Expert: Celtica - 12/28/2010

Question
Hi, my son is diagnosed to be in the autism spectrum/ PDD, NOS.  I am trying to decide whether to introduce my son to a second language at home.  He is two years and eight months old and started receiving ABA sessions through early intervention right before his second birthday.  He was also approved for speech therapy at the time, but we did not start him on speech therapy right away because we wanted to first focus on his socialization skills and ability to attend to tasks.  He has made good progress over time.  So five months ago we decided to start him on speech therapies.  The following evaluations were provided by two different speech therapists.  My boy’s total language score was 70 and a percentile of 2 on the PLS-4 at 20 months.  His score was 76 and a percentile of 5 at 28 months.  He is intelligent.  It is just hard to teach him because of what I would like to call “learning disabilities.”

Now my first language is Mandarin.  At home, my husband and I speak English to each other and to our son.  My son’s therapists are very against me introducing him to another language.  They think that since he is already delayed, we should only use English with him.  There was one time one therapist found my son watching a Chinese DVD for children, she was not very pleased.  A year ago when I took my son to Taiwan to visit my family, he was exposed in a Chinese speaking environment for a few weeks.  But back at home, I have only used three or four Chinese words with him (for example, thank you.)  But even that stopped because I felt discouraged by his therapists’ attitude and worried that the second language would impede his progress.

I have heard that the best time to introduce a foreign language is when the child is young while the brain is most plastic and before language and speech patterns are fixed.  I also heard that bilingual children are slower with language acquisition but they really “take off” once they get it.  I really would like my son to speak or understand Chinese, if possible.  At one point of time, he did repeat “thank you” in Chinese after me.  Then I stopped using the word for many months.  Lately, I started asking him to say “thank you” again. To my surprise, I found that his pronunciation was not as good this time around as before, as if he had a better ear when he was younger!!!  I have to say though his pronunciation gradually improved over the last 2-3 weeks with practice.  Anyhow, this finding really alerts me and prompts me to ask for help.  I don’t want to miss the window of opportunity to teach my son Chinese, but I don’t want to further delay him or confuse him.  Secretly, I hope your answer is yes.  It’s okay to teach him Chinese.  Then my question will also be how and when?. Autistic children learn differently.  Is there a recommend method to teach them to be bilingual?   I really would appreciate your advice on this matter.  Cathy, a worried mother

Answer
Hi,

I'm probably not the right person to ask here. I'm not an expert in biligualism, although I consider myself bilingual (German/English). However I acquired my second language (English) only relatively late in life (in my early teens), which is different from your situation.

I just "absorbed" my second language somehow by being immersed in English music, watching English programms on TV, and later by reading English books, and again later by living in an English speaking country. It is said that learning a second language later in life is harder but I think, for me my early teens were early enough.
I am equally fluent in both languages (although my grammar may not always be perfect), and I usually think in the language I'm using.

I don't know if you just could do the same with your kid, just let him listen to Chinese songs, sing along with him, translate them for him so he knows what he's singing and such. Let him watch DVDs for kids in Chinese. A couple I know of have a daughter with Down's Syndrome, and they plan to raise her biligually (they are Americans living in Germany), and what they do is that one parent is speaking English with her and the other exclusively German. I don't know how successful this approach is, as she's only eight months old), but that's what you could do too.

Hope that helps
C.