With the increasing borderlessness and the progress of globalization, international marriages have been increasing all over the world.  Many people tend to think that children raised in a family of internationally married couple naturally become bilingual, but it is a rough road to nurture two different languages (that of course contain proper balance) than one might imagine in a family where different cultures and values coexists.  Holding of two languages of a child is a serious problem, especially families residing abroad, and there are many cases that child only speak one language and become monolingual before one realizes it without nurturing two languages from a very young age in a planned manner.  In this blog post, I want to introduce a family of internationally married couple between an American and Japanese who live in America as an example of a family that has been adopting bilingual education policy to their children.  In addition, I also want to introduce their purpose and method of bilingual education towards their children.

Before they had children, both husband and wife agree to teach both Japanese and English so that they can create an ideal bilingual environment where children can nurture two languages.  As for the purpose of bilingual education, wife, who is Japanese, not only wants their children to speak Japanese but also share the Japanese culture and customs by learning Japanese.  Also, she wants her children to communicate with her relatives when they go back to Japan.  On the other hand, from the husband’s perspective, he understands that most of the second and third generation of immigrants lose their parents’ language and end up being able to speak only English.  Rather he wants their children to appreciate good and bad things of their mother’s culture through language, and also by being able to speak two languages he wants their children to be able to look at and interpret movies, literatures, music, etc from two perspectives.

As for the method of bilingual education, the wife has been speaking to her children since they were born to make it a custom so that children wouldn’t question why they are learning Japanese and children can develop the fundamental skill of Japanese.  In order to nurture the speaking and listening skills of her children, the wife tries to speak to Japanese almost all the times and also read books to her children.  Writing is the most challenging for her children.  Hiragana is relatively easier to learn, but learning Kanji (Chinese Characters) is really difficult for children and it’s a time-consuming process.  Therefore, she will take time and expect her children to get used to as many Kanji as possible.  However, they are aware that as the children grow, children will go to school in America and interact with other American kids. Eventually lives of their children will be based on English and there will be less opportunity to learn Japanese.  In this way, children will be proficient in English and their Japanese ability will grow stagnant.  Therefore, she expects her children to continue to learn Japanese so that children will be fluent in both languages so that they have more opportunities in the future.

In conclusion, in order to success in bilingual education, both husband and wife have to cooperate each other to make an ideal bilingual environment and also continuation (even though it is a time consuming process) is the most important part of bilingual education.

by Hirokazu Takeuchi