Tales From the Third Grade

So as most of you guys know, I am responsible for a crop of adorable (“devilish though they may be”) second and third graders as a counselor at Recky’s Day Camp. And as you can imagine, I’ve been covertly using them to conduct informal field studies of language acquisition, literacy, and bilingualism (in essence, I am being paid to do amateur linguistic “research” with unsuspecting, unpaid subjects… I love my job). So, I thought I would share some cute and surprisingly enlightening anecdotes.

First, I have a seven-year-old boy named Jason, who is of Chinese descent, but was born in the United States. His parents speak Cantonese (most of his family is from Hong Kong), some Mandarin, and English. His mother has also lived in Paris and speaks fluent French, and is teaching him a little bit. He has two-year-old twin siblings, who only speak Cantonese. One day a couple of weeks ago, Jason was telling me about how he goes to Chinese school to learn how to write in Chinese, and how even though Cantonese and Mandarin are different, they have the same writing system. He told me how he found learning to write Chinese very hard, because you have to memorize lots of characters—one for each word. I said, “It’s not like English, is it? Because in English we have letters that stand for sounds instead of words. The sounds all put together make up the word.” At this point, another boy piped up: “Yeah, that’s why English is the easiest to read! Because the letters stand for sounds! But it’s also the hardest to pronounce, because we have letters like ‘ph’ that make the wrong sound.”

So these kids not only have phonemic awareness, but also an idea of how writing systems vary in different cultures for different languages—which is more than can be said for many adults today. In short, these kids are AMAZING!

Jason tells me that he is “A little bit Chinese, a little bit English, and a little bit French,” because these are the languages that he speaks. He speaks English best, followed by Chinese, since as a baby his parents spoke both languages to him, but he has spent more time immersed in English because he goes to public school in the United States. He speaks only a little bit of French because of his mother, yet still counts this as part of his linguistic, and therefore ethnic identity. On the subject of language and identity, this is kind of a revolutionary idea. Jason looks Asian, and clearly grew up in a home with some Chinese customs—to any person on the street, he would just be an “Asian kid.” But to Jason, his ethnic identity is much more complex. He feels that because he speaks English and French also, he therefore partakes of the cultures that speak these languages, and therefore they make up part of his ethnic identity.

Jason may learn later that most of the world does not see ethnic identity in this way. Or, Jason may simply be part of a post-racial generation—where our definitions of “identity” are based on culture (I include language in this, even if some linguists might disagree) rather than biology (in race or in ethnic group).

Pamella is eight-years-old and grew up in a bilingual household, speaking both Spanish and English. Her father is Colombian and her mother is Peruvian. Like Jason, she makes fine distinctions between different dialects. She knows that her family speaks Spanish, but sees a distinction between the way her mother’s family and her father’s speak Spanish. “It’s the same language but it’s different. Sometimes they have different words for the same thing.” I tried to explain to her that it’s the same with British and American English. Pamella also says that speaks “more Peruvian than Colombian,” because her mother and grandmother speak Peruvian Spanish. For me, this just reaffirms the mother’s critical role in teaching language to her children (from “baby talk” in infancy and beyond). Sometimes I wonder if it had been my mother who spoke Spanish in my family, if I might have picked it up as a child. Quién sabe?

I like to practice my Spanish with Pamella sometimes, but I’ve noticed that whenever I speak to her, she’ll answer me in English. I used to think she did that because my Spanish was so poor. Then my Spanish instructor at Berlitz told me that the same was true of her kids, who are bilingual. I realized that the same is true of many other bilingual families I’ve known. (And now think about all the kids our age who have told you that they can understand a language that their family speaks… but can’t speak it.) Is it because the non-English language becomes secondary for the child after living and going to school in the English-speaking United States? I wonder.

Sometimes the counselors also have to speak to parents who speak little English. One day, I got this fabulous note from an ELL parent—a juicy ELL writing sample:

“To. Recky

This is Seoyoung’s mom.
She is gonna be absent tomorrow.
We are going to go to North Carolina to visit my aunt.
Thanks for your understand.”

Of course, I read this and absolutely loved it! Look at Seoyoung’s mother’s brilliant use of “gonna” as an English idiom. She’s a bit ahead of the curve, since “gonna” isn’t really accepted as legitimate in written English yet (though it should be and probably will be soon enough). She also chooses “thanks” as the informal, abbreviated form of “thank you.” She has mastered the present progressive-plus-infinitive construction, demonstrated in “we are going to go.” She also recognizes and makes use of two different meanings of the verb “to go” (she knows “going to” expresses an event in the future, as opposed to the general meaning of the verb, which expresses movement). She only misses by using “understand” instead of the gerund form “understanding,” where she means for the word to function as a noun—the object. Not sure what’s going on with her use of the period instead of the colon in “To. Recky”—though I do know some Koreans who use it instead of a comma in writing letters (ex. “Dear Amy.”), or for some reason include it at the end of titles (ex. “An Introduction to Hungarian Folklore.”). Otherwise, this note is completely clear, coherent, and understandable. Seoyoung’s mom showcases ELL at its finest.

--Amy