Parents' Responsibilities in a Child's Language Acquisition

All of us are aware that parents play an imprescindible role in building a child’s language potentials, and here are some facts that one may want to follow:

        To begin with, it is not advisable to educate a child to be bilingual at an too early an age. A child should first consolidate his first language until the age of three or four before proceeding onto the second language. A third language is not recommended until the child develops mature usage of the first two tongues.

        If the parents insist in getting their kids to be bilingual, there are two major ways to achieve this goal. Once the child demonstrates that he can articulate well, one of his parents should start communicating with him in a second tongue, and the other parent should continue talking to him in his first language. Note that both the father and the mother should always stick to the same languages when talking to the child. If these parents care about the child’s fluency in both languages, the easiest way is to take their infants to a nation where the targeted language is spoken as an official tongue. Note that the child has to carry in speaking his first language in a family context.

        Language acquisition is a complicated myth that researchers are still fighting to unravel. However, if parents think clearly before they plan their child’s language learning, I trust that there is hope for every family to have bright bilingual children.