Q&A: Bringing up multilingual children in Belgium

Bilingualism is good for the brain and leads to cognitive advantages among children. But what is the best way of teaching a child more than one language at once? 

Piet van de Craen is a professor of linguistics at the VUB in Brussels. At a recent talk at ISF Waterloo International School, he discussed "the miracle of multi-language learning" and offered some advice.

What do you mean by the miracle of language learning?
Most people think, when they observe their children and how quickly they acquire language, that it must be a miracle. In fact of course this can be studied, and it’s not that miraculous. But we have to analyse the situation and find out what is really going on, and what is really going on can be explained by looking at the brain.

How do we learn languages? What is the best way?
The best way in a family is that one parent should speak one language. So if there are two languages in the family, one parent speaking French and the other speaking Dutch or English, to consistently do that for the first five years, that would lead to bilingualism. We can learn four to five languages properly, provided we take good care of the children and we put them in environments where the languages are meaningful.

Is language-learning effortless for children?
If you make a situation such that a child can adjust to it, then it is indeed the case that a child picks up a language as quickly as we say boo, and that is a very good thing of course. In schools, it’s a different story, schools should adhere to a specific language pedagogical approach in order to obtain the same results.

You talked about the difference between explicit and implicit learning
Implicit learning is learning without being conscious that you are learning. For instance if you are cooking in the French language, you will pick up a lot of French terms and French expressions without being aware of it. Explicit learning is what you do in school, where you go and sit down and people explain to you by way of grammatical rules how a language works. We now know that if you learn something implicitly first and then expicitly, then you get the best results. When you read something, that’s OK, but when you read something, listen to something and do something, that’s even better, because the more stimuli you get, the better results you have in the learning process.

Do we need to learn grammar structures all the time when we learn a language?
The answer is counter-intuitive because most people have learnt a language by learning the grammar. But the answer is absolutely no - we do not need grammatical structures or vocabulary lists to learn a language. Unfortunately schools think differently. But now, with the upcoming of multilingual education, we see that most schools are aware of implicit learning and they are starting to get rid of the lists and the grammar structures. One of the characteristics of implicit learning is that it’s more robust - more is retained by the brain.

Do you agree with Gwendolyn Rutten, the leader of the Flemish liberal party Open VLD, that we should start teaching English in primary schools? She chose English because she said it’s the language of the young people
Today secondary schools in Flanders may adopt French or English [as the second language], primary schools are not yet permitted. If we expand this to primary schools, then I would hope that both languages, French and English are allowed, and in this case, I am absolutely in favour of it. Nevertheless, I would prefer French because it is the language of our neighbours, and we will learn English anyway. If we learn English too fast, we risk not wanting our children to learn French, and that would be a disaster I believe.

What advice would you give to expat parents that come to live in Belgium who do not speak either of the languages and they are deciding whether to send their children to a Flemish, a French-speaking or an international school?
First of all it’s up to the parents. I would first look in my neighbourhood and see if there’s a bilingual school where French and Dutch are taught together, if not then I’d look for a good Belgian school where French or Dutch is taught as well. Of course, if you're aiming for an international career, if you’ll be in Santiago or whatever in a year's time, then I would recommend an international school.