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A Terrific Way to Get Your Bilingual Kids Talking (and Build a Closer Bond)

A Terrific Way to Get Your Bilingual Kids Talking

Okay, so I’m sitting at dinner, across from my nine-year-old daughter. It’s just me and her because my wife and my son have already eaten. On Mondays, Lulu has a dance class after school, and because I’m the designated driver, we always get home well after 7 p.m.

Too often, I’m afraid, I don’t take full advantage of these opportunities to talk to her, just the two of us having dinner together. The truth is, by the time we get home, I’m just too tired to create much conversation. I’m a morning person, by nature, and because my brain shuts down at sunset, I generally turn into a slow-chewing zombie at the dinner table.

But this day is different. Painfully aware of the wasteful silence hanging in the air, I spontaneously launch into a little speaking game that not only successfully generates a lot of fun discussion, it brings us closer together, too.

Spontaneous solutions

Sometimes, as you would expect, the ideas that I pursue with my kids and my students are the result of deliberate thought: I have a certain challenge and I consciously craft an effective way to address it.

At other times, an idea simply flashes in the moment, and I immediately begin to improvise, carried along by that initial burst of inspiration. After many years as a teacher, I trust that these moments, though they may fail at times, more often than not produce some of my most successful solutions. And, in fact, because these ideas come as a surprise to me, too, I feel a fresh energy that isn’t experienced to the same degree with ideas that have been conceived beforehand. This sort of excitement charges the moment and fuels my interaction with the children present. As a parent and teacher, these are the moments—these lively, living moments—that I relish most of all and that kids often respond to best.

Dogs, Cereal, Fish

So I’m sitting there with Lulu and I abruptly point at her and say: “Dogs.”

For a second she stops chewing and stares at me blankly.

“Dogs,” I repeat. “Go.”

And she says: “I want a dog.”

“What kind of dog?” I say.

“I like little dogs—little fluffy dogs.”

“What would you do with your little fluffy dog?”

And she proceeds to tell me how she would cuddle it, and play with it, and take it for walks.

I remind her that she’d have to help clean up its poop, too.

Then suddenly I recall an incident from my own childhood, when I was leaping over the newspaper where our little black dog did its business. The light was dim and I didn’t see a stray poop that had missed the newspaper. When I landed on the other side—SQUISH!—I hit that poop barefoot.

Lulu laughs at that story.

“Now it’s your turn,” I say. “Give me a topic.”

Lulu glances about the kitchen, her eye falling on a box of cereal.

“Cereal,” she says. “Go.”

First, I complain about the poor selection of cereals in Japan. Then, again, I’m brought right back to my own childhood and I share glowing memories of my favorite cereals when I was a boy, raised in the United States, the superpower of sugary breakfast foods.

Lulu follows by describing her amazement when we visited America last summer and saw a whole wall of cereal boxes—dozens and dozens of different kinds—at the supermarket.

“Okay,” I say, chopsticking another bite of fish, tonight’s main course, into my mouth. “Fish. Go.”

“I want to go fishing,” she says. “But I don’t want to touch any worms.”

“Fish is hard to eat,” I add. “When I was growing up, we didn’t eat much fish. And I’m not good at getting the meat from these bones. Worms would be easier to eat, don’t you think?”

“Topic Talk”

This little game—let’s call it “Topic Talk”—is played just as I’ve described: you simply take turns tossing out topics and talking about them.

The important thing is speed and spontaneity: just choose whatever topics spring to mind and speak freely about these subjects without stopping to think. If you do, I bet you’ll be surprised at how rich your conversations can become, and how, like me, you’ll probably flash on childhood memories, too, which your children will love to hear you recount. (See Strange-But-True Tales: Baby Chicks in the Bathtub for more on the important act of sharing stories from your childhood with your kids.)

After this talk-filled dinner with Lulu, I had a sort of revelation: there’s always something to talk about. Conversation about daily events tends to dry up pretty quickly, but by making use of a tactic like “Topic Talk,” you have available to you, at any time you like, a practically infinite number of things to discuss—and thereby engage your children in active use of the minority language.

Remember, the more you can engage your children in using the target language, the more their language ability will grow, and “Topic Talk” can be a fun and useful tool for accomplishing this essential aim.

P.S. For another fun tactic that can produce a tidal wave of lively, spontaneous speech, see How I Get My Bilingual Son to Talk His Head Off in the Minority Language.

How about you? If “Topic Talk” might work with your kids, give it a try and tell us how it went!
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11 Responses

  1. Wow, great idea!!! Adam, your ‘Topic Talk’ is a great idea how we can learn more about our children and ways they think, how they use words associations. This activity can develop creativity or even show them that creativity can be found anywhere, we don’t need anything but our rich minds.
    Thank you for the inspiration 🙂 !

    1. Vesna, you’re welcome! And you’re right, this activity can give us insight into how our children think, including the things they care about and the things that concern them. So, not only are we engaging the target language, and stretching its ability, we’re gaining an important glimpse into our children’s minds and hearts.

  2. What a great idea, Adam! And this is something I can already try with my almost-4-year-old (unlike some of your other games for which she is still too young). Just today on transport I found I didn’t know what to talk about with her. Very cool, I’ll try it right away next chance I get!

  3. Hello Adam

    This is brilliant! I love topic discussions, we try to do this in the car on the way to nursery in the mornings, and because we live in a rural part of England there is always a story about a birdie flying past or a big tree. Also, I hope you don’t mind, I’d like to share the following ‘topic’ type incident that happened with our little girl.

    The other day, Anna (nearly 2!) and I were reading ‘The Whale and the Snail’. We have the book in English but I always ‘read’ it to her in Greek. Well, what a cool way of telling her a story about a whale who has a big tail and every time the whale moves her tail the water goes ‘SPLASH’ and we move our hands up and down!

    But the most amazing thing was that when Anna saw the book the next day, she spoke a whole sentence in Greek and it was all about the whale and its tail! (It rhymes! Ha!)

    Proud Greek Mummy moment 🙂 🙂 🙂

    1. Anna’s Mummy, I’m glad your bilingual journey is going so well, with such obvious joy. Keep up that happy, positive energy!

      (P.S. We have “The Whale and the Snail,” too. It’s a fun book!)

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Welcome to Bilingual Monkeys!

Adam
I’m Adam Beck, the founder of this blog and The Bilingual Zoo, a lively worldwide forum for parents raising bilingual or multilingual kids. I’m also the author of the popular books Maximize Your Child’s Bilingual Ability and Bilingual Success Stories Around the World. I’ve been an educator and writer in this field for 25 years as well as the parent of two bilingual children, now 19 and 16. I hope my work can help empower the success of your bilingual journey.

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