By: Manuela Pinto
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Writing his name properly has always been an important issue for my 6-year-old son. I have not yet managed to convince him that his name is the same in every language. He is called ´Matteo´ in Italian as well as in Dutch. One and an half years ago we had a discussion on this topic. He wanted to know how to write his name in Dutch. ´Matteo´, I answered, ´exactly like in Italian´. He did not agree and observed: ´In Dutch they say Mateejo ´. Before I could reply he had indeed signed a card with ´Mateejo´. It was for a Dutch boy, after all.
At the moment he is attending kindergarten in the USA and he is learning to write in English. He loves writing up new words. On the wall in the corner where his toy airplanes are parked, there´s a piece of paper with the word aerplain on it. And on the last drawing he made is written My elephant as lado – he means ´is little´. There’s no doubt about it, his capacity to distinguish acoustic signals is perfectly okay. His English also reveals the typical Florida accent. There was a moment I wondered whether all these different sounds would not confuse him (sometimes I´m just a mom). But he readily convinced me there’s nothing to worry about: ´Mama, the ´a´ in my name in English is an ´ay´, and the ´e´ is an ´ee´. Great, he knows how it works. Now he also knows that the same letter can correspond to different sounds in different languages.
Developmental psychologist Bialystock and her team have shown in various studies that bilinguals have a greater metalinguistic awareness than monolinguals. This means that bilinguals easily recognize regularities in language, in sounds as well as forms and meanings. Thanks to these general metalinguistic skills, bilinguals seem to have an advantage in learning to read, since they quickly understand that the relationship between a sign and a sound is an arbitrary convention that may differ from language to language.
More recent research has also shown that bilinguals learning to read in two languages at the same time have better reading skills than monolinguals It also appears that the earlier they were exposed to the two languages, the better their reading skills. Even more surprisingly, monolinguals attending bilingual classes turned out to read better than monolinguals in monolingual classes.
So, Matteo’s discoveries about reading and writing just reveal how playful and naturally young children deal with more than one language. Fascinating, isn´t it?
See also: Bialystok (1991) Bialystok, Shenfield and Codd (2000), Kovelman, Baker & Petitto (2008)
Manuela Pinto
20/03/2012
