A Victorian School of Languages (VSL) event titled ‘Raising Bilingual Children in Victoria’ will be held online on Thursday, 7 November. Its inspiration is two in depth parent seminars Professor Joseph Lo Bianco has prepared and delivered for Greek speaking families in Melbourne, through the Pharos Alliance, one in November 2023 and the second in June 2024. It is intended to make these language specific seminars a feature of the work of Pharos Alliance.
Pharos is dedicated to supporting the retention of Greek in Victoria and is a very active group of people around the Modern Greek Teachers’ Association of Victoria, building on the Pharos Strategy that Prof Lo Bianco prepared at MGTAV’s request some years ago. One of the points of that strategy is to foster the use of Greek among young children and within families. The two seminars will be repeated specifically for Greek Australian families, and it is intended these should become a regular feature of support for such families.
The VSL seminar was expected to attract 60 or so parents but has topped 930 at last count and will be conducted as an information webinar. This incredible response is testament to the deep interest that families of migrant origin have in language maintenance in the home to prevent intergenerational loss.
Currently, all migrant languages are slipping away as second and third generations tend to use their heritage language less and less, and it retreats from the homes of parents and children to the homes of grandparents interacting with their grandchildren. As the first-generation age and eventually pass on, these precious assets and reminders of heritage fade from active usage. This phenomenon is known as language shift or language loss and while some level of decline is inevitable especially among young people who marry out of the community (something which happens for all groups), there is the additional issue of the domination of English in wider society. But language shift can be can be tackled through what is known as ‘reversing language shift.’
Professor Lo Bianco’s seminar is an introduction for families to the complex process of language loss, but it will also focus on practical strategies that can be easily adopted to stem the rate of loss. He will offer examples of successful action and strategies that different kinds of families can use to encourage language retention. In some families, both parents speak the heritage language, in others one parent does and the other does not, while in others neither parent has an active knowledge of the language. Despite these differences there are specific ways to organise time and input to children to increase the amount of contact they have in the language and to support their learning of it at school or in other settings.
The 900 who have enrolled come from multiple language backgrounds, such as Greek, Hindi, Vietnamese, Italian, Sinhala, Tagalog, Khmer, Russian, and Tamil, some of longstanding migrant background and others are recent arrivals. All face a challenge of how to support the home language so children become bilinguals rather than knowing only English.
Event Details:
- Title: Raising Bilingual Children in Victoria
- Date: Thursday, 7 November
- Time: 5.30pm
- Mode: Online
- Register here
 event titled ‘Raising Bilingual Children in Victoria’ will be held online on Thursday, 7 November.){kind=link}