A Feasibility Study Of Bilingual Parenting In A Foreign Language In Bilingual Chinese Families

Bilingual parenting in a foreign language refers to the practice of one or both parents in bilingual families speaking a foreign language (normative to either parent) to their infants in daily family communicative settings, in order that the baby can get familiar with and even acquire the language in a sub-conscious manner.Bilingual parenting in a foreign language takes advantage of the flexibility and sensitivity of the infant's innate language mechanism before the Critical Period (Aitchison 1998: 85) for language acquisition, so it does not impose additional processing load on the children's mental development, and will not negatively influence the process of L1 acquisition due to the powerful potential of children's innate language ability.Bilingual parenting in a foreign language in bilingual Chinese families is possible and should be encouraged. Bilingual parenting does not only equip children with an additional language besides their mother tongue, it also gives children advantages over their monolingual peers in communication, cross-cultural awareness, mental power, character, education opportunities, and even financeSome successful cases of bilingual parenting in a foreign language can be located both in and outside China. Such successful cases give encouragement to bilingual parents to attempt bilingual parenting in a foreign language. Furthermore, they share experiences as to how bilingual parenting can be successfully conducted.The case of Qiaoqiao draws our attention to the potential of a child's innate language acquisition mechanism in the brain as well as the quantity and the quality of the language input that need to be supplied to the child for language acquisition to happen at a level appropriate to their age. The case of Qiaoqiao is also intended to get parents prepared for the most likely result of bilingual parenting practice in China, which is passive or receptive bilingualism in the child when the quantity and quality of the target language input needed is not able to be supplied. However, it shall be...