00:00:15
Sharon: Welkom bij Kletsheads, de podcast over meertalige kinderen. Mijn naam is Sharon Unsworth, taalwetenschapper aan de Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, een moeder van twee meertalige kinderen.

00:00:28
Sharon: Meertalige kinderen groeien op in allerlei verschillende omstandigheden. In sommige gezinnen spreken beide ouders hun eigen moedertaal met hun kind, de zogenoemde één ouder één taal strategie. Mama spreekt bijvoorbeeld Zweeds en papa Nederlands. In andere gezinnen spreken beide ouders dezelfde taal, bijvoorbeeld Arabisch. Dan komt het kind alleen buitenshuis in contact met het Nederlands, bijvoorbeeld bij het kinderdagverblijf, de peuterspeelzaal of op school. Dit laatste is wat wij thuis doen. Zowel mijn man als ik spreken Engels met onze kinderen, maar op school, met vrienden, bij de voetbalclub en met de buren spreken ze Nederlands. Er zijn natuurlijk ook andere factoren, behalve wat de ouders doen, die bepalen dat het ene meertalige kind meer of minder Nederlands hoort dan het andere. Denk bijvoorbeeld aan broers of zussen. Meertalige kinderen met oudere broers of zussen horen vaak meer Nederlands thuis dan kinderen die geen broers of zussen of alleen jongere broers of zussen hebben. En als het gaat om de niet Nederlandse taal, wat we vaak de thuistaal noemen, dan is het voor sommige talen heel makkelijk om aan filmpjes, boeken en apps te komen. Bijvoorbeeld in het Engels is dit echt super makkelijk, terwijl dat voor andere talen veel moeilijker is en soms zelfs onmogelijk. Wat ook nog kan verschillen, is dat in sommige gezinnen, familieleden of vrienden in de buurt zijn die ook Zweeds, Italiaans of Japans spreken. Voor andere gezinnen is dit niet het geval. Alles bij elkaar betekent dit dat er grote verschillen kunnen zijn tussen kinderen in hoeveel Nederlands ze horen en hoeveel ze horen van hun andere taal. De vraag is natuurlijk in welke mate deze verschillen tussen kinderen ook leiden tot verschillen in hoe goed de kinderen hun twee talen kunnen begrijpen en spreken. Hoeveel taal moet je nou horen om meertalig te worden? In deze aflevering van Kletsheads zoeken we dit met Erika Hoff, hoogleraar aan de Florida Atlantic University in de VS. Nou, omdat Erika geen Nederlands spreekt, vond ons gesprek in het Engels plaats. Ik begon door haar te vragen of het feit dat meertalige kinderen hun tijd over hun twee talen moeten verdelen, betekent dat het onvermijdelijk is dat ze slechter zullen presteren dan hun eentalige leeftijdsgenoten.

00:03:04
Erika Hoff: No, they won’t necessarily be worse at all, but it will in all likelihood take them longer to get to the same place.

00:03:04
Sharon: Right. Will that be the same for all different aspects of language?

00:03:16
Erika Hoff: No, in the long run no. Early on different aspects of language are very tied together in development. So you see the effect of the split input or exposure, as you described it. You see those effects across the board, in vocabulary growth, in grammatical development. But in the long run, things like vocabulary development and grammatical development differ in ways that affect bilingual children’s ability to catch up. In grammatical development at some point, children have mastered basic aspects of the grammar. They know how to put words together. Once you know how to put words together, then you have accomplished that. So in those kinds of milestones we, and other people who have studied this, see that the bilingual children catch up to the monolingual children after a lag.

00:04:22
Sharon: Dus als het gaat om grammatica, hoe kinderen zinnen in elkaar zetten, kunnen meertalige kinderen er soms langer over doen dan eentalige kinderen, om dit aspect van taal onder de knie te krijgen. Maar na een korte vertraging halen ze hun eentalige leeftijdsgenoten wel in.

00:04:42
Erika Hoff: Vocabulary development may be different, because vocabulary development sort of goes on forever, we can always keep learning new words. And that may be a place where bilinguals are different, are always different, from monolinguals. They are not necessarily different in a way that matters in most circumstances. But they may, if you test hard enough and more advanced words, you may see forever a difference between someone who only uses and only reads in one language and only speaks in one language and only goes to school in one language. There may be forever some differences between such a person and someone who is doing their reading and writing and speaking in two or more languages.

