What impact does a multilingual environment have on children?

Language environment refers to the situation and state in which a person is speaking. There are many kinds of language environments: generally speaking, there are natural language environments, local language environments and self-created artificial language environments. The natural language environment refers to the living environment where the language is the native speaker. The local language environment refers to the language environment in which learners live or study part of the time. The artificial language environment mainly refers to situations in which learners use the language to retell, describe, remember or create certain scenes in their minds.

The baby is in the initial development stage of language. Language learning begins with imitation. The environmental interference of multiple languages ??will definitely have an impact on the child's speech, including various dialects and other acquired language habits.

The production mechanism of language is very complex. Language ability is produced by the interaction and coordination of many factors such as perception, biology, acoustics, learning, and communication methods. The normal development of infants and young children's language ability is closely related to the above factors. Specifically, it is mainly affected by two types of factors. One is physiological conditions, such as congenital hearing organ defects, damage to certain parts of the brain, poor congenital constitution, frailty, etc., which will all affect the development of language ability. The second is the external environment in which the baby lives, including a good language atmosphere, interactive objects for children's language, and opportunities for communication. Therefore, it is necessary to create a suitable and scientific language learning environment for babies, otherwise it will delay the baby's language development throughout his life.

In a large family, parents, grandparents, and nannies all speak their own dialects. The language environment is complicated and multiple dialects coexist. This makes the family have a different accent, which creates problems for the baby who is imitating and learning the language. I was very confused. I didn’t know whose language I should learn from. Today I would learn a Southern accent and tomorrow I would speak a Northern accent. As a result, the language learning stage was prolonged and I learned to speak later than normal.

A more serious impact is that a variety of language environments may cause the baby to become "dumb", that is, suffer from aphasia or autism. According to statistics from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the current incidence of autism among U.S. children has increased tenfold compared to the 1980s, with 1 in every 300 children suffering from the disease. One of the important factors is that they live in a multilingual cultural environment and suffer from autism because they cannot adapt to this complex language environment. Ms. Li, who lives in Manhattan, is a Hong Kong immigrant who speaks Cantonese. Her nanny is from Wuhan who speaks dialect, her husband is a northerner who speaks Mandarin, and the cartoons on TV are pure American English. I don’t know since when, the baby became less and less talkative. Later, he stopped saying anything at all and just lowered his head to play with his toys all day long, becoming like a mute. The family thought that it would gradually get better over time, but the baby still had difficulty speaking at the age of 6 and refused to go to school. Diagnosed by medical experts, the cause of the illness was that the baby was at a loss in a chaotic language environment and suffered from severe childhood autism.

Even if your baby is a "gifted child" who has strong expressive ability between 1 and 2 years old, you must remember that the early environment for language learning should not be too complicated, especially in the middle and late childhood years. During the critical period of language learning from the age of 2 to 2 years old, the focus should be on teaching the baby a correct language first, that is, teaching him to learn Mandarin first.

Many mothers believe that “the sooner language skills are developed, the smarter the baby will be.” They cannot let their babies “lose” at the starting line, but they did not expect that they would fall into misunderstandings about language skills development, which would instead affect their babies. Development of language skills.

The environment for baby's language learning must be appropriate and scientific

It should be reminded that mothers can easily fall into the misunderstanding of paying too much attention to their baby's learning environment and always want to develop his language as early as possible. Ability, as soon as the baby was born, the wall was covered with literacy cards with large characters, and literacy books, nursery rhyme tapes, and CDs were bought. I wished that the baby would be able to recognize the words and call mother while drinking milk when he was one month old. This premature development of the baby's language ability and even premature development of intelligence is not conducive to the healthy development of the baby's body and mind. Because in early education, in addition to intelligence and language skills, behavioral habits must also be cultivated, such as communication skills, expression skills, self-care skills, etc. If these "emotional intelligence" are not possessed, in the long run, seemingly trivial things will "not know how to do it yourself". "Eating", "not participating in children's various activities", etc. will cause psychological burden on the baby. He will feel that he is worse than others in every way and cannot integrate into his peers. He will gradually lose self-confidence and lose interest in anything, and then he will Causes baby's low emotional intelligence and affects future development.

Learn and draw lessons from the models of language training

In terms of language training, Old Witt (father of Carl Witt, founder of Carl Witt’s education rules) has provided us with Set an example. Old Witt attached great importance to Little Witt's early language ability. When teaching him language, he summarized some very useful methods. One of them was to put great emphasis on letting him learn standard language. For this reason, Old Witte always pronounced his son clearly and repeatedly, patiently taught him standard German, and praised his son as long as his pronunciation was accurate. In addition, Old Witte only allowed Little Witte to memorize standard German and set an example. He always insisted on standard pronunciation and language standards. He also explicitly prohibited his wife, maids and male servants from speaking dialects and dialects. He believed that Little Witte should be allowed to memorize dialects and dialects. Patois is a waste of time. Through unremitting efforts and persistence, Little Witt's pronunciation has been very accurate since he was a child. Soon, Little Witte learned to read standard German again and could read easily. Old Wit asked his son to learn similar foreign languages ??on the basis of mastering the pronunciation of his own language.

Hard work pays off, and around the age of 9, Little Witt can freely use six languages: German, French, Italian, Latin, English and Greek.