By Tamara Guo, M.Ed. TEIS Developmental Specialist
We receive many questions from parents in our Ask A Therapist forum asking "Am I harming my child or causing additional speech delays by speaking to him in two languages within the home?". For any therapist who thinks the answer is "yes", we encourage you to think again.
When I started in early intervention 20 years ago I was told by a speech therapist to encourage a family I was working with to "stop speaking to their child in Spanish and focus on English first" so the child did not "become confused". Even though I am not a speech therapist and did not do previous research on the subject of bilingualism in early childhood, I did not agree with her theory. I learned Spanish as a second language in middle school through college and knowing how multicultural our world was becoming, I felt it was unnatural for this mother (whose native language was Spanish) to be forced to speak only English to her daughter in the home. Well, the SLP and I did get into a battle over it, but I continued to encourage the mother to speak Spanish to this two year old, while the father spoke to her only in English. I used both languages in my developmental therapy with her. I was fascinated that she could understand both languages, even though she wasn't verbally using either language very much yet. When she was evaluated by an English speaking SLP they failed to pick up that what they thought was gibberish, was actually word approximations of some Spanish words. I wish I could give you the results of where that child is today to prove that she is now fluent in both languages, but as EI therapists we only get to see our kids until they turn three!
In the "old days" which wasn't so very long ago, the thinking was that teaching a child two languages simultaneously, especially a child with special needs (such as Down syndrome) would only further impede his language learning. Also, things have changed culturally. For example, my husband is Chinese and his parents purposefully did not teach him Chinese as a child growing up in the 50's and 60's because they wanted him to be "American" and talk like a native English speaker, not speak with a Chinese accent like they did. He now wishes he had learned Chinese. How beneficial it is for us to know a second language in today's world.
We posted an article on our Early Intervention Support website entitled Early Bilingualism which you may wish to read since it gives tips for parents to encourage dual language learning at home. But, the question remains that if a typically developing child can learn two languages, what about a child with a diagnosis that is associated with speech delays or cognitive delays?