00:05:35
Sharon: So I guess, when we’re talking about grammar, we’re talking about sticking bits of the sentence together as it were. So once you know how to do that you can do it with any words, right?

00:05:35
Erika Hoff: Yes.

00:05:35
Sharon: So we’re talking about vocabulary. I guess the words, you know, are the ones that you use in the in the parts of life that you use your language for, right? So you might know words in one language and not in the other. You don’t have to know words in both languages.

00:05:35
Erika Hoff: Well, we see that in the children that we look at. One of the standardized tests we use, for example, has a picture of scissors and it’s a test of the child’s knowledge of the word scissors. And it’s far more likely that a child in the United States for whom Spanish is a minority language and English is the language they go to school in, they’re more likely to know the word scissors in English than they are in Spanish. And that’s just one example. There are many, many examples of words that bilinguals will know in one language and not the other, because they only do that activity in one language and not the other.

00:06:49
Sharon: Dit is ook wat we in de eerste aflevering van Kletsheads hebben gehoord toen we het met Elma Blom over mixen hadden. Net zoals een timmerman allerlei bijzondere woorden over hout en zagen kent, woorden die jij en ik waarschijnlijk niet kennen, omdat wij zelf geen houtwerk doen, kennen meertalige kinderen ook niet alle woorden in beide talen, omdat ze in één van hun talen daar mogelijk nooit mee in aanraking zijn gekomen.

00:07:17
Sharon: So we’re talking about comparing bilinguals and monolinguals. We’ve spoken about the different words they might know and we’ve spoken about the grammar or the way they put words together into a sentence. What about when they start learning to speak? Because that’s something you often hear that bilinguals are slower at starting into, let’s say, combining words, putting words together. Is that true?

00:07:40
Erika Hoff: Yeah, that’s what we found. It is that the bilingual children lag and this is a development that occurs young enough and fast enough that we actually know how long the lag is. They lag three months behind monolingual children in reaching the milestone of first starting to combine words. And these are, the bilingual children I’m talking about, are children who on average get about half of their language exposure in English and half in Spanish. The size of the lag or the length of the lag is different depending on that balance of exposure. So a child who gets 70 or 80 percent of their exposure, say in English, will have a much shorter lag. They’ll be much less different from a monolingual child and a child who hears only 30 percent of his language exposure in English will have a longer lag. The rate of language development at this early age is very influenced by how much exposure to a language the child hears. It goes slower if the child hears less and it goes faster if the child hears more.

00:09:06
Sharon: Right. So, to be clear, we are talking about around age?

00:09:11
Erika Hoff: Oh, I’m talking about two and a half.

00:09:13
Sharon: Yeah, two and a half. Right. And you said so there’s about a three month difference. That’s comparing bilingual children in one of their languages to monolinguals?

00:09:21
Erika Hoff: Yes

00:09:25
Sharon: And what happens if you take the other language into account?

00:09:27
Erika Hoff: If you take the other language into account bilingual children and monolingual children look remarkably the same at this early age. You can at a young age, it gets hard to do with older children, but at a young age you can pretty much count all the words a child knows. And if you count all the words that bilingual children know in their two languages, it is very much like the number of words that a monolingual child knows in just that one language.

00:10:00
Sharon: Dus als we naar één van hun twee talen kijken, lopen meertalige kinderen soms achter op leeftijdsgenoten, maar dit is afhankelijk van hoeveel ze van deze taal horen. Horen ze meer, dan zal de vertraging oftewel de lag, veel korter zijn, maar horen ze weinig van die taal, dan zal de vertraging en dus het verschil met eentaligen groter zijn. Tel je de twee talen echter bij elkaar op, dan zijn er weinig tot geen verschillen. Erika legde ook uit hoe belangrijk het is om rekening te houden met andere factoren die de taalontwikkeling van kinderen kunnen beïnvloeden als je meertalige kinderen wilt vergelijken met eentalige klasgenootjes. Eén van deze factoren is het opleidingsniveau van ouders of socio-economic status, zoals zij dit noemde.

