Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Trip home -- worth every penny

Well, there's a lot to cover about Stinkerbella's language development over the last few months and I should really be in bed...but at the rate things are going I'm just going to have to give up some sleep to do everything I want to do in a day!

To be brief, we went home to the US for a month over the summer. Stinkerbella has always been a bit of a chatterbox, even as a tiny baby, and while her first words were in English, her French became stronger and stronger after she started day care for 2 mornings a week. She had a much broader vocabulary in English, but she was able to express herself in longer, more accurate sentences in French and sometimes she'd tend to stick to French in her imaginative play unless I'd join her. She was able to switch to English without problem, but I think French came more naturally to her when playing.

In the US, she switched over to English automatically and since we've been back, there's no question that English is her mother tongue. It was a little weird to hear her speak English to me and then French to her dolls, and then it was equally weird to come back and see her struggle a bit to get back into the swing of French. Now she seems able to handle both quite easily and can code-switch without effort, which is amazing to watch.

The trip back to the US really proved to be an important step in establishing her bilingualism. Even though I worked hard at describing things in detail, singing, reading, playing, and all the things that are standard practice when raising a bilingual child, she really only heard English from me and she needed to be immersed. Plus I think it was very important to her that she hear other children.

The process was so automatic that it really seemed that she was programmed to speak English and had all the knowledge in her head, but it took a trip home to really flip the switch. I'm still waiting to see what will happen when she goes off to school, but I'm feeling a little more confident that if we can save our centimes for trips home that she'll continue to express herself well in English.