Part 1: 28.5.2020

The essence and purpose of this blog is to document the progress in language acquisition of my daughter, Sophie. Of course, to every parent every aspect of development of their child is fascinating, and often is unable to be appreciated fully because of the pressures and time consuming aspects of everyday life. There has been much research into language acquisition from birth of children, and I will be highlighting some of it in this blog. 

So, why do I want to write a blog about the development of my daughter? Well, that’s a good question. As I say it is obvious all parents are fascinated with their own child’s development. I have often wished I had taken more specific documentation of my 8 year old son Logan’s development. You know how some parents take a picture every month in the same place for twenty years, then put all the pictures together in a film to show a pictorial representation of how the child has grown. I wish I had done that with Logan.

But the pressure of time and the way time is eaten up on a daily basis made this a difficult task to commit to. Those video montages documenting years of development are instantly fascinating to watch. How the body grows and develops, how the hair is short, becomes long, short, long over time. The vagaries of fashion.. So the interest in the development of language from pre birth and beyond holds a similar interest. Especially to a teacher of English as a second language.

OK, so time for a bit of background. Let’s put some flesh on the bones. I went to China in 2007 to teach English. I had been living and working in London for about 10 years when I had the opportunity of accepting redundancy from my job in swinging Camden Town, London. Not my job swinging in Camden Town, you understand. I went travelling for 9 months. To find myself. And, as the old joke goes, I found myself somewhere in between a Thai beach and a homeless couple of nights sleeping in Sydney Railway Station. As so many people do.

The first country I went to on my nine months travel was China. A lot of my friends at the time had said that they thought I must be mad to go to China first. But the language! But the road signs! But the food! My reasoning was that as it was the start of my journey I would be fresh and ready for whatever questions China had to throw at me. This turned out to be good reasoning. 

On arriving in China, at Beijing Airport, it was admittedly a bit of a shock. I remember soon before leaving sitting on a bus in London, and there were a couple of Chinese women nattering away in the seats in front of me. Ooh, I thought to myself, don’t they speak loud. And high. And a bit shouty. Then it dawned on me. I was going there in a couple of weeks for the first few weeks of my nine month expedition. Cripes! Luckily, the experience of being in China was a fascinating and, thankfully, easy endeavour. The people were all smiley, they knew what I was pointing at, and they were very polite. To foreigners at least. 

Which is why I returned there to teach, I guess. 

The reason I want to do a blog about my daughter Sophie’s language acquisition is because she is half English and half Chinese. My wife, Qiaomin, is from a lovely coastal city called Qingdao in China. I met her when I moved to Qingdao gto teach for two years. We have a son, Logan, who is eight, as well as Sophie, who is two years old. The difference between the two children is that for the first six years of his life, Logan lived in the UK. Not on his own, I hasten to add. He was born in the UK as my wife and I had moved back to the UK in 2010.

Logan’s early years of language acquisition was predominantly English. The TV he watched, the majority of people he heard/ spoke to were English. His spoken and written English skills developed quickly and he has a real thirst for reading books. During his baby years, Qiao, my wife, didn’t speak too much to him, in Chinese or English. Her reasons for this are a little unusual. She says that in those times, she didn’t know what to say to him. As I recall, it seemed that she said nice, happy things to him in English, and admonished him in her native Chinese tongue. This makes perfect sense, as when we are most stressed, we revert to a comfort space.

In contrast to Logan, we relocated back to China for a year and a half when Sophie was two months old. With my wife’s parents still alive and in there seventies, we felt that we should give them the opportunity to see the children grow up and get to spend time with them. So, it is true to say that because from the age of two months being located in China, and surrounded by Chinese speakers, that Sophie’s first language is Chinese.

For most of that year and a half, she was cared for during the day by my wife’s mum and dad. I had a busy job in a language school and my wife also worked. This put Sophie into an environment of Chinese sound. She became very close to her laolao and laoye (granny and grandpa). In this environment I was the odd one out. When I returned from work in the evening, Sophie would look at me with a little distrust. Who is this western face that is trying to pick me up and take me into the other room? What are these strange sounds coming out of his mouth? 

So, during this time, her mum, her brother, her grandma and grandpa, all visitors, everyone she saw apart from her dad was Chinese, and spoke Chinese. This was a fascinating time to observe her development. It was also a fascinating time to observe my son’s language development. 

In the UK, Logan had been going to an English pre-school and then primary school. Although he didn’t really speak much Chinese, he understood a lot of what his mother said to him in Chinese. This, I feel, is the great diviner of success or failure at learning a language. Understanding. To be comfortable with the sounds and meanings of the language allow you the confidence and purpose to learn how to speak it. Logan was put into a Chinese primary school, with Chinese teachers, and taught without any regard to his previous education in the UK.

His speed of progress, not only to learn Chinese, but to acclimatise to a foreign and unusual location and situation was quite remarkable. A child’s ability to respond to challenges and overcome them is amazing. But very natural. Very intuitive.