Science to the people!

As a newbie aspiring linguist and a newbie mom of a (potentially) trilingual child I was told by a pedagogue in a playroom facility that I should not speak to my child in my first language and I should rather try to use my (at that point fairly broken) Norwegian. Apparently, if I used my first language, the child would not acquire the correct mother tongue… I was shocked that a professional with a higher education in the field of early child care could utter such nonsense and give advice which can directly harm the language development of children from multilingual families. I had a lengthy discussion with her, but she insisted on her original statement. I did not listen to this pedagogue because even as only an aspiring linguist I was already familiar with the overwhelming evidence of the importance of natural language input in the early child language development. Not surprisingly, my children managed to acquire two languages from birth without any problems. But what about the other parents hearing such advice? Those who are perhaps less familiar with language acquisition research and are in a more vulnerable position as recent immigrants trying to fit in. Would they do as they are told?

Current research is very clear on the topic of multilingual language acquisition – one parent, one language (or home language, community language) is an approach which in most cases provides the best base for multilingual development of small children. And multilingualism gives much more than just the additional language. Yet the advice given to young parents often goes directly against this research-based fact. I have had many parents contacting me since with questions relating to similar stories, so my experience was not an exception. Why is such an outdated piece of advice still so prominent among professionals?

On 20^th October 2015 Anine Kierulf wrote an Op-Ed in Aftenposten criticizing the fact that researchers are neither requested to nor appreciated for communicating their knowledge to the public. Universities do not demand popular science from their employees. The only thing that counts is publication points from the scientific journals. The “translation from the discipline to the people,” as Kierulf calls, it is lacking, and the few who wish to communicate their research to the public do it more or less as a hobby. The professionals outside of academia rarely have the resources to keep track of the state-of-the-art research in their field published in specialized journals. So if we in the academia do not communicate with the public (lay and professional) how can we expect the public to implement our newest findings?

There are two sides of this story, of course. Some of the responsibility lies in the hands of each and every individual researcher. Are we willing to invest our time and effort into popular science? Are we interested at all in spreading our knowledge beyond the conference rooms and research journals? Are we able to “translate” our research into the language of the masses? But more importantly, are we as academia willing to acknowledge the importance of popular science? Are we prepared to give it the credit it deserves? Or should it stay just a hobby of a few bloggers?

Kierluf points out that one of the three fundamental pillars of higher education is the dissemination of knowledge. If our universities do not demand that their researchers communicate knowledge to the public, they are failing in their mission to disseminate knowledge. And we as researchers are as much part of the problem as of the solution. Science to the people!