Raising Children as Multilinguals in the U.S. Context: Perspectives from a Parent and Educator

摘要

I am raising a five-year-old son and two-year-old daughter as trilinguals in a multilingual household where we speak Korean, Farsi, and English. We have consistently maintained a one-parent-one-language (OPOL) policy in which I only speak Korean to my children while two other caregivers, my partner and mother-in-law, exclusively speak Farsi to them. Promoting my children's proficiency in home languages in an English-dominant society, the United States, has been my priority. As a successive multilingual, having learned English and Farsi after acquiring my first language of Korean, and as a professor and scholar of language and literacy education, I am well aware of the multiple benefits of multilingualism (Bialystok, 2011). Although my children have not been formally assessed, I can say that they have sufficient speaking skills in both Korean and Farsi appropriate to their ages; they are often praised by others, both multi- and mono-lingual adults, for these skills. However, concerns have also been a frequent reaction to their developing trilingual abilities. Some intimate family members, friends, neighbors, and school personnel have commented on the confusion that my children must experience because of them acquiring three different languages simultaneously, the urgency in mastering English, and the shortlived nature of home languages once school starts in the United States. These common assumptions have troubled me.