The Ching Chong Method of Children's Language Acquisition

We found a new Hawaiian language picture book--at Target (on O'ahu) of all places. This one has more words than the others we have; some pages just have one long sentence, but others have entire paragraphs. I'm sure I read it very poorly, but I can attempt it at least.

The first time I read it to the kid, I was impressed with her attention span. I mean, she played around a bit, but I was reading both the Hawaiian and the English parts. And again the book is a little on the longer side compared to others (English or Hawaiian) that we read with her, so with those two factors combined, this was a really long book for her!

As I was reading, she started making noises that sounded like approximations of Hawaiian. You know, like how English-speakers say "ching chong" to pretend to speak Chinese? It was like that.

My gut reaction was that this was a bad thing. I mean "ching chonging" is racist right? But then I thought about how babies learn to speak, the babbling, the "bababababa" and "dadadadada." That's also what she's doing right? Just like an infant imitates the sounds around her, my daughter was doing the same thing with this new language that she is hearing more of.

the interview

Like all my other encounters, this one was also fraught with anxiety. I mean, when isn't an interview--especially one done by a panel--anxiety-inducing?

The most interesting thing I came away with, however, was when my husband and I had a chance to ask a question at the end. We're worried about our daughter adjusting to school--not to being away from us (she's been in childcare full-time since she was about a year old), but to a different language environment. At home, we've been trying more and more to use Hawaiian with her--just whatever little vocab we know, like maika'i, a'ole, i'a, honu, ai hea, ku'u hoa. Sometimes we'll substitute words when reading her stories. Sometimes she's cool with it; i'a, he'e, and honu are ones we've used a lot, for example, so she's comfortable with them. Other times, she's like, "No! Don't say 'a'ole'!" So we're a little worried about how she'll react in the school environment.

In response to our question, a parent on the panel said that a lot of gestures are used in the beginning, like miming teeth brushing while giving instructions in Hawaiian. In her response, the lead teacher spoke mostly about children adjusting to being away from their parents, which, like I said, is not our primary concern, but she also said that the parents usually have a harder time adjusting than the children do. I'd heard her say this before and thought she was referring to parents crying in the parking lot because they were leaving their children for the first time, but the more I think about it, the more I think she's also talking about parents' vs. children's challenges adjusting to immersion. I mean, we already know that the learning process will be much slower for us as adults who only attend language class a few times a month while our daughter is at a prime language learning age and immersed in the language 40 hours/week.

The larger realization, however, was that many children around the world attend school in languages different than their home languages, whether they are from non-English speaking families in the U.S. (i.e. immigrants) or children in other parts of the world that are simply more linguistically diverse. This helped me to realize that we shouldn't worry that it's cruel to put our child in an immersion environment, that this is something that many children experience, that it is simply what education is in many situations.