The Challenges Of True Bilingualism In A Monolingual Culture

The Challenges Of True Bilingualism In A Monolingual Culture
(Last Updated On: January 18, 2021)

True bilingualism can be hard to achieve, even if both parents are bilingual.

Speaking two languages with native fluency and having a strong vocabulary to express yourself in both languages takes a lot of effort.


For my complete guide on raising a bilingual child, check out this post here:

How To Teach Your Child A Second Language: A Quick Start Guide


Why True Bilingualism Is Hard

A good friend of our family was born and raised in China. She immigrated to the United States when she was 13 years old. She continued to speak Chinese at home and learned English at school and from the community environment.

As an adult, her work required her to travel to China a few times a year for business.

When she got there she was embarrassed to admit that she needed a translator for most of her work!

While she was fluent in Chinese from speaking it at home with her parents, there was so much vocabulary surrounding her work, politics, and current events that she didn’t know.

To some extent, this is true of many children being raised bilingual in a culture that is monolingual .

Unless the children are going to a dual language immersion school, it is likely that the primary language that is spoken in their community and school will be the language that they are the most dominant in, since there will likely be a gap in the professional vocabulary of their secondary language.

One top New York Times article, Raising A Truly Bilingual Child, states:

“The children start out as baby bilinguals, but the older they get, the more English overtakes Spanish,” she said. “The ones who are successful bilinguals as adults are still much better in English than they are in Spanish — they didn’t go to school in Spanish, they don’t read books in Spanish, and when you actually measure the size of their vocabularies, or the grammar they understand, or the coherence of the narrative they produce, they are not as proficient as they are in English.”


This is a great article and well worth the read. Click the link here to check it out:

Raising A Truly Bilingual Child


The Challenges For Non-Native Speakers

If you are a parent that is a non-native speaker and are raising your child to be bilingual, this can be even more of a challenge.

Making sure that you’re giving your child the most amount of vocabulary in the target language is hard since you may not have a as high of a vocabulary in the target language as your native language.

This topic really hit home for me this year as my daughter started to excel in her preschool class.

She would come home and tell me all of the things that they were learning about and she didn’t have any Spanish vocabulary for it.

We don’t live in an area where a dual immersion school is located, so there is no other option for us on that front.

As a non-native speaker, I don’t think that I’ll ever be able to give my daughter the highest amount of vocabulary in Spanish that she will need to be truly bilingual.

However, there are some things that I can do now to help instill an academic vocabulary in Spanish and give her a boost.

How We Focus On The Spanish Language

Spanish Books

I’ve been building our Spanish library since my daughter was born and we have a significant amount of books for her to read and listen to.

One thing that I’ve tried to do to help with exposure to Spanish vocabulary is to incorporate Spanish novels and nonfiction books.

Recently, my daughter has been interested in listening to chapter books.

We read a chapter before bed and talk about what happens in the story.

Listening to chapter books in Spanish is one way to make sure that she’s hearing a high level of Spanish and also a way to help build a foundation for an academic Spanish vocabulary.

Our library of informational books is another way that I work on boosting her Spanish vocabulary.

We have a good collection of animal books, some beginning biographies, dinosaur guides, and books about space.

Reading these books not only helps to introduce her to specific academic vocabulary in Spanish, but it also opens up conversations that allow us to talk more about topics that we wouldn’t normally talk about.

It has certainly challenged my Spanish as I’ve been pushed to look up lots of new words and videos to help me explain topics that I wouldn’t have been able to talk about before!

Informational Spanish Shows

Another way that I’ve been working on supporting my daughter’s Spanish vocabulary is through an informational show.

While she isn’t allowed much screen time, we do occasionally watch some shows in Spanish.

Instead of just letting her watch a cartoon, I’ve started looking for more informational programs that can introduce her to different words that she’s used to hearing.

The show that we’ve seen recently is called, “If I Were An Animal…” on Netflix and she’s been watching a 6 minute mini episode a few times a week.

This allows her to hear some fluent native Spanish and also work on some of those less common words like, ‘camouflage” that we normally wouldn’t be using during the day.


