aggressive message behind such comments: Stop speaking Spanish (or insert any other language).

It’s been a rare occurrence when someone actually has blatantly told me to stop speaking Spanish. Last month I wrote about the time when someone blatantly yelled out, “Speak English!” when I was asking another teacher for ten cents.  A couple of weeks ago, I also blogged about a school secretary who was fired for translating for a distraught parent.

These extreme cases of anti-bilingualism tend to not be frequent occurrences, yet the disdain for speaking another language is often done in a much more passive aggressive way. I’ve come to the conclusion that most of the time when people make statements about it being rude when people speak another language or that they are worried people are speaking about them in front of their face is really nothing more than a passive aggressive display of anti-bilingualism.

Sometimes I think to myself that I would prefer for people to just aggressively yell out, “Speak English” because then I would know exactly where they stand and in that case I would be able to defend myself.

Who would have thought that it would ever get to the point for me that I would prefer blatant racism over ambiguous “how do I know you are talking about me” types of comments?

About the Author: Melanie McGrath is a bilingual education fanatic. She passionately thinks, lives and dreams about multilingual education every waking and sleeping moment of her life. Seriously. Melanie is an administrator of bilingual education programs, and considers herself to be an advocate for students, parents, teachers, and others in the struggle for quality bilingual education programs.  As founder of Multilingual Mania, she’s doing all that she can to help create a multilingual and non-racist society one day at a time.

Are you curious about the advantages of learning another language?  Do you wonder if it is worth it to continue developing your fluency in a second or third tongue?   Have you ever contemplated how bilingualism might benefit your children?  The gift of language is one that truly keeps on giving.  The process of learning and mastering more than one language yields lifelong rewards for both children and adults.  Being bilingual improves an individual’s mental agility, cultural sensitivity, and listening skills while also giving an individual a proven competitive advantage in both the classroom and the workplace.  Keep reading if you are interested in learning more about the many ways that bilingualism can benefit you and your family.

Cognitive Benefits

Studies of both children and adults have repeatedly confirmed that the ability to speak two or more languages increases a person’s mental flexibility and capacity for creative thinking.  Other cognitive benefits of billingualism include the development of a strong working memory and a better ability to multi-task than monolingual individuals.  In addition, research has shown that speaking two or more languages over the course of a lifetime can delay the loss of mental ability later on in life and slow the onset of dimensia and Alzheimer’s disease.

Cultural Benefits

Being bilingual exposes an individual to diverse customs, ideas, and perspectives from different cultures.  Ease in more than one language opens up travel opportunities and the capacity to study or work in different countries.  Accordingly, those with the ability to speak a second or third language are able to develop relationships with people that language barriers would have otherwise prevented.  As a result, bilingual children and adults are often more culturally sensitive than single language speakers.  Bilingualism can also deepen family bonds by allowing younger generations to communicate with older generations in their family’s native tongue.

Communication Benefits

When a person learns a second or third language they also heighten their overall language sensitivity which allows them to deepen their understanding of their native language.  Bilingual children have an easier time grasping the symbolic nature of language than their multilingual counterparts.  This leads to a more thorough comprehension of how language works and the most effective ways to use it.  Additionally, because bilingualism requires an individual to choose a language in which to communicate or quickly switch between two or more tongues, multilingual individuals are often more attentive listeners.

Classroom Benefits

Research has indicated that bilingual children are better at focusing their attention and coping with distractions than monolingual children.  Resultingly, bilingual children generally perform better in the classroom because of their increased ability to concentrate and multi-task.  Bilingual children also score higher on standardized tests like the SAT.  In addition, language skills make a student more competitive when applying for college.  And the benefits of bilingualism are not confined to the classroom.  Bilingual abilities give individuals a jump in the job market.  In today’s global economy, employers all over the world are looking for job applicants with the ability to speak more than one language.  Bilingual individuals have the real competitive edge!

About the Author: R.K. Albers is a freelance writer and translator living in Mexico, where she serves as a volunteer English teacher, computer instructor, and web designer for several social and environmental justice non-profit organizations. In her spare time, she loves to sustain and improve her bilingualism by reading novels and watching movies in Spanish.

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