00:10:55
Erika Hoff: It’s very important that you compare monolingual and bilingual children who are similar in other aspects. Socio economic status is a very strong predictor of language development. And if you look at norms, so big, large databases of the age at which children do things. If those norms are done well, they include a range of children from lots of different backgrounds. And bilingual children who get studied also come from a range of different backgrounds. And it’s just important to compare like to like.

00:11:40
Sharon Unsworth: You mentioned before that it can really matter how much of a language bilingual children hear and we know that that varies, right? Some children only hear a bit of the language, the minority language, and others hear that most of the time, especially in their early years when they’re at home. One of the questions I think parents have is: how much input is enough? How much language do you need to hear to be able to become bilingual? Do we know the answer to that?

00:12:05
Erika Hoff: I don’t think we know. It’s a question people talk about and people have tried to do research on. Clearly, there is some limit to how much information children can process at a time. You couldn’t take a monolingual child and just talk to it twice as much and then that baby would learn to talk twice as fast.

00:12:31
Sharon: Right, right.

00:12:33
Erika Hoff: The experiments never been done, but nobody doubts the outcome of it. On the other hand, within the normal range of experience that children have, I don’t think there’s any convincing evidence that allows us to say a certain number of hours a day and then everything else is extra and doesn’t matter. And the way people often ask the question about bilingual children is: is 80 percent the same as a 100 percent, is 70 percent the same as a 100 percent? I think the best answer to that is: no. That is, every extra amount makes a difference. Whether it’s a detectable difference or an important difference is, again, another matter

00:13:32
Erika Hoff: And again it also depends upon to what monolinguals you are comparing this bilingual child. What often happens and this should be, I think, a comfort to parents who are trying to raise their children as bilinguals in a monolingual world, which is often the circumstance in schools is that where the schools are designed for monolingual children, they are still designed for a range of monolingual children. A range of monolingual children around whatever is average. Bilingual children are doing more. They are learning two languages. But they can do more, they can learn two languages. And if they have very rich input from parents who provide experiences and really support their children’s language development, then bilingual children can get pretty close to monolingual, to average monolingual level. With a lot of support children can do two languages and not be at a great disadvantage, particularly if they’re dominant in one language. And that’s usually the case, that a perfect balanced bilingual is kind of a rare creature.

00:15:04
Sharon: I always say it’s a very monolingual perspective on bilingualism.

00:15:07
Erika Hoff: When we see children who come from bilingual homes, the children who have the most English dominant exposure are very close and sometimes not noticeably different from the monolingual children. The children whose exposure is primarily in Spanish have a different outcome.

00:15:32
Sharon: We’re talking about how much you hear the language can affect the development ot that language. So is it really an effect on how quickly you learn the language or is it also an effect on where you end up, how well you end up speaking it?

00:15:46
Erika Hoff: I think the best answer to that question is that the amount you hear a language influences how quickly you acquire it. But your ultimate level of proficiency is going to be more a function of the circumstances in which you hear that language and the uses to which you put that language. The nature or the quality of your language exposure is going to affect the ultimate accomplishment, but the amount will affect the rate. That’s a bit of an oversimplification, but I think there’s a lot of truth in that.

00:16:26
Sharon: OK, we’ll get to quality in a minute. For now, let’s first listen to our Kletshead of the week.

00:16:43

Kletshead van de Week

Sharon: Elke week vertelt een meertalig kind hoe het is om met twee of meer talen op te groeien. De opname is gemaakt op wetenschapsfestival Expeditie Next, vandaar de achtergrondgeluiden.

Nathan: Hallo, ik ben Nathan. Ik ben 7 jaar en ik spreek Russisch, Engels en Nederlands.

Sharon: Drie talen? Wauw, dat is knap. En hoe is dat om drie talen te spreken? Vind je dat moeilijk of makkelijk, leuk of niet leuk?

Nathan: Leuk.

Sharon: Wat is daar zo leuk aan dan?

Nathan: Er is iemand in mijn klas die spreekt alleen Russisch en de andere kinderen in mijn klas spreken geen Russisch en dan kan ik met hem praten.

Sharon: Dus je kunt hem helpen?

Nathan: Ja.

Sharon: Ja, dat is leuk. Met wie spreek je Russisch verder, behalve met een kind in je klas?

