What's it like growing up with two languages

Bilingualism in the picture - clip 2: "What's it like growing up with two languages"

Bilingualism is a hot topic, one which is increasingly the subject of conversation in many primary schools. To facilitate this conversation, Sharon Unsworth and Gerrit Jan Kootstra of Radboud University (Nijmegen) have created three short animation clips about bilingualism. With these clips, they want to inform primary school pupils (group 5 to group 8) and their teachers about the scientific findings on bilingualism. By means of suggestions for further deepening and processing activities, they want to bring about a constructive dialogue and raise awareness about bilingualism among children and their teachers. In this way, they hope to let them experience how fascinating and omnipresent bilingualism is. The animations can also be used by teachers and health professionals to give information about bilingualism to parents in a way which is easy to understand, readily accessible, and available in bite-sized chunks.

In the second animation we show what it’s like to grow up as a bilingual child. What does it really mean to be bilingual? Do you always know the same words in both languages? And what are the pros and cons of growing up bilingually?

(The assignments are only available in Dutch for the time being)

COLOFON:
The script was written by Sharon Unsworth and Gerrit Jan Kootstra with the help of Kees Oerlemans and Jan van Baren-Nawrocka and voiced by James McQueen. The animations were developed by Kees Oerlemans and drawn by Kees Oerlemans and Leon Lukassen. This project came about through means that were made available through the annual popularization prize of the National Linguistics Research School (LOT).