EP1: What is Bilingualism, Really?

Hi everyone and welcome to the very first episode of the bilingual professor podcast. I'm Dr. Kevin Wong, Wong-Homon Boxy, trained elementary school teacher, now teacher educator and researcher, and apparently a podcaster by night, once the kids go to bed of course. This podcast is a space for parents, teachers, and anyone who cares about bilingualism really, not just the mechanics and how-to of it, but the lived reality of it. The beautiful, messy, sometimes guilt-ridden experiences of raising or educating kids in more than one language. And I want to start this whole episode with a question that sounds simple but really isn't. What is bilingualism really? Because I guess not if I asked most parents, including maybe you, you'd say something like knowing two languages, speaking both, being fluent in both, and that's completely reasonable. But I want to offer you a different way of thinking about it today. One that I believe will actually change how you feel about your child's language journey and perhaps your own. Let's start with a researcher named Francois Grosschene. He's a Swiss American linguist who spent decades studying bilingual people. And in the 1980s he said something that was quite revolutionary at the time and does still apply today. He said a bilingual person is not two monolinguals in one body. Now let me say that again, a bilingual person is not two monolinguals in one body. What does that mean? Well the traditional way of thinking about bilingualism, what researchers call the "fractional view," basically treated bilinguals as if they had two separate, complete language systems inside of them. And by that standard, to be truly bilingual, you had to be perfectly fluent in both languages, equal, balanced, native-like in both. And by that standard, almost nobody's bilingual, including most of the bilingual people I know and definitely including me. Grosschene offered something different, a holistic view. The idea that bilinguals have a unique integrated linguistic repertoire. They're not splitting themselves in two. There's something whole and distinct, a bilingual person uses their languages differently in different contexts, with different people for different purposes. And that's not a deficit. That's just how bilingualism actually works. So to make this a bit more concrete, I was born and raised in Hong Kong. And if you asked me about my language background, I would say that I spoke Cantonese to my dad and English with my mom. And then a fluid mix, which we called "changlish" with my sister. I also used Cantonese accented English when I was out in society, because that's what people understood best. And all of that was wrapped up in being mixed, as well, in Hong Kong, which meant language wasn't just about communication, it was also about identity, every choice about which language to use and with whom was always a choice about who I was and where I belonged or didn't. Now was I bilingual, by the fractional view, maybe not perfectly. I wasn't identically fluent in both, but by Gross Jean's holistic view, absolutely. My linguistic repertoire was layered, it was mine, it was rich, it was me. It was shaped by love, by family, by culture, and by the specific texture of growing up between two languages and two worlds. And I think that's true for a lot of us and for a lot of our kids too. Now, there's another piece of research I want to bring in here, because it directly addresses one of the biggest fears I hear from parents, and maybe you've had this fear too. The fear is, if I spend time on the home language, my child will fall behind in English. A researcher named Jim Cummins spent years studying this, and what he found is actually that the opposite of what most people expect. He proposed something called the Common Underlying Proficiency Model. The idea is that that deep literacy skills, so these skills like reading comprehension, perhaps start reasoning, making inferences. These are not language specific, they actually transfer. And when a child develops strong skills in their home language, those skills become a foundation for their second, third, fourth or fifth languages as well. You're not dividing a limited resource, you're building a shared resource that benefits all the languages that you are learning. So supporting Cantonese, Mandarin, Spanish, Tagalog, or whatever your home languages might be, that's not taking away from English. And the research, it's actually investing in English. So that's what the research says, but I know that research doesn't always feel real when you're sitting at the kitchen table, and your kid is switching back and forth between two languages, mid-sentence, and you're not sure if that's a problem. It's not. And I want to explain why. What you're observing, that mixing, that switching, has a name and research. It's called TransLanguaging, and it's not a sign of confusion or weakness, it's actually a sign of a sophisticated integrated language system that is at work. Now, here's an analogy I like. Imagine a musician who plays both piano and sings. When they're performing, they don't forget the piano just because they're singing. Both those instruments are both ways of playing music, are part of who they are as musician, and sometimes in certain musical context, the most expressive thing they can do is to move fluidly between the two at the same time. Now bilingual kids are doing something similar. They are not confused about languages. They are drawing on their full linguistic repertoire to express themselves as precisely and completely as possible. Now this comes with a real-world tension that I want to name directly because a lot of parents, especially those who are immigrants or heritage language speakers, have been told implicitly or explicitly that mixing languages is bad. And it means you're failing at one of them, that your child should keep them separate. Now some of that messaging comes from schools, some comes from well-meaning family members, some of it comes from within ourselves, from our own complicated histories with language. And I'm not going to pretend that societal pressures around language don't exist. They do. There are real contexts where English fluency is gate-kept and where bilingual children do face bias, and we'll talk about that on this podcast. What the research shows and what I've seen in classrooms and what I see at home is that bilingualism isn't a problem to manage. It's a practice to support. Now to get a little bit more personal for a moment here, I mentioned that I'm a researcher, but I'm also a father and I have two daughters who are in first grade and preschool. And both of them are growing up as emerging multilinguals. They're navigating Mandarin and English in our home, figuring out who they are across these two languages. And I'll be real with you, even knowing everything I know about bilingualism research. There are moments where I feel the pull of this deficit narrative, where I wonder, oh, is her Mandarin strong enough, oh is she mixing too much, am I doing enough? And then I'll hear my six-year-old explain something to her little sister, seamlessly switching languages mid-sentence, to make sure her sister understands. And I think this is a gift, she's doing something most adults can't do and she doesn't even know it's remarkable. And that's the reframe I want to offer you today. So let me bring this back to the question I started with, what is bilingualism really? It's not just knowing two languages, it's not being perfectly fluent in both, it's not keeping them perfectly separate or performing them equally well at all times. Bilingualism is actually dynamic, it's living, it's identity-rich relationship with more than one language, and bilingualism shifts across your lifetime. It looks different at three than it does at six and sixteen and forty. It's shaped by your family, your community, your history, and your values. Now that the deficit narrative will say, my child isn't fluent enough in both languages, so they're not really bilingual. But the asset-based view says, my child has a unique linguistic repertoire that is already theirs. It will grow and change and my job isn't to make them perfect, it's to make sure they know what they have is valuable. Now that shift in framing changes everything, it changes what you celebrate, it changes what you stop feeling guilty about, and I genuinely believe it changes what your child internalizes about themselves and their language, and ultimately about who they are. So before I let you go, here's something I want you to sit with this week, just one thing. Notice a moment when your child or student uses their home language or mixes languages or code switches, and instead of correcting it or feeling anxious about it, just observe it. Notice what they're expressing, notice how natural it is for them, and if you want to take it one step further, tell them something in that language, something small, something warm, not a lesson, just making a connection, because that's what this is really all about, not fluency or benchmarks, but connection. In the next episode, we're going to dig into one of the most persistent myths about bilingual children, the idea that they get confused and spoiler alert, the research shows that they do not. So if today's episode resonated with you, share with another bilingual parent or a teacher you know, and I would love to hear from you, what questions do you have about bilingualism? What's the one thing you're worrying about most or celebrate most about raising a bilingual child? I'm Dr. Kevin Wong, thank you so much for listening to The Bilingual Professor Podcast. Hatsi Kiina. (upbeat music)