Speak easy: Children become bilingual at a young age

One day when Sabrina McKee was 4 years old, her father spoke to her in English. It amuses her to tell the story of that day. She especially likes to tell it to parents who are raising their children to be bilingual.

She had been in the kitchen of their Provo home, eating pudding. She had goo around her mouth as she walked into the living room where her father sat, talking to some guests. He spied her and said, "Sabrina, bring me a wet washcloth so I can clean your face."

Sabrina ignored him. She walked through the room with her head held high, like a filthy-faced princess. She walked straight out the door. Suddenly, her father realized that she didn't know he was talking to her because he wasn't speaking Spanish.

Sabrina's father, Trevor McKee, was an expert on how humans learn language. He was a professor of linguistics and child development at Brigham Young University and started the International Language Programs.

He had learned to speak Spanish on an LDS mission to Argentina. After he came home and married and had five children, he wrote his doctoral thesis on his various attempts to teach his babies to speak Spanish.

With his second youngest child, McKee had good success by speaking Spanish to her during daily "fun" times. Stories, songs and games were done in Spanish, and Sabrina's sister picked up the language without effort.

With Sabrina, the youngest, McKee tried something different. From the day she was born, he spoke to her only in Spanish while her mother, Marian, spoke to her only in English. Like her sister, Sabrