LINES IN THE SAND, by guest blogger Francie Gow

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… 

The No-Television Experiment, Day 13

The children have four good-quality recorders in their toy box, and for at least a year I've been meaning to start teaching Sebastian and Serena how to play, but since I haven't played myself since my ninth-grade year in Istanbul, I've kept putting it off.  Well, this Monday, after several hours of playing with some cardboard boxes in the back yard with Serena, Sebastian came into the living room looking for something to do.  This is the time of day when I used to say he could put on a DVD--when he seemed to have exhausted his creativity for the day and we were all a bit tired an impatient.  Since there was no TV this time (he hasn't even asked this week), he went over to the basket of books that we keep in a corner of the living-room floor and picked out a recorder book that I'd picked up at a garage sale or a thrift store on some long-forgotten weekend, brought it over to me, and said happily, "Let's play recorder!"

I've been wanting to start him on an instrument since he turned three last summer.  He's loved violin music since he was a baby, and just after this third birthday my friend Francie gave him a few lessons during a week-long visit (and again when we visited her for her wedding celebration in Newfoundland), which he adored, so last fall I embarked on a several-month-long journey to find him a teacher.  

I finally found someone who was willing to teach violin to such a young child, but Sebastian didn't respond to her like he did to Francie.  He found her intimidating and refused to try anything she suggested, hiding behind my legs and making funny faces until we decided to call it off until he was older (or, I thought to myself, until I could find him a teacher with whom he'd feel more comfortable).  I grew up playing piano and would like to teach him to play piano, too, but I don't currently have one in the house.  For now, I am happy that, because of the No-Television Experiment, we have finally started learning to play the recorder together.  

I was pretty good at the recorder as a child, by the admittedly low standards of school recorder-playing.  In my school in Istanbul, all we did in music class all year long was play the flûte à bec, and the teacher (who once got hit in the forehead by a flying piece of recorder belonging to one of my classmates) used to have me demonstrate every new piece to the class before they attempted to play in a cacophony of squeaks and squeals (I guess that says something for the quality of Canadian music education).  Okay, the competition was basically nil, but, still, I was a decent recorder player and enjoyed playing.

I found out only much later that the recorder is not just a toy instrument invented for the purpose of helping children to make lots of noise at school but a serious instrument with a long history and the capability to produce beautiful music (see Jim Phypers's recorder website for a brief historical overview and some nice recordings of recorder music to start out with).  It remains an excellent first instrument for a child because the basics are uncomplicated and because it's practically indestructible and very inexpensive to buy or replace; a high-quality instrument can be had online for $20 or less. 

Our first three days of "lessons" (all initiated by Sebastian) have been a lot of fun.  Sebastian has learned the proper method for "tongueing" and knows how to play the notes "B" and "A."  The only problem is that his hands are a bit small to cover all the holes simultaneously; perhaps a sopranino recorder (the smallest type) would work better for him until he gets a little bigger, but if I try that I will have to find a sopranino method since the notes are not the same as on a regular (soprano) recorder.  

There are six basic types of recorder: in addition to the sopranino (or descant) and soprano, which are the smallest and highest-pitched, there exist alto (or treble), tenor, bass, and contra-bass varieties.  Others, including the 8-to-9-foot-tall sub-contrabass, are less commonly played (not to mention expensive).  

I have, of course, already taught my children to say "flûte à bec."  Now that we've gotten over our first recorder-playing hurdle--getting started--I figure I might as well make this another opportunity to learn some French, which shouldn't be too hard since I had that entire year of French scholastic recorder-playing in Istanbul.  I've been trying to refresh my memory as to the relevant vocabulary, and I can already see that learning to play the recorder in French will be rich in new vocabulary for the kids.  

First there are the names of the musical notes, which do not go by the letters of the alphabet (C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C) as in English but use the solfège system (Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Si, Do).  There will be the names of the individual fingers and of the note and rest lengths (my favourite is the quarter rest, called the "soupir," or sigh, in French).  And of course there will be lots of verbs, such as "hold," "play," "cover," "uncover," "move," "wait," "start," "repeat," and so on, most of which will be useful in other everyday conversations, too.  I am especially anxious to add more verbs to the kids' French vocabulary, since they currently know mostly nouns and set phrases.

I have found some helpful websites by searching on Google.fr (France) and Google.ca (Canada).  My favourite so far is a site called: Flûtalors from Quebec, which is nicely organized with audio demonstrations and traditional French children's songs to play with each new note that is introduced.  If anyone finds something even better (in French or another language), please feel free to post the link(s) here!

There are also a large number of recorder-method books available in French for those who would like to combine their children's musical education with a French-immersion experience (the amount of text is probably small enough to be manageable even to parents who aren't fluent speakers/readers of the language).  These vary from compilations of the same old pieces that you played on the recorder in elementary school to international compilations; methods based on African, Middle Eastern, or Celtic folk tunes; and rock and jazz methods.  Actually, I think recorder methods are one area in which there are a greater variety of books available in French than in English, although we English speakers do have Harry Potter for Recorder. 

I'm off to play some more flûte à bec.  More no-television and recorder-playing updates coming soon!

A Year at the Center of the World

My parents gave me many wonderful gifts, but among the top few--right up there with breastfeeding me, having a happy marriage, trusting me to make my own decisions, and putting me through the Canadian French immersion system--is the trip we took to Turkey as a family the year I turned fourteen.

We lived on the European side of Istanbul, not far from Taksim Square, and my younger sisters and I attended Lycee Pierre Loti, a school created to educate French children left behind in Turkey during the Second World War.  It was an ancient building, having been, before the Lycee was founded, a French Capuchin seminary in the business of training priests for the Greek, Syrian, Chaldean, and Armenian rites of the Catholic church.  My mother had had to fight to get us in, because, since we were mere Canadians--and Anglophone Canadians at that--our French surely wouldn't be good enough.  We were slightly worried they might be right when the application forms mysteriously demanded, "Do you sleep with your mouth open?"  We got in and I did have trouble--for about a week, after which I picked up the accent and eventually made it onto the honor roll.

That school did great things for my French and also seriously improved my German, which up to that point had been picked up from a year of Saturday school, another year of night classes, and a few months of tutoring.  My classmates took English as their third language (fourth for the 50% or so of the students who were Turkish), and a few spoke it well.  During English class I was allowed to sit and read my own English books; I had a reading list for ninth-grade English from my school at home and had added some titles related to our travels (we were reading The Iliad as a family, for instance).

Since we went to school in French, we didn't learn to speak Turkish fluently during our year in Istanbul. We did learn enough vocabulary and basic phrases to get along in Turkish at the markets, the banks, and the stores.  Some things we learned from the Foreign Service Institute Turkish Basic Course that my father had bought (I was mainly the one who sat with the heavy paperback book and listened to the tapes, and then I drilled my parents and sisters until they got the pronunciation right--I'd always had a good ear for languages), but most we picked up from reading the signs in the stores and bazaars and listening to the shopkeepers and vendors and the other customers.

I do regret that we didn't study Turkish more intensively and more formally when we had the chance to use it every day, but even the small amount that I picked up was valuable: for one thing, it was my second significant exposure to a non-Indo-European language and therefore expanded my understanding of how human languages work, which certainly made it easier for me to pick up other languages later.

The cultural education that I got during my year abroad was far more interesting and more important than  anything that I could have learned in school.  Seeing how people live in another country--but especially a country as different from Canada and the United States as Turkey--changed my life profoundly.  I can't possibly explain how in a short blog post, but some of the little things that stick in my mind, even eighteen years later, are the old men strolling along Istiklal Caddesi, the famous shopping street, with their friends, holding hands; the running water in our apartment being shut off twelve hours a day (we had to light the hot-water boiler with a match), my piano teacher's enormous Turkish rug and the servant who brought us tea before the lesson; the stray cats and dogs that haunted the streets and courtyards at night, and the people who fed them and cared for them; the way the poorest people smiled a lot more than the richer ones; the briefcases full of cash left casually on the sidewalk outside shops while their owners bought meat and bread on the way home from work; the stares that I elicited from walking around bare-headed in some of the provincial towns; the call to prayer broadcast from the minarets five times a day; the trucks painted in brilliant floral designs; the fruits and vegetables in the markets arranged with exquisite precision.  And of course our visits to Troy and Pergamon and Gallipoli and Hattusha were a history course unlike any other.

I learned that there no one culture has a monopoly on beauty, happiness, or knowledge and that a fresh perspective can improve any situation.  I learned that the way my Canadian classmates dressed was not the only way to dress, that their interests and prejudices should not limit my interests and understanding.  I learned that I should not judge other countries and cultures by what I heard on the news.  And I learned that the way I was perceived by the people I'd grown up with was not the only way I could see myself.

I hope that before my children grow up and leave home, I will be able to give them the gift of a year (or two or three) abroad and that it will have as positive an effect on their lives as it did on mine.

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This post is part of the Blogging Carnival on Bilingualism.  Learn more about the Carnival and how you can participate by visiting the Carnival founder's blog, Bilingual for Fun.  Check out the most recent Carnival posts by visiting the host blog, Bringing Up Baby Bilingual.

A TALE OF TWO KINDERGARTENS, by guest blogger Francie Gow

About a month after I began French-immersion Kindergarten, my Dutch grandmother died, and my mother brought me and my sister Emily to the Netherlands to spend two months with Opa. While we were there, the grownups decided to send me for part of that time (two or three weeks, perhaps) to the local school. The teacher graciously accepted me as a guest in her classroom and asked the other students to make me feel welcome. 

I have no memory whatsoever of my first month in the French Kindergarten. I presume that we were all taught the phrase “Puis-je aller aux toilettes?” (May I go to the bathroom?) on day one. We were all Anglophones, so although the teacher never used any English with us, I know that she would have used very simple sentences, lots of repetition, and plenty of contextual clues to help us along.

I do, however, have a vivid first-person recollection of parts of my Dutch experience, perhaps because it was so overwhelming. I remember an enormous sense of frustration at not understanding what was going on around me. The adults spoke to me in English and to each other in Dutch. The teacher spoke to the class as a whole in a Dutch that I could not hope to follow, as of course she was aiming it at native speakers, and then she would give me a brief explanation in English so that I could join in the activity. My classmates spoke to each other in Dutch, and to me in slower Dutch accompanied by gestures.

Had I stayed longer, I would have eventually cracked the code and become quite fluent, progressing much faster than I later did in French. I did acquire a large stock of vocabulary words over those two months, mostly related to food, a topic that came up several times a day. However, with the exception of “Ik ben Francie” (I am Francie), which was printed on one of my t-shirts, I never learned to produce a single sentence.

Because the adults were continuing to speak to me in English, no doubt at my insistence and because it was easier, I had no way to pick up verbs, an essential building block for meaningful communication. Therefore, even as my vocabulary grew, I never felt any closer to being able to speak when the time came to return home.

Of course, we all knew that the trip was temporary, so while the grownups no doubt hoped that I would benefit from the exposure to an extent, learning the language was not the primary purpose of my time there. It may have been different if we knew that I would be staying. I imagine that simple story books, read to me repeatedly by patient adults, would have granted me the entry into sentences that I so badly needed to be able to burst through the wall of incomprehension. A strong desire to make friends with my non-English-speaking classmates would have pushed me from there.

While I don’t remember my first days of Kindergarten, I do remember the first days of my return to the French-language classroom in December. In theory, French should have been even less comprehensible to me than Dutch, as there had been no previous exposure to French in my home. However, my only memories of the rest of Kindergarten relate to my classmates and the things we did. I remember learning that I could use the black crayon to make grey by pressing lightly instead of hard. I remember tossing beanbags through holes in a wooden board with a clown painted on it. I remember counting to one hundred. I remember building structures with blocks and pasting macaroni to construction paper. I remember singing songs. I do not remember the fact that I was doing all of this in French.

I recently asked my mother what she remembered from my Kindergarten experience. She told me that a friend of hers had once asked me whether I had learned any French at school that day and was surprised when I replied, “No.” But wasn’t I in French immersion? I looked at her as though she had just said something nonsensical. “We don’t learn French at school,” I explained, “we just speak it.”   

FRENCH IMMERSION AND BEYOND, by guest blogger Francie Gow

I first met Susan in 1982 when our parents enrolled us in the first French immersion class to be offered at our primary school in St. John’s, Newfoundland. We quickly became inseparable, no doubt because of our shared love of language and wild imaginations, and we remained close even after her family moved away in high school. Like Susan, I took to French immersion like a duck to water, despite the fact that our parents did not speak French.

My Dutch-born mother lives primarily in English, her second language, and she came away from her psychology degree with a firm belief in the benefits of second-language learning for children’s brain development.

My father was brought up in Ontario speaking only English, but a commitment to pan‑Canadian bilingualism was really taking off in those latter years of Pierre Trudeau’s leadership, and Dad wanted to make sure that I had the opportunities that came with speaking both of the country’s official languages.

My mother had intended to teach me Dutch at home, and, though I do not remember this, I even had a Dutch-speaking nanny for a while. However, when I was 20 months old, my sister Emily was born with severe cerebral palsy, and my parents’ priorities naturally turned to her rehabilitation.

After graduating from high school, I built on my French in a variety of ways, culminating in a graduate degree in French-to-English translation. While studying in Ottawa, I met the love of my life, a French-speaking Ontarian who speaks near-perfect English and very good Spanish, and who also happens to be the son of two marvellous English-to-French translators.

I am now a legal translator in Montreal, and French is the language I speak most often both at home and at work. I recently realized that my parents’ early decision to facilitate my learning of French has defined almost every aspect of my adult life.

In future posts, I will go into more detail about my experience in learning French, which Susan has labelled a commonly taught language. I also have some experience learning a less-commonly taught language, as I decided to make a real effort to learn Dutch in my early 20’s. I am by no means fluent, but I can now communicate with members of my extended family who do not speak English, and I feel much more connected to my family history. 

Of course, this blog is called LinguistKids. Although I never learned to produce any Dutch as a child, I will explore how some of my early exposure to the language supported my later efforts to acquire it.

Thank you for inviting me to contribute, Susan, and I look forward to chatting with you all in this space!  

Guest Blogger Francie Gow to Write a Series of Posts for LinguistKids

I am happy to announce that my childhood friend Francie Gow will be writing a series of posts for LinguistKids this summer.  Francie went through the French immersion program in Newfoundland and now works as a legal translator in Canada.  She is a brilliant and multi-talented linguist and writer who has travelled widely and used her language skills in a variety of personal and professional contexts.  I am honored to have Francie share her insights on the LinguistKids blog!

A Short Linguistic Memoir

I took the city bus to school when I was growing up in Newfoundland.  We lived in a townhouse on Craigmillar Avenue, with its back facing the South Side Hills, and the school that I attended through the sixth grade was across town, up a steep hill from Downtown and St. John's Harbour.  My parents didn't own a car when I started kindergarten at Bishop Feild Elementary, so my mother and I were on the Route 1 Metrobus when I started feeling a bit nervous about going to school all in French.


I had spoken only English up to that point.  My paternal grandmother was a New Orleans French speaker, a "Creole," as she called herself, but she had not taught my father to speak.  My mother was a "bayman"--that is, it had been enough of a challenge for her, when she'd first arrived in St. John's as a student at Memorial University, to speak English that was standard enough to avoid embarrassment.  Growing up in the isolated fishing community of Nipper's Harbour, on the Baie Verte Peninsula, she had spoken an English reminiscent of the West Country dialects, with a good dose of Irish English thrown in for good measure.


My four-year-old fears soon dissolved when I met my kindergarten teacher, Janette Planchat, and started my first day in the Canadian French Immersion program.  I was soon speaking French, if not like a native, at least quite fluently.  We had all our classes (except gym and music) in French up until Grade 3, when an hour-a-day English class was introduced, and we gradually got more and more English until we were down to two classes (French and social studies) in French by the tenth grade.  I wish that the French Immersion curriculum had been even more rigorous than it was and that it had remained nearly all French through the high-school years, but despite its limitations, the program was one of the greatest gifts my parents ever gave me.


My parents also encouraged my linguistic abilities by teaching me phonics before I went to kindergarten, enrolling me in a Chinese Saturday school for several years during elementary school, and sending me to a German Saturday school in the seventh grade and a German night class (for adults) in the eighth grade.  They let me listen to their Italian records and attend after-school Spanish and German tutoring for a while, too.  Indirectly, too, they taught me to value cultures and languages by sponsoring a family from Vietnam who had immigrated to Canada and making friends from a variety of different cultures.  When I was a teenager, my father took the whole family to Turkey for a year, and two years later my mother went back to graduate school and became an ESL teacher at the college level.  At the same time, I transferred to an American high school, where I studied Latin and joined the International Students Club.


I can still speak French, although I'm rusty after more than a decade and a half of living in the United States, and as a bonus, I also find it much easier than most people do to learn other languages as an adult.  I taught myself Spanish and Italian (at the intermediate level) as a college student, and I have also learned  some Korean.  I am now focusing on mastering Chinese and know bits and pieces of various other languages, including Turkish, Greek, and Georgian.


When I started college at the University of Chicago, my father went through the course catalog with me, and I learned, for the first time, that there was a field of study called "Linguistics."  I took my first linguistics course--Languages of Europe--that fall, with Kostas Kazazis, who was a phenomenal teacher and a wonderful person.  Since then I have taken advanced coursework in linguistics at several different universities.  I am particularly interested in historical linguistics, typology, and language universals.


I have a Master's degree in Nonfiction Writing from the University of Iowa and am currently earning a second Master's degree, in Library and Information Science, from Drexel University and running World's Edge Books & Publishing and its new imprint LinguistKids.  I plan to return to graduate school for my PhD in linguistics once I am able to read academic articles in Chinese.


I am also trying to pass on my love of languages and linguistics to my children.  I speak to them in French and Chinese as often as I can, read them books in those languages, take them to Saturday and evening classes, and use most of their TV-watching time to play French- and Chinese-language DVDs.


I would love to hear about other people's experiences, and I welcome suggestions for future blog posts.  If you are an author interested in submitting materials to World's Edge Books and Publishing / LinguistKids or a translator or illustrator interested in working on one of our projects, please email your cover letter and resume to worldsedgepublishing@gmail.com.