By Professor Emeritus Joseph Lo Bianco*
Introduction
On Sunday, 8June several Pharos colleagues and I were engaged in a fascinating afternoon with Greek Australian families talking about their children’s Greek language development. The warmth and earnest engagement on the mezzanine floor of the Greek Centre contrasted with the chilly wind and rain we could see outside the windows.
Some of the families were third generation Greek Australians, who spoke only English at home, others, the majority, were linguistically and culturally mixed, and in a small number of families one of the parents was more proficient in Greek than English, and had recently arrived in Australia, and raising children with an English-preferring partner. These demographics reflect contemporary multicultural Australia.
People often say that children will lose their heritage language when one of the parents is from ‘outside’ the community, but it’s not so simple. The research shows that neither endogamy (marrying within a community) nor exogamy (marrying out of a community), automatically leads to either language maintenance or language loss, though it is true that mixed language families face additional challenges in raising their children bilingually.
All the parents engaging enthusiastically with Pharos on the 8th of June were concerned to pass on all the languages their children could potentially speak and valued them equally as the languages of their families, their heritage, and their mixed multicultural community. In our group this involved extended families speaking Chinese, Czech, Indonesian, Italian, and Spanish. This means that these families are aspiring to achieve tri-lingualism: Greek, English and, depending on the family, one of these other languages. Facing all the heritage languages is the socially dominant and ubiquitous English.
As one parent remarked, ‘it’s the way things are now’, and of course she is right. So, how do we tackle the ever more complex task of ‘keeping minority languages alive’ or, more to the point, how to pass on these languages to young Australian children today, when major parts of their identity will be pre-formed and performed for them, at school, among most of their peers, in the media and in the streets, as it were, English is normalised. The same parent also said, with a sigh, we need to adjust to all this and already our homes are ‘pushing only English’.
But she always replies in English!
In this Pharos Tip, I will address one part of this complicated issue, how to handle the above question asked of me by a parent at the seminar.
There is a clear note of frustration in this comment. It is a common lament within the Greek Australian community, but also among parents raising children in other languages. Why do children reply in English when they (often, if not always) fully understand what the parent has said to them in Greek? If they understand the Greek, isn’t this a good sign of some (even latent) language ability? What practical things can we do to encourage them to reply in Greek instead of English?
Recasting
This is the term used in the research on bilingual families to describe what many parents successfully do to foster use of the heritage language. Recasting involves (gently) correcting the child’s English by repeating what they have said in English, but in Greek, in an expanded way. The aim is for you, as a parent or caregiver, or older sibling, to accept the child’s communication, but to expand and recast the communication sentence in Greek. One aim of this is to foster a ‘need to communicate’ (N2C), which is a key principle in home bilingualism.
Recasting is a communication strategy where an adult, the parent or caregiver (but it can also be done by older siblings with much younger children), reformulates a child’s English comment in Greek, and there has been international research on home communication in many parts of the world showing that used consistently recasting is more effective than other strategies.
With recasting you reinforce Greek but do not discourage the communication begun by the child or the child’s response to the parent-initiated communication. Below I give some specific recastingtechniques with Greek examples. These are based on strategies that we can find in the bilingualism literature, that reports research in many parts of the world, including local Greek/English studies (references below).
Recast with expansion
- Child (in English): “I want juice.”
- Parent (in Greek): «Θέλεις χυμό, ε; Ωραία, θα σου βάλω χυμό πορτοκάλι.»
(“You want juice, huh? Alright, I’ll give you orange juice.”)
In the above example, you repeat what the child has said but in Greek, adding new vocabulary, new information, or extending the grammar and structure. Here you would do an immediate translation but expand the scope of the discussion, aiming to validate what your child has said, but to enrich and extend it, so the focus of the child remains on the topic, the juice they are aiming to get rather than the grammar or translation you might want to give them.
Recast as a question in Greek
- Child: “Where is grandma?”
- Parent: «Πού είναι η γιαγιά; Για πες μου στα ελληνικά!»
(“Where is grandma? Tell me in Greek!”)
In this second example, you arereformulating your child’s statement as a Greek question, and in doing so you want to encourage him or her to reply in Greek. If this works, you would shift the conversation towards proceeding in Greek. The main aim here is to prompt a code-switch but not by refusing to hear or accept what your child has said.
Recast with a built-in translation
- Child: “The dog is sleeping.”
- Parent: «Ο σκύλος… τι κάνει; Κοιμάται! Ο σκύλος κοιμάται.»
(“The dog… what’s he doing? Sleeping! The dog is sleeping.”)
The main technique in this recast is that you, as parent, rephrase just part of the sentence in Greek, then slowly you are building towards full Greek repetition. As you can see the embedded translation is also expanded, and this is what researchers call a ‘scaffold’ of meaning. This way to interacting is better with younger learners because it sticks close to what they started to say, includes a bit of meaningful repetition, and a question and then reinforces the original comment.
Recast with play and emphasis
- Child: “Let’s go to the park.”
- Parent: «Πάμε στο πάρκο, πάμε στο πάρκο!» (Sings it like a chant)
(“Let’s go to the park, let’s go to the park!”)
I think the reader can see here that you, as the parent, are injecting a bit of play into the conversation, a routine of course that comes naturally to us with children, but it also involves repetition, very important with child language learning, but the slight exaggeration in tone, and the rhythm of a chant, can make it more appealing for the child to repeat what you have said in Greek. So this is a form of correction, with emphasis, and aims to lower resistance or rebellion from the child who would prefer a ‘yes, let’s go to the park’ answer rather than a language lesson.
