THE IMPACT OF ONLINE LEARNING ON HOME LANGUAGES Sophie Barré Head of French, Garden International School Kuala Lumpur
I am a language
teacher, a language learner and the mother of trilingual children.
Saying that last part I feel obligated to add a disclaimer and say pre-covid they were thriving trilingual, now they are just aspiring trilingual, or maybe I am the one who is still hoping that they will be trilingual. Everything is a bit blurry these days; on the language front it is no exception. We live in Malaysia and we have started our 3rd year of academic learning online, as in other countries in Asia where schooling in general has been very disrupted. Online education has meant for many parents getting involved in the academic input of their children, to their dismay. Even as educators and experts in our field, we find
teaching our own children a kind of torture, and a test to our patience and pedagogical skills. It changes the family dynamic, it strains relationships, it means more conflicts, less lines between home and school, less breathing space for parents and children. Definitely, no space for children to express their personality outside of a very timetabled and controlled environment that has become home. Everybody has experienced this at different levels in their own home, but one thing I was not expecting to experience in my house was the phasing out of our home languages. I speak French with my children, my husband speaks Arabic with them, and they are schooled in English. That was our paradigm that was supposed to stay that way. We had very clear lines of which language was used in our house. Home Learning has shattered these lines and distinctions, making English surreptitiously
and unexpectedly the main language in our house. I found myself looking back and thinking how did that happen? What happened is we started to do home-schooling, or should I say we started supporting our children with online learning. To help our children with their schoolwork, we started explaining things to them in English, because doing it in our home language may have confused them. But mainly it also meant we had to make more effort and spend more time explaining concepts in our home language before making sure they understood it in English, and that took a lot of time. Time with two parents working online is something we did not have a great deal of to start with. So little by little, they started speaking in English more and more outside of learning time because the words came much more easily, and we replied in English because we were too tired to even notice or make the switch between languages. We did not notice how bad it all got, 22
