I recently spent a ten-day vacation with Susan’s family in Maine. It was my first time seeing the Sius since 2009, so it was a welcome chance to catch up and spend quality time together. Spending all that time with three children under the age of five was a fantastic opportunity for me to prepare for the arrival of my own first child later this summer.
Naturally, I had been tracking the younger Sius’ progress in French since I last saw them, occasionally mailing a short note in French to Sebastian to add a little encouragement. Before arriving, Susan and I discussed the possibility of my speaking with them exclusively in French during my visit. I was curious as to how that might go down, especially given that Sebastian already knew from previous visits that my native language was English, and that I would no doubt be speaking English to their father in front of them.
We did not get off to the start I had envisioned. When I pulled into the Sius’ driveway, Sebastian and Serena were hanging out their upstairs bedroom window. They were the first to speak, in English, describing the antics of a cat that had just left their garden. My kneejerk reaction was to respond in English.
I tried to salvage the situation when I walked into the house, asking Sebastian in French how he was. He wasted no time in drawing a line in the sand: “I don’t understand French—only English!” Susan assured me that his comprehension was excellent, but that he had lately been more resistant to communicating in that language, possibly because many of his classmates did not speak French and he did not think it cool to be different.
He seemed pretty stubborn, so I didn’t insist, but soon I came to understand that his line in the sand was not quite as firm as I had initially believed.
Anyone who reads Susan’s posts knows that her house is overflowing with wonderful children’s books. I adore reading to children and rarely get to do so, so every time one of the three walked or toddled over to the couch with a book—and this happened many times a day—I obliged without hesitation. To my great surprise, but not Susan’s, about half of the selections that Sebastian brought over to the couch were in French, and he wanted to hear them again and again!
I gradually began to get a sense of Sebastian’s true level of understanding, which made me hesitate less and less about addressing him in French for short spans throughout the day. He sometimes pulled his trick of faking incomprehension (generally showing he had understood perfectly), and sometimes indicated that he understood but preferred to respond in English. Sometimes my efforts were even rewarded with a bit of French production.
One day he brought me a French chapter book. Susan said she was surprised, as the book was clearly too advanced for him and he had not spontaneously chosen it before, but suggested that I go ahead. Worried that not knowing what was going on would make him lose interest, I would add the occasional gloss in English. I later learned from Susan that she generally didn’t bother to do that, even if they did not understand everything. This made perfect sense to me at one level, as it matched the philosophy of our shared French immersion schooling background. However, I was finding it surprisingly hard to implement in practice.
Then a new experience changed that for me. On and off, I have been teaching myself basic Spanish. Susan’s Spanish is more advanced than mine, and among her children’s books are several selections in that language. She loaned me an illustrated story collection that she herself had been using to practise, so that I could keep up my own learning.
One day while I was reading it to myself, Serena crawled up on my lap and asked to hear it. I obliged. The nice thing about Spanish pronunciation is that once you figure out the basics, you can read anything out loud accurately, whether you yourself understand it or not. There were plenty of verbs and nouns with which I was not familiar, but the context and the illustrations helped me piece together enough of the story to keep it interesting.
Suddenly I was hearing the story in Spanish much as Sebastian might have been hearing that other story in French. It really clicked that full comprehension was not necessary for a good listening experience. Serena must have been following even less than I was, yet she seemed to take equal pleasure from the flow of the words. In fact, the experience may even have been heightened; because I was not sure exactly what I was saying all the time, I compensated by putting more expression than usual into my reading, making the flow almost musical. As a bonus, we were both learning bits and pieces of the language along the way.
Although I drove to Maine hoping the children might learn from me, I drove back to Montreal ten days later understanding that I had learned from them. (I hear parenting is often like that.) My own son-to-be will pick up French and English easily, as his father will speak to him in the former and I in the latter, but this experience has given me hope that I will be able to pass on some of my limited Dutch as well, despite the Dutch family being far away. Even if he pretends to resist from time to time, now I know for sure he’ll be listening…
