Anupma ThakurParenting is always difficult, but most parents aren’t also trying to teach their children to be trilingual.
University of Alberta Professor Martin Guardado is studying families with a unique challenge in their homes: parents wanting their children to become fluent in three different languages.
Guardado, of the faculty of extension, is beginning a new research project with co-researcher Rika Tsushima looking into the experiences of families where each parent wants to pass on a different language to their children, while living in a place where a third language is most commonly spoken.
Their project aims to understand why parents choose to raise their children using both of their heritage languages or the languages they grew up speaking themselves, how parents are teaching their children those languages, and what techniques work best for them. They then want to share that knowledge with other families who are trying to raise their children in a three-language environment.
Guardado hopes the study will help parents in a situation he says offers more challenges than monolingual parenting.
“One of the issues I’ve found in previous similar studies is that parents are not experts in this area; they’re just parents, and they’re learning to be parents,” he said. “We all learn to be parents through parenting, and that’s a much more specific way of parenting.”
“When you are raising your children in your own language and your partner also speaks your same language, there’s no linguistic issues going on, but then when there are several languages involved, they have to figure it out.”
He hopes to find out what the best practices for families in this situation are in order to make it easier for them.
The project is focusing on families in Alberta, but Guardado said he’s been getting contacted by families around the country asking to participate in the study.
“I’ve been saying to them, ‘I’m going to put you on a waiting list, and we’ll see how the study unfolds,’” he said. “Depending on how far we can stretch the money, and what kind of uptake there is here in Alberta, there may be a chance to work with families outside of Alberta.”
He also hopes to look at some families where the parents have two heritage languages but choose to raise their children in English instead.
“My goal is to not only research families who are committed to promoting their heritage and their cultural richness and all of that, but also families who are not interested in that, and to understand why as well,” he said.
Guardado said that part of what has led him to study this is the experience of raising his own children in a similar environment.
“I was doing my masters at the University of British Columbia and I already had small children, so I was starting to grapple with those kinds of challenges myself,” he said. “My kids were small at the time, now they’re all grown up… They’re all trilingual. Very fully trilingual, they all speak French, English, and Spanish.”
“So that’s also kind of some of the motivation as well, seeing how feasible it is,” Guardado said. “It requires a bit of extra effort on the part of parents, and it’s a gift for children as well, something that can bring them all kinds of benefits.”
