Foreign Perspectives

The effect of this is that there are many more people coming here with kids and, for the most part, they haven’t considered what to do about the languages that their children will speak and particularly about how their English should or could be developed.

That wedding was interesting as we saw a fair cross-section of children too with most of those having lived here from about 3 to 7 years with ages from 2 to about 20. The effect of living here was very noticeable in how they spoke English. For example, a 17 year old who has been here for about 5 years spoke English well but with perhaps 10-20% of his words spoken with a French accent. A 13 year old who had been here around the same time didn’t speak English nearly so well and it was easier to speak to her in French. The worst was a 10 year old who could barely speak English.

Some would say that wasn’t a bad thing. After all, the children are living in France so they should be speaking French, shouldn’t they? Of course, they should be speaking French but the point is that they should be developing their English too. To give your child the chance to be bilingual is a wonderful thing but the vast majority of people living here seem to be throwing that opportunity away by accident or design.

How did all this come about? Well, the standard advice for people moving here is to get their French up to speed as soon as possible. The way to do that is to immerse yourself in the language so you should have French TV, read French papers, speak French as much as possible and continue with your French lessons. If you do that, you should be fairly fluent quite quickly and if you keep it up you’ll continue to improve your French over time.

The snag is that it’s a total disaster for your kids.

Children pick up quite a bit of vocabulary from watching TV programmes. If you only have French TV, then they’ll not pick up the majority of “kiddies English” that they need to speak to other English speaking kids. Likewise for childrens’ magazines of course. What about the likes of story books? Stick to reading the French ones and they’ll never learn the nursery rhymes etc. and naturallly their English vocabulary will have even more gaps. That’s even before you consider that, unless you send them to a bilingual school, they’ll only learn the French words for the various school subjects and, of course, won’t learn about British history. Actually, learning history from a French aspect might mess them up even more eg they’ll be taught that Nelson was the enemy.

The effect is much more pronounced with younger children and the parents of one ten year old that we know are finding it more and more difficult to communicate with her. They’ve only been here five years yet are now at the point where her English isn’t really good enough to speak to them and their French isn’t good enough to speak to her. That’s how bad it can get.

So what should you do? If you want your children to be completely bilingual it’s not an easy task but there are a number of relatively easy things that you can do which will help. Only use English at home, have UK TV and read to them from English books (you can order these from amazon.co.uk). Going a bit further, you can get subscriptions to English magazines for them. To go further, you need to send them to a bilingual school (I doubt that it would be viable to teach them the various subjects in English yourself).