Conversational input to bilingual children
All children learn from conversational input, including children who have simultaneous or successive acquisition of several languages in childhood. Partners who stimulate speech by asking questions, responding, and expanding a child’s utterances can accelerate learning at all levels of language, in addition to scaffolding the development of speech acts, speech events, social styles and appropriate code-switching. In family bilingualism with a person dichotomy, the frequency of conversation and the instructional style of each parent can affect the rate of acquisition. Bilingualism in minority languages is most successful when parents maintain a language different from the community, so there is a place dichotomy. Children whose second language is acquired in school can become fully bilingual but there is wide variation in acquisition time.
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