Recast as a full Greek model
- Child: “I’m hungry.”
- Parent: «Πεινάς; Να πεις: “Μαμά, πεινάω!”»
(“You’re hungry? You should say: ‘Mum, I’m hungry!'”)
This recast is more like teaching but retains the need to communicate. The whole exchange is reverted into Greek, as you respond in Greek to the English, accepting what was said, but modelling what your child could have said. This isn’t instruction in the direct sense, but it does come closer to a teaching than a communicating model, and in some circumstances is the best thing to do.
Recast as parallel talk
- Child: “Look at the bird!”
- Parent: «Να το πουλάκι! Κοίτα το πουλάκι!»
(“There’s the bird! Look at the bird!”)
With younger children, especially with toddlers, by saying Να το πουλάκι! Κοίτα το πουλάκι you are not correcting at all, or not directly, but instead you are turning what your child has said into a story, a mini narration, and inviting him or her to engage with you on this. This is not only suitable for toddlers however, but also for children who are what we call ‘passive bilinguals’, who understand or ‘hear’ Greek but hardly ever choose to use it.
Recast as a bilingual sandwich
- Child: “I don’t like this.”
- Parent: «Δεν μου αρέσει αυτό. I don’t like this. Δεν μου αρέσει αυτό.»
(“I don’t like this.”)
This method is often likened to a sandwich, a layer of Greek, a slice of English, and another layer of Greek. The aim of using this is to reinforce the Greek meaning, but tie it directly to the English original the child has used, and then recast it into Greek suggesting that it is your preference for them to use the Greek form. This way they know you know the English, that you’ve registered they don’t like whatever it is they are rejecting, but you are still going to prefer Greek.
Recast with cultural information
- Child: “I want to eat now!”
- Parent: «Περίμενε λίγο, όπως λέμε στον μύθο της Αράχνης…»
(“Wait a bit, like in the myth of Arachne…”)
Recasts also offer you the chance to inject a bit of culture in a non-didactic way into conversation. You can attach extensions to communication whose focus remains communicative, but you can inject Greek characters, stories, values, or other information into the language recast. Given some versions of the Arachne myth you might need to be careful here not to spook children. I’m aware of the Greek myth about Erysichthon who is punished by Demeter with insatiable hunger, but that too would need to be cast in a playful way with young children,
Conclusion
Children will often choose to speak the language in which they can express themselves more easily. The aim of the recasts is to nudge them towards speaking Greek, and what and how you use recasts depends on the age of the child. However, they all have in common one key idea: that bilingual families are not classrooms for explicit teaching, and this is crucially important.
While it is fine to have moments or occasions of explicit teaching, the aim of what I am describing is to build learning into regular communication and foster desire in children to see themselves as competent users of Greek.
You can start with a simple request for Greek, you don’t even need to specifically ask for this, you can have a gesture, or a piece of clothing or some other cue that aims to prompt your child to say what they have just said in English in Greek. For toddlers and small children some parents use a hand puppet as a tool in bilingual parenting, to displace corrective Greek onto a puppet. The parent can have conversations with the puppet, or the child can, as an aide, or a confidante, a friend or a spy. These roles can displace what might otherwise be tension around language.
What is key is to not stop the flow of communication, the child has asked a question or made a statement and the main distinction between a recast and a correction is to keep the flow of conversation moving, without interruption, to avoid negative attitudes or hostility and resistance being created. The last thing you want to create is for Greek to be associated with disruption, negative feelings, anger and so on. This means accepting that some or most of the dialogue will be bilingual, with code-switching between English and Greek.
Elizabeth Lanza is Professor Emerita of Linguistics at the University of Oslo in Norway and a key figure in family multilingualism research. She has shown, as have many other scholars, that ‘discourse strategies’, meaning how we use language purposefully, can foster bilingualism in very effective ways, showing how parents can affect two-year-olds’ language choices in the way they interact with them. Belgian linguist Professor Annick De Houwer, Director of the Harmonious Bilingualism Network (HaBilNet) website, has many helpful and practical resources, https://www.habilnet.org
With positive strategies, and by fostering motivation, all supported by a family language plan, you can avoid language rebellion from the kids and produce family bilingualism as the most enriching experience. Please contact us and work with us to continue to support Greek language in Australian homes, school and the wider community.
- *Joseph Lo Bianco is Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education. He is also the President of Pharos Alliance, dedicated to preserving Greek language in Australia.
- *Do you have a question you would like the Pharos Alliance to answer, send your query to editor@foreignlanguage.com.au.
References
- De Houwer, A. (2009). An Introduction to Bilingual Development. Multilingual Matters.
- Kirsch, C. (2012). Ideologies, struggles and contradictions: An account of mothers raising their children bilingually in Luxembourgish and English in Great Britain. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism.
- Lanza, E. (1997). Language Mixing in Infant Bilingualism: A Sociolinguistic Perspective. Oxford University Press.
- Saunders, G. (1988). Bilingual Children: From Birth to Teens. Multilingual Matters.
- Tamis, A. M., and Papastathi, V. (2003). Language Maintenance and Shift in Australia: The Case of Greek. La Trobe University.
- Kirsch, C. (2012). Ideologies, struggles and contradictions: An account of mothers raising their children bilingually in Luxembourgish and English in Great Britain. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism.
