Coat racks in a Paris school that promotes the mother tongues of its students - CHAMUSSY / SIPA

Since its creation in 1999 by UNESCO, the International Day of Mother Languages ​​has allowed each year to promote linguistic diversity and multilingual education. While France's bad reputation for mastering foreign languages ​​is well established, associations and schools are campaigning for the sacrosanct French to leave a little room for other pupils' mother tongues.

The Dulala association, founded in 2009, offers resources and workshops to families and education personnel to promote the diversity of languages ​​and cultures among children. Coline Rosdahl, head of educational material at Dulala answered questions from 20 Minutes.

What is the Dulala association?

It is a set of resources and training around language education. We create educational material, tested in the field with children and professionals. We also have a training and research center, in collaboration with researchers who study around plurilingualism, language teaching, neuroscience ... Our role is to create training courses to make all these concepts accessible to stakeholders education. Finally, we have the communication pole. We are trying to create a network of actors concerned with questions of plurilingualism so that they put things in place in favor of languages ​​in their structure or territory.

Concretely what is the point of speaking several languages? Why is it important not to forget your mother tongue?

The mother tongue is the foundation of language, the more solid it is, the easier it will be to learn French but also English or Chinese. It is also essential from the point of view of identity: it links us to our roots and often allows us to keep in touch with a part of the family living in another country. Besides, we often see that children who do not master their mother tongue will take an interest in it and seek to relearn it later. For them it is a quest for identity.

Finally, the mother tongue is linked to emotional security. It is the language that reassures. When you go to a foreign country and you hear someone speak our language, you are immediately reassured. It is a simple psychological process: the mother tongue is the one you hear when you are a baby. It is the one that put us to sleep, makes us play, it is a protective language and whose trace remains throughout life.

In France, around one in four children grow up in a bilingual or plurilingual environment. What do you think of the use of these family languages ​​at school and the care of children?

This figure climbs very quickly in Île de France where one in three or even two children is affected. We are involved a lot in priority education networks and we note that in these REP about 90% of children speak a language other than French.

What is interesting is to see that when the mother tongue is English, Italian, Spanish or German it is much more likely to be taken into account by the school and the teachers who often know or have heard it before. In this case, we will regularly ask a child to count to ten in front of his comrades or to recite the days of the week. But when it comes to languages ​​that school staff do not know, they are not taken into account.

When we don't know, we don't talk about it?

It is not ill will but there is a kind of silence that passes over the languages ​​of a large part of children. The educational staff do not know how to take certain languages ​​into account, which makes children unconsciously integrate the idea that theirs is devalued, that it has no place in school, that it is almost the ashamed to speak it because it differs from the standard even though the French standard is multilingualism.

There is a problem with tools and training: plurilingualism is not part of the initial and continuous training of teachers and this is how children find themselves leaving their language, part of their identity, to the grids of school.

This discomfort of speaking a language other than French, where does it come from?

Fortunately, this does not concern all children, but there is indeed a taboo on certain languages. And then, some families, who have had a difficult migratory journey and want to integrate quickly, tend not to want to transmit their mother tongue.

But the discomfort that arises from mastering certain languages ​​is regrettable: at the level of the brain, whether one is bilingual Arabic / French, English / French or Bambara / French, it is the same thing. It is the same cognitive process that comes into play. The plurilingual environment brings many advantages beyond languages. The children concerned develop skills in logic and mathematics. They also have greater adaptability and creativity and recent studies have shown that growing up with two languages ​​would reduce the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease in adulthood.

Benefits that prove to be true if and only if the child perceives a positive appreciation of his two languages.

What do you advise parents who want to give bilingual education to their children?

To recognize that this is the obstacle course ( laughs ). And don't blame yourself if you don't. Parents are advised to talk about it with the child, whatever their age, to have discussions on bilingualism and to develop an emotional relationship with the language that they want to transmit via songs, stories and small moments. of tenderness. Finally, they can put their child in contact with the family and other children who speak the same language as him. In any case, you have to create a positive image and make you want to.

What tools allow you to encourage multilingualism?

Education staff feel helpless when it comes to multilingual children. Often they make meals of the world, parades with traditional costumes ... But that does not go much further and the danger is that we folklorize the diversity and we assign a foreign identity to the parents. We are developing tools to make research accessible to professionals (videos, posters, etc.). But also games, educational sheets and a digital app that allow children to play on languages ​​and think about them. When awakening to the languages ​​of the little ones, we develop their sociolinguistic (tolerance, openness to others ...) and metalinguistic (observation and analysis of the language) skills. Always by comparing with French, whose specifics they discover. The activities obviously concern all children and not only those in a bilingual situation. These workshops create a climate of trust. The message is: "The languages ​​of immigration, the regional languages, the sign language ... They are all as important as each other. "

For children to feel proud of their language, school and educational structures must also open their doors to languages ​​and diversity and allow them to express themselves around it.

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