Experiences of Parents on Artificial Bilingualism

Year 2025, Volume: 12 Issue: 2, 1 - 24, 04.01.2026

Ahmet Güven , Cavide Demirci

https://doi.org/10.59409/ojer.1584914

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to reveal the experiences, opinions and perceptions of parents who teach their children English during the mother tongue acquisition period and raise them as bilingual individuals although their mother tongue is not English. This research was carried out in a strong qualitative method, phenomenology design. The study group was determined by criterion sampling method. Semi-structured eight interviews were done with 8 parents who participated in the research. Content analysis method is used to organize and elicit meaning from the collected data. During the interviews, participants mentioned not only positive experiences but also negative experiences. The general perception of participants about bilingualism is positive. On the other hand, participants stated some setbacks and downsides in the process of raising bilingual kids. One participant stated that the downsides she experienced made her suspicious about bilingualism and her practice. Some parents stated that people around them reacted negatively to their practices on raising their kids as bilinguals. Also, they mentioned the troubles they experienced because of communicating with their kids in English which is not their mother tongue. All but one of the families follow a similar method to acquire two languages to their children simultaneously. One family applies “one parent, one language” method and the other families follow a method in which one parent uses one language to communicate with the child, and the other parent uses both languages. Considering parents' perceptions of their children's language skills, some think that their children experienced setbacks in language development.

Keywords

English teaching , teaching English to young children , bilingualism , artificial bilingualism

References

• Baker, C., & Jones, S. P. (Eds.). (1998). Encyclopedia of bilingualism and bilingual education. Multilingual Matters.
• Baker, C. (2007). A parents’ and teachers’ guide to bilingualism (3. ed.). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
• Bialystok, E., & Martin, M. M. (2004). Attention and inhibition in bilingual children: Evidence from the dimensional change card sort task. Developmental Science, 7(3), 325-339.
• Bialystok, E. (2009). Bilingualism: the good, the bad, and the indifferent. Bilingualism, 12(1), 3.
• Bloomfield, L. (1935). Language. London: Allen ve Unwin.
• Chin, B. C., & Wigglesworth, G. (2007). Bilingualism: An advanced resource book. London: Routledge.
• Ching, G. (2019). Teaching english a practical guide for language teachers. 1st ed. Toronto: Canadian Scholars.
• Clark, E. V. (2017). Morphology in language acquisition. The handbook of morphology, 374-389.
• De Groot, A. M. (2011). Bilingual cognition: an introduction. Psychology Press.
• De Houwer, A. (2007). Parental language input patterns and children's bilingual use. Applied psycholinguistics, 28(3), 411-424.
• Dong, Y., & Li, P. (2015). The cognitive science of bilingualism. Language and Linguistics Compass, 9(1), 1-13.
• Genesee, F. (1989). Early bilingual development: One language or two? Journal of Child Language, 16(1), 161-179.
• Graham, V. T. (1926). The intelligence of italian and jewish children in the habit clinics of the massachusetts division of mental hygiene. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 20(4), 371.
• Grosjean, F. (2010). Bilingual. Harvard University Press.
• Grosjean, F. (2013). Bilingualism: A Short Introduction. In Grosjean, F., Li, P. ve Bialystok, E. The Psycholinguistics of Bilingualism. Hoboken: Wiley-Blachwell/John Wiley & Sons.
• Howell, P., Davis, S., & Williams, R. (2009). The effects of bilingualism on stuttering during late childhood. Archives of Disease in Childhood, 94(1), 42-46.
• Husserl, E., & Tepe, H. (1997). Fenomenoloji üzerine beş ders. Ankara: Bilim ve Sanat.
• Hutchison, S. M. (2010). Executive function and bilingualism: what are the effects of language proficiency? (Master’s thesis) University of Victoria, Victoria.
• Jones, W. R., & Stewart, W. A. C. (1951). Bilingualism and verbal intelligence. British Journal of Statistical Psychology, 4(1), 3-8.
• Karhu, A. M. (2018). Bilingual parents: experiences of being bilingual and aspirations and plans for their children’s language development (Master’s Thesis) University of Oulu, Oulu.
• Keresztes, R. (2007). Against the odds: the challenges of bilingualism in a monolingual environment (Master’s Thesis) Linköping University, Linköping.
• Kielhöfer, B., Jonekeit, S., & Henrion, J. M. (1983). Zweisprachige kindererziehung. Stauffenburg Verlag.
• Krashen, S. D. (1981). Second language acquisition and second language learning. University of Southern California.
• Kuhl, P. K. (2004). Early language acquisition: cracking the speech code. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 5(11), 831-843.
• Kuhl, P. K. (2010). Brain mechanisms in early language acquisition. Neuron, 67(5), 713-727.
• Lenneberg, E. H. (1967). The biological foundations of language. Hospital Practice, 2(12), 59-67.
• Lightbown, P. M., & Spada, N. (2017). How languages are learned 4th edition-Oxford handbooks for language teachers. Oxford University Press.
• Macnamara, J. (1967). The bilingual's linguistic performance a psychological overview. Journal of Social Issues, 23(2), 58-77.
• Marian, V., & Shook, A. (2012, September). The cognitive benefits of being bilingual. In Cerebrum: the Dana Forum on brain science (Vol. 2012). Dana Foundation.
• Maxwell, J. A. (2018). Nitel araştırma tasarımı: etkileşimli bir yaklaşım (Çev. Ed. Çevikbaş, M.). Ankara: Nobel.
• Mead, M. (1927). Group intelligence tests and linguistic disability among Italian children. School and Society, 25, 465-468.
• Mechelli, A., Crinion, J. T., Noppeney, U., O'Doherty, J., Ashburner, J., Frackowiak, R. S., ve Price, C. J. (2004). Structural plasticity in the bilingual brain. Nature, 431(7010), 757-757.
• Mennen, I. (2011). Speech production in simultaneous and sequential bilinguals. Multilingual Aspects of Fluency Disorders, 5, 24.
• Merriam, S. B. (2013). Nitel arastirma: desen ve uygulama icin bir rehber (Çev. Ed. Turan, S.). Ankara: Nobel Yayın Dağıtım.
• Ostadghafour, S. (2018). Sentence comprehension in monolingual and bilingual children (Master’s Thesis) York University, Toronto.
• Peal, E., & Lambert, W. E. (1962). The relation of bilingualism to intelligence. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 76(27), 1.
• Pohl, J. (1965). Bilinguismes. Revue Romaine de Linguistuque, 10, 343-349
• Saer, D. J. (1923). The effect of bilingualism on intelligence. British Journal of Psychology: General Section, 14, 25-38.
• Saunders, G. (1990). Artificial bilingualism: must it fail? In Learning, keeping and using language: selected papers from the eighth world congress of applied linguistics, Sydney, 16 21 August 1987 (Vol. 1, p. 115). John Benjamins Publishing.
• Schaffai, S. (2014). The bilingual cost in speech production: studies of phonological and articulatory processes (Doctoral dissertation, Universitat Pompeu Fabra).
• Strauss, A., & Corbin, J. (1990). Basics of qualitative research. Sage Publications.
• Van Manen, M. (2016). Researching lived experience: human science for an action sensitive pedagogy. Routledge.
• Wei, L. (Ed.). (2007). The bilingualism reader. Routledge.
• Yıldırım, A. ve Şimşek, H. (2018). Sosyal bilimlerde nitel araştırma yöntemleri. Ankara: Seçkin Yayıncılık.