To read more about the show and why I like it, check out my post here:

An Educational Spanish Kids Show That You Need To See!


As a non-native speaker who is bilingual parenting, raising a fully bilingual child can be an extra challenge. Making sure that they are exposed to a high quality level of the target language can be next to impossible without a language immersion school or a native language tutor.

Reading high quality books and making sure that your child has a higher exposure to informational resources can be one way to boost their target language vocabulary!

What do you do to grow your child’s Spanish vocabulary? Share in the comments so we can all learn!

Happy Learning!

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9 thoughts on “The Challenges Of True Bilingualism In A Monolingual Culture”

  • Hello,

    I am a bilingual parent. I have a concern about speaking to my daughter in a language I am not 100% fluent in. My native language is English. I speak Hebrew fairly well and started talking to my daughter in Hebrew since she was born. We live in New York City. My wife is foreign born. She speaks mostly English with her and a little Vietnamese, her native language.

    I have learned a great deal of Hebrew and am able to feel comfortable speaking to her. I try not to use English words and usually quickly look up words on my phone and spend at least half an hour a day learning Hebrew from podcasts, apps and books.

    I am concerned that my vocabulary is not robust enough to give her enough words. We interact a lot. My wife feels that I might be doing her a disservice. My daughter knows and can speak three languages, but she is not as fluent as other kids in expressing herself. We have a friend who has a child who is one year older and is monolingual but can express very complex thoughts.

    I would love some advice on this from someone going through the same dilemma. I don’t want to switch to English and destroy all the gains I have made. Maybe we need to find a Hebrew Daycare or Nanny. I am not sure if my wife will go for that. Such a dilemma.

    Marc

    • Hello Marc!

      I’m definitely in a similar situation since I am also not fluent in my second language!

      From what I’ve read and seen so far with my daughter (age 5), children who are raised in multilingual environments often have a slightly smaller vocabulary in each of their languages because they’re amassing so many words all together. For example, a monolingual child might know 2,000 words in their language, while a bilingual child of the same age may know 1,500 in one language and 1,500 in the other. Since the bilingual child is internalizing words in both languages, they have a higher total word count (3,000 words) but a slightly smaller word count in each individual language.

      As they grow older, one language tends to become dominant and they should acquire similar vocabulary levels to that of a monolingual in their dominant language, though it will take a bit longer. Since you’re in NYC, I’d guess that your daughter’s dominant language will be English eventually. Once my daughter started Kindergarten, English quickly became more dominant than Spanish and I saw how quickly she caught up to being able to express herself just as well as her monolingual peers. After a year of Kindergarten, I can see no difference between her English vocabulary and that of her friends.

      I think that the benefits of being multilingual far outweigh any potential lag in vocabulary that a child might experience in the first few years. I don’t think that your daughter will in any way be negatively impacted by hearing Hebrew from you, even if you’re not fluent. My daughter’s English has not been negatively impacted by our Spanish work and her Spanish, though not as strong as her English, is now better than mine and she often gets complimented by Spanish speakers when we’re out in public.

      Children tend to pick up on grammatically correct language when they hear it enough. If you’re worried about your Hebrew, I would suggest exposing your daughter to high quality books (fiction and nonfiction) and podcasts in Hebrew. There is a lot of research that shows that reading out loud benefits language development and vocabulary in children because it’s typically a close bonding time, they hear their parents voice, and they hear a wide range of vocabulary. I read chapter books and nonfiction to my daughter constantly so that she has a strong understanding of how “correct Spanish” sounds and so that she gets more varied vocabulary words that I might not say in everyday conversation. Sometimes when we’re just talking and I make a mistake in my grammar she’ll say, “that doesn’t sound right”, because she’s heard enough correct Spanish to know the difference or she’ll use a word that I don’t know because she’s picked it up from the podcasts we listen to.

      I hope this helps and I hope that you don’t give up on teaching your daughter Hebrew! Being multilingual can open so many doors for her, allow her to connect with many different people, and has cognitive benefits as well.

      Reina

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