The Heart of the Matter: All in the Family – A Very Short Memoir of Language Acquisition

Lou Spaventa, US

Lou Spaventa teaches and trains in California, the USA. He is a regular contributor to HLT - The Heart of the Matter series. E-mail:spaventa@cox.net

“Don’t say that. Ajumoni says that.”

An ajumoni is a Korean word which could mean “aunt,” “oldish female commoner”, ”housekeeper,” “baby minder,” or “you” when speaking to a middle-aged female street vendor. The words above were said to me by my preschool daughter upon our return from Korea. I had said something to her in Korean, and she let me know that she wasn’t buying it. Because I was her dad and usually spoke to her in English while we were living in Korea, she demanded that I use English when speaking to her in her new home of Santa Barbara, California. She realized we were now living in the United States where people mostly spoke English. An interesting point about what she said to me is that she used the Korean word ajumoni. We used the same word when speaking English in Korea because there is no exact English equivalent to this portmanteau term. Eventually, ajumoni and most things, people and places Korean have disappeared from my three children’s lives. Childhood memories as well as childhood language seem to wither with the passing years. Yet, when we acquire language, we change a little at least, and that is all to the good. But do we change permanently and is acquisition permanent learning? Do we notice and value the changes that a second or third language brings? I would like to describe how I understand the language acquisition experiences of one of my children in order to answer these questions.

First, my older daughter, Louisa, spent her earliest years in a dormitory of English-speaking volunteer teachers on the campus of Sogang University in Seoul, Korea. All the volunteers spoke Korean to a greater or lesser degree. There were two women who took care of the dormitory and cooked dinners for the volunteers. They were called ajumoni. The older one, the one in charge, was k’un (big) ajumoni and the younger one, the helper, was chagun (small) ajumoni. Louisa spent her infancy in Korea. She was a little over 10 months when we arrived and nearly 28 months when we left. As with the linguist Werner Leopold’s daughter, there were two languages in Louisa’s environment, but instead of English and German, she heard English and Korean. Leopold writes that initially his daughter held to the principal of one form for one meaning; if she had a word in English, she didn’t have it in German. The same held true for Louisa. Her early vocabulary was marked by a mixture of Korean and English words and sounds. She spent most of every teaching day with the two monolingual Korean-speaking women and her afternoons and evenings with us, her mom and dad, hearing English interspersed with Korean words and phrases. When we left Korea, Louisa attended a Korean day care center in Honolulu, Hawaii. She treated her Korean teachers and teacher’s aides as if they were ajumoni, expecting to be picked up and put on their backs as they did their work. She was quickly and firmly disabused of this expectation and soon she stopped using Korean. Later on Louisa spent an academic year in a quadralingual city of the former Yugoslavia, Prishtina. There she only occasionally played with Serbian-speaking children, and learned virtually no foreign language. This was not much different from us, her parents, who in a sea of Turkish, Albanian, Serbian and Romani, were confused at best. We learned very little language, but of that little, what we learned was mostly Serbian or more precisely at the time, Serbo-Croatian. At home, we used only English except for some common words such as fakultet, kako ste, molim vas, dobro, and odlichno.

When we moved to England, Louisa began attending school, and in no time, sounded much like every other English-speaking English child who attended primary school. We have tapes of her referring to her athletic shoes (American – sneakers) as plimsoles. Events and people weren’t very nice. Instead they were ever so nice. Her intonation, phonetic set, voice quality, grammar, and references were distinctly English. This lasted for the first part of two and a half years that we spent in Barbados. She began there as an English-sounding American child in a British colonial school system. By the end of our time there, Louisa sounded more like an American eight year old, which she was.

After a few years back in the Eastern United States, we moved again to Korea. Louisa was put in the untenable situation of studying at a Korean medium middle and high school. Her first class was Japanese language, explained in Korean. Her earlier Korean had long vanished and she was as if a total novice at the language. She was in addition, a near-adolescent girl, interested only in American popular culture. She disliked going out in public because she invariably caused crowds of young girls to flock to her. She had a few English-speaking Korean teenage girl friends, but very few. They did not often visit her. She studied at home with her mother and lived a rather secluded life for a pre-teen. After eight months of this, we decided to send her to an English-language international boarding school in a city about two hours north. She was among the youngest girls at the school. The school provided insulation for her from Korea. Until we left Korea again, a year later, Louisa was a stranger in a strange land, with little linguistic facility. After that experience, Louisa did not leave the States until she got married this June, a period of some twenty years. She went to Italy and did not much like the people there, who seemed to her rude and unfriendly as compared to people in the American south where she has spent most of her adult life (North Carolina and Texas).

What do I make of Louisa’s experience? Certainly, there is reason to believe that the some of the social and psychological factors enumerated by John Schumann over forty years ago explain Louisa’s experience. In her early experience, Korean and English language environments were at times identical; the two cultures were not distinct or judgeable to an infant; there was plenty of intragroup and intergroup contact in her early years. Attitudes of those around her were positive. As a preteen and teenager in Korea for the second time, her attitude towards Korean culture was not positive. Language and culture shock were ever-present outside of the home. She had little motivation to learn Korean because she knew we were not going to stay there for a very long time and she wound up at an English-speaking school with its own social network.

Louisa’s early language acquisition followed a common path for bilingual households – one form and one meaning. That path did not diverge much because she left Korea at the cusp of a rapid increase in and awareness of language, which later blossomed in English. Speech directed to her as an infant was caretaker speech, in both languages. She developed physically and linguistically in accordance with Lenneberg’s milestone markers for children. She adapted quickly and easily to her English-dialect environment, but hardly at all to her multilingual Yugoslavian environment. Comprehensible input was available in the former, but not the latter. When Louisa entered puberty, she was in Korea again, but seemed unable to learn the language at the same rate and in the same way she did as a child. Conditions were different, but perhaps she had ended her critical period for acquisition. Most language acquisition scholars accept the idea of stages in language learning. Stage theory usually claims that once a stage is attained, barring injury to the brain and aphasia, an individual will not regress to a previous stage. However, in Louisa’s case, it is hard for me to see the truth of that unless I accept that she never attained any stage at all in Korean. But she did. At least, the holophrastic speech stage.

When Louisa studied language in American high schools, she sounded like every other teenager who mangles Spanish or French. Today, she does not speak a second language, but does have a great sensitivity and intuition for second language learners. She is also very tolerant and appreciative of differences among people. Despite telling her parents that she would never become a teacher, that is exactly what she has become. She teaches at a community college in Texas. She is a lover of language with an MFA in English. She speaks of getting an MA in TESOL. In her case, second language and second culture have created an emotional place inside her that others who have not had such exposure may not have.

Louisa’s experience was framed by her parents’ propensity for moving around the world. She had no control over where she went as a child. As a child, she was free to learn or not depending upon what was in her environment. As a pre-adolescent and adolescent, social constraints and self-consciousness, the need to identify with a group, created mostly negative contexts for learning. Yet something good did take place and remains with her.
So, perhaps the gift is what language acquisition, in whatever form it comes, does to us, not what it does for us.

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