Nathan: Met mijn mama.

Sharon: Met mama, nog met iemand anders?

Nathan: En mijn broer.

Sharon: En je broer. Je spreekt ook Engels zei je. Met wie spreek je Engels?

Nathan: Met papa en mijn broer.

Sharon: Met papa en je broer. En Nederlands leer je, op school? Welke taal spreek je het liefst? Als je zou kunnen kiezen?

Nathan: Nederlands.

Sharon: Nederlands. Waarom Nederlands?

Nathan: Want dat is de taal die ik leer.

Sharon: Dat is de taal die je leert. Is het soms moeilijk om drie talen in je hoofd te hebben?

Nathan: Ja soms.

Sharon: Soms. Waarom?

Nathan: Want als ik al Nederlands en Engels in mijn hoofd heb, dan moet ik proberen Russisch in mijn hoofd te plakken. En dat lukt niet vaak.

Sharon: Dat lukt niet vaak? Kom je niet op het juiste woord?

Nathan: Nee.

Sharon: Nee, ik kan Nederlands en ik kan Engels, maar ik kan geen Russisch. Kan jij mij misschien leren hoe je tot vijf kunt tellen in het Russisch?

Nathan: Odin, dva, tri, chetyre, pyat.

Sharon: Pff dat is snel. Oké, odin.

Nathan: Odin, dva, tri, chetyre, pyat, shest, sem’, vosem, devyat, desyat.

Sharon: Oké, laten we 1 tot en met 3 doen dan, want dat is me veel te moeilijk. Eén was odin.

Nathan: Odin, dva, tri.

Sharon: Odin, doe ik het goed? Dva en tri. Zoals in het Nederlands?

Nathan: Tri.

Sharon: Tri. En hoe zeg je dank je wel en tot ziens in het Russisch.

Nathan: Spasibo, paka.

Sharon: Spasibo paka. Nou, spasibo paka.

00:19:57
Sharon: So Erika, you just mentioned that it’s not only how much language you hear, but the kind of language you hear, so the quality of the language you hear, that can have an effect on bilingual children’s language development. What do you mean exactly by quality?

00:20:08
Erika Hoff: Well, I can answer that in a couple of different ways. One dimension of quality has to do with the purposes to which language is put. The vocabulary and grammatical structures that you use at home, talking about home sorts of things, putting children to bed at night, feeding them breakfast in the morning, uses a fairly limited range of vocabulary, even among the most proficient speakers in the world. On the other hand, language that’s used in school, language that you read in, a language that you work in, is going to draw on a larger vocabulary and a richer range of grammatical structures. So one aspect of quality, to oversimplify again, is: is it a home language or is it also a academic language and a workplace language? Another factor that influences quality, even within just home language use, is the language proficiency of the speaker. And this might not be obvious, that is, if you’re talking to a two year old, who after all doesn’t know very much about the language, and you’re just talking about what to eat for breakfast. You wouldn’t think that the proficiency differences between a native speaker and a non-native speaker would matter, how hard is it to talk about eating your cereal? We have recorded mothers talking to their children with playing with toys and doing ordinary home kind of things. Some of these mothers are native speakers of English and some of them are native speakers of Spanish, but who use the English that they know in interacting with their children. And we find differences. We find differences in the range of vocabulary that’s used and we find differences in the complexity of the grammatical structures that are used. And importantly, the limits in the range of vocabulary limits what we call the informativeness of the language. That is, children have to figure out the patterns of language from the speech they hear and some speech is more revealing of those patterns than others. Speech that uses a rich vocabulary is more revealing of those patterns. So what we find, looking at just monolingual children, is that the richness of the vocabulary in the speech they hear and the complexity of the grammatical structures in the speech they hear, are positive predictors of their language development.

00:23:15
Sharon: De kwaliteit van het taalaanbod is dus belangrijk. Wat we met de kwaliteit bedoelen is de context waarin de taal gebruikt wordt en wie de taal praat met het kind. De taal die kinderen op school horen bevat veel meer verschillende woorden dan de taal die kinderen thuis horen. Ook de zinnen zijn complexer. Het is logisch, want de onderwerpen waar je het op school over hebt, zijn natuurlijk veel complexer dan waar je thuis over praat. De mensen die met een kind praten, kunnen verschillen in hoe taalvaardig ze zijn. Sommige mensen gebruiken meer woorden, veel meer verschillende woorden, ze stellen veel vragen en leggen veel uit aan het kind. Dit is wat er bedoeld wordt met de kwaliteit van het taalaanbod, iets dat zowel voor ééntalige als meertalige kinderen relevant is.

00:24:08
Sharon: Parents sometimes still get the advice that they should speak Dutch to their children, because as you said the more you hear a language, the better you learn it. So the idea is, well you know, Dutch is the language of school, so it’s important that they can speak Dutch. Teachers and others, maybe health professionals, sometimes even politicians I’ve heard say ‘make sure you speak Dutch to your children even if you are not a native speaker’. Is that an advice that you support?

00:24:38
Erika Hoff: No, not at all. When these non-native speakers are using English, or in your case Dutch, with their children it’s not as useful for language acquisition as probably the people giving the advice think it is. So that’s one half of it. But the other half of it is, every time someone who is a native speaker of Spanish is speaking English to her child rather than Spanish, the child is losing the opportunity to learn Spanish. And so what you are doing with that advice to the extent parents follow it, is you are diminishing the quality of the child’s exposure to English and eliminating the child’s exposure to Spanish.

00:24:38
Sharon: So basically, it helps no one.

00:25:28
Erika Hoff: The Dutch that you hear from your non-native parent will help somewhat, but it will not help your Dutch as much as it will hurt whatever the other language is.

00:25:37
Sharon: Het veelgehoorde advies om Nederlands met je kind te praten, als je zelf geen moedertaalspreker bent, is dus geen goed advies. Het gaat je kind waarschijnlijk niet helpen om beter Nederlands te praten. En het gaat vaak ten koste van zijn of haar andere taal.

00:25:55
Sharon: OK, so I think we’re going to wrap it up for this particular episode. Maybe we can finish by talking about what these findings mean for what teachers can expect from bilingual children.

00:26:08
Erika Hoff: Well, I think teachers and for that matter, parents and speech language pathologists have to recognise that language acquisition is not a magical process. It takes time. It takes exposure. And the children who are acquiring two languages are doing more than the children who are acquiring just one. It will take them more time. And the fact that the bilingual children may not have as big a vocabulary and may not be as advanced speakers as the monolingual children is normal. It’s to be expected, it doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with the child. So parents and teachers need to have reasonable expectations and not use their idea of what’s typical for a three year old or a five year old in monolinguals and evaluate a bilingual child against that standard. They would come to a wrong conclusion about the bilingual child’s ability.

00:27:10
Sharon: Er is dus geen duidelijk antwoord op de vraag: hoeveel taal moet je horen om meertalig te worden? Maar onderzoek heeft wel laten zien is dat hoeveel een kind in aanraking komt met zijn of haar twee talen invloed zal hebben op hoe snel het deze twee talen leert. En waar een kind de taal hoort en van wie zal ook gevolgen hebben voor hoe goed het de twee talen leert. Hier in Nederland moeten meertalige kinderen functioneren in een grotendeels ééntalige omgeving. Op een paar uitzonderingen na is Nederlands de voertaal, zeker op de basisschool. En dus is de taalontwikkeling van eentalige kinderen de norm. Het is dus onvermijdelijk dat meertalige kinderen met ééntalige kinderen vergeleken worden. Wat Erika hier in dit laatste stuk beweert, is dat het belangrijk is dat als je dit doet je rekening houdt met het feit dat meertalige kinderen vaak minder Nederlands en ander Nederlands horen dan hun eentalige leeftijdsgenoten. En dat dit gevolgen kan hebben voor wat je van ze kunt verwachten als het gaat om de Nederlandse taalontwikkeling.

00:28:21
Sharon: Wil je meer weten over Kletsheads? Ga dan naar http://www.kletsheadspodcast.nl. Daar vind je ook meer informatie over deze aflevering. Wil je geen aflevering missen? Abonneer je dan op Kletsheads via je favoriete podcast app. Bedankt voor het luisteren en graag tot de volgende keer.

Dit transcript is gegenereerd met behulp van amberscript.nl en gecheckt door Aniek Ebbinge.