This past summer I had the chance to spend three weeks in an orphanage in Colima, Colima, Mexico , with a friend of mine. The intentions of this trip were to live and interact with several boys, ages nine to fourteen, and to build Sunday school classrooms for a church in an outlying village. Our contact for this trip, and the head of this orphanage, Troy Guild, is an American. He runs the orphanage with his wife Imelda, a native Mexican woman who grew up in Colima, a few blocks from the orphanage. Troy and Imelda have two boys, named Sammy and Josh, ages six and two respectively. It was my interaction with Sammy that sparked my interest in this curious predicament of receptive bilingualism.
As a conversational speaker of Spanish, I had only a little trouble speaking to the boys in the orphanage. I could express myself to them, and I could understand them with little trouble. Of course none of the orphans spoke English. The thing about Sammy in particular was that he could understand perfectly well when I conversed with him in English, yet he could only respond back to me in Spanish! How is this possible? Does Sammy really not have the ability to put words into English, or is this just a case of childhood stubbornness?
As I described Troy and Imelda, Sammy comes from a bilingual family, Troy being a native speaker of English and Imelda being a native speaker of Spanish. Sammy has been surrounded by a Spanish-speaking society his entire life as he interacted with the many Spanish-speaking orphans. At home he is surrounded by two parents who have chosen to speak English primarily at home, i.e. around Sammy.
Transcription
Interview #1
Troy : OK, what's question number one?
Me: Um…ask him about uh, playing soccer. Like, does he still play soccer a lot, with the boys or anything?
Troy : OK. Sammy. Do you still play soccer with the boys? Do you like to play? How often do you play?
Sammy: Que?
Troy : How often do you play?
Sammy: Eh, en español?
Troy : Uh, ¿hace cuando tiempo…(fades out).
Sammy: (Answering in Spanish, not understandable)
Troy : He said he still likes it, he still plays with the boys.
Me: Uh huh.
Troy : He says when all the boys get together they always play soccer.
Me: Yeah, ok. Let's see uhm. Ask him to tell a little bit about his little brother.
Troy : Hey, can you tell, can you tell him a little bit about your little brother Sammy? Your little brother Josh? Hey, come here, Sammy. I want you to come here. Give me your attention. Now tell us about uh, Josh. (How old is he?).
Sammy: Dos
Troy : I have a little brother, he's two.
Sammy: (Speaking Spanish. Not able to hear his words)
Troy: We always play fight together…we wrestle. What else?
Sammy: …(Hard to understand)…jugar luchar(?).
Troy : They like to wrestle a lot.
Sammy: (Hard to understand Spanish)…manejar la bici(cleta).
Troy : He said, My little brother doesn't know how to ride his bike.
Sammy:…y…y…
Troy : When's his birthday?
Sammy: No sé.
Troy : Next week. Y, my little brother has a birthday next week. Where do yall sleep?
Sammy: Dormirnos en diferentes camas.
Troy : We sleep in different beds, in the same room.
Me: OK
Troy : Do you have another one?
Me: I guess uh, ask him a little bit about school, like has he started school yet or when will he start or anything like that.
Troy : Sammy, have you already started school?
Sammy: Sí.
Troy : Yes. What grade are you in Sammy?
Sammy: (Answers, not understandable, Spanish)
Troy: He's in uh, elementary school, in first grade. And he has classes in English.
Sammy: ¡Sí!
Interview #2
Troy : Yeah, he's learning a lot. We switched schools. And they practice English—it's a private school—and they speak a lot of English to them.
Me: Ok, uhm…does he do pretty good in the English classes?
Troy : Uh, yeah. He's doing real well in English class. The problem is it's hard. They have to…he's in first grade, and they have to memorize like thirty words uh, every two weeks. And he's just learning how to write now, but most of the kids already know how to write. So he's having to memorize words, and he doesn't all the alphabet yet. But he's doing real well, he got a B in the class.
Me: That's good.
Troy : He's a little behind, but he speaks really good. But it's a lot of writing and stuff, and he's having to play catch-up.
Me: Yeah, cause when he first got on the phone before I could tell a difference, cause he like, he got on and he said “Hello how are you?”, you know. He started, he wanted to talk to me in English, and I remember this summer he, he really didn't talk much at all in English.
Troy : He's really right now, he's really trying hard, I'll ask him things and he'll answer in English. He's trying really hard, he wants to speak English better, he's working real hard. He got dressed this morning and he came downstairs and he said, ‘Pop, I finished.' And I said, ‘Well, we would say “I'm ready.”' He said, ‘No I finished dressing.'
Me: That's funny. Yeah, the project that I'm doing this for, one of the things they say is that when kids like Sammy, they understand English, once they get into a classroom setting they excel pretty well, as far as learning the other parts of English. So I was just kinda curious about that.
Troy : Yeah, his English, he speaks almost as good as his English teacher. She knows how to teach it from the book, but she speaks broken English. But they do…vocabulary…Sammy, stop please…uh, they do a lot of vocabulary and numbers and learning the alphabet in English and Spanish. So it's a lot of stuff where she doesn't have to speak a whole lot, but she's teaching him the basics.
Me: OK, that's cool, yeah. Sounds good.
Analysis
The first step in becoming bilingual in general is to be in a situation which requires that one interact with two distinct languages. In general, this is propitiated through contact with a culture other than your native culture, or being caught in a situation between two cultures. Sammy fits these qualifications on the road to becoming fully bilingual as he is caught between the Mexican culture he is around all the time and the American culture that his father, Troy, represents—not to mention that his mother, though natively of Mexican culture, is familiar with American culture as well, and may thereby also have slight a American influence on Sammy.
Though Sammy is in a situation that can lead to becoming a fully bilingual individual, there are certain hindrances to becoming productively bilingual—having the ability to not only interpret and understand both languages but to be able to produce both languages verbally. One major hindrance to Sammy becoming productively bilingual is his opportunity to speak English in comparison to his opportunity to hear English. He has had the opportunity to speak and hear Spanish practically since he was born, and this being the case he speaks and understands Spanish with the normal fluency of a six-year-old. However, he has had less opportunity to hear and speak English—particularly less opportunities to speak it. He has heard English spoken practically since he was born, from his parents. Troy , having learned Spanish later in life, after the critical period, is not as attuned to speaking Spanish as Imelda is attuned to speaking English, so a large amount of the time, Troy and Imelda will converse in English. With the opportunity to hear English, Sammy has the ability to understand it to a proficient level. However, at the same time this means that the only people he would have to ability to speak to in English are his parents (with the exception of Judy, an older American lady) considering that no one else he interacts with speaks English. So, he has had no practice at forming sentences and speaking in English.
Another hindrance to becoming productively bilingual is the priority of learning the second language placed on the child by the parents. This is not as much of a problem for Sammy because his parents have decided to try to speak only English around him and constantly encourage him to speak to them in English. However, other situations are different, where the parents have no interest in making sure that their child learns a second language. Many times this may occur in immigrant families in which the native family tongue would not be useful in the contexts of a new country and culture. It has been noted, however, that there is a correlation between the father's desire for their child to learn a new language and the mother's: fathers tend to be more laid back in regards to second language acquisition, not wanting to obligate their child to struggle with a second language. Mothers tend to be more passionate about their child's learning of another language to a proficient level, encouraging the child to take an active role in the learning and speaking of the certain language.
There also seems to be a correlation, in regards to the child's ability to produce the second language proficiently, between learning the second language among family members and in an academic environment. A second language is more readily produced in a family setting, or at least in a setting in which constant interaction is required in the second language. Many receptively bilingual children simply give up and decide that they will learn to speak their second language in school later. In this case, receptively bilingual students of a certain language can more readily pick up on the speaking part of a language than other students that have never had any interaction with the language being learned.
There may be a misconception as to what receptive bilingualism is and how it works in a child's brain. Receptive bilingualism is not a failure to becoming fully bilingual, it is just another step, on the road to becoming fully, productively bilingual, that must be taken by certain children in the aforementioned circumstances.
The cognitive processing that goes on the mind of a child that is receptively bilingual follows the same patterns of parsing sentences and storing the meanings of the words they can understand as someone that can speak the same language fluently. The difference in the cognitive processes of a receptively bilingual individual is that their minds will memorize not the word itself, but solely the meaning associated with that word. So in reality, it's not that they are recognizing the word itself, they recognize the meaning associated with that word—they learn and understand the language in mentalese in reality. Likewise with sentence parsing, though they have the ability to parse these memorized meanings together, they do not necessarily memorize specific wording and syntactic structure used in the sentence, but rather the meanings that can be derived from the sentence structure—once again, mentalese.
As stated above, receptive bilingualism is not a permanent state, but is rather an extra step on the road to fully productive bilingualism. With persistence and the right opportunities to use their knowledge of the understood language, a receptively bilingual individual will become productively bilingual in a short time. It is not the individual's lack of intelligence that causes this condition, but rather the aforementioned circumstances that put constraints on the developing of productively bilingual abilities.
My name is Matthew Charles Revilla. I am 18 years old and am the oldest child in my family. My parents are Ramon and Mary Revilla, and I have a younger sister named Kaitlyn, who is 15 years old.
I was born in Fayetteville, NC, but I was raised in Williamston, NC since we moved there 17 years ago. Williamston is a small, rural, farming town. My back yard is a mixture of forest and cotton fields, and often tobacco as the crops are rotated every few seasons. I graduated with 130 classmates from the largest school in our county...not very large by comparison. All in all I'm a country boy, now living in the city.
I wish I could say that my knowledge of foreign language is extensive, but I will be able to someday. I intend on majoring in Spanish here at Carolina. I studied Spanish for 4 semesters while in high school and it really sparked my inerest in Spanish and foreign language in general. I actually had the chance to go to Mexico this past summer, with a friend of mine, and live in an orphanage for three weeks. We stayed in Colima, Colima, Mexico and I was able to use my Spanish speaking skills to interact with the orphans and to interact with the residents of Colima as we did our daily routine. My friend does not speak any Spanish, so I frequently had to translate for him. My knowledge of English dialects is some. I was raised in the south, interact with "ebonics" stlye speakers on a daily basis, my mother is from New Jersey...and the only other thing I can think of is pidgen(sp) english from Nigeria that was spoken by a native Nigerian once in school.
My abilities with information technologies are fairly up to date. I'm computer-literate, but I wouldn't say I'm a "hacker" or a "computer geek". I frequently have to get my suite mates to help me with troubleshooting orcomputer problems. I would say I'm efficient.
My intrest in expressive arts is a deep one. Although I do not wish to pursue expressive arts as a major or career, I love drama and music and they are two of my hobbies. I have played music for a while now; playing the trombone since middle school, as well as the guitar(classical, acoustic, and electric), mandolin, and a little banjo, and I would say I'm proficient on the bass as well. I enjoyed theater arts with a community players group during high school doing 4 productions during that time.
Having an interest in Spanish already, and considering other languages for study, I am really interested in the study of linguistics. It fascinates me how one human being may or may not be able to communicate thoughts, desires, ideas, and feelings to another human being. I hope that this course broadens my knowledge of what communication and language really is; all the aspects that it includes, and how it is used by all or some of us on this planet.
This past summer I had the chance to spend three weeks in an orphanage in Colima, Colima, Mexico , with a friend of mine. The intentions of this trip were to live and interact with several boys, ages nine to fourteen, and to build Sunday school classrooms for a church in an outlying village. Our contact for this trip, and the head of this orphanage, Troy Guild, is an American. He runs the orphanage with his wife Imelda, a native Mexican woman who grew up in Colima, a few blocks from the orphanage. Troy and Imelda have two boys, named Sammy and Josh, ages six and two respectively. It was my interaction with Sammy that sparked my interest in this curious predicament of receptive bilingualism.
The first step in becoming bilingual in general is to be in a situation which requires that one interact with two distinct languages. In general, this is propitiated through contact with a culture other than your native culture, or being caught in a situation between two cultures. Sammy fits these qualifications on the road to becoming fully bilingual as he is caught between the Mexican culture he is around all the time and the American culture that his father, Troy, represents—not to mention that his mother, though natively of Mexican culture, is familiar with American culture as well, and may thereby also have slight a American influence on Sammy.
My name is Matthew Charles Revilla. I am 18 years old and am the oldest child in my family. My parents are Ramon and Mary Revilla, and I have a younger sister named Kaitlyn, who is 15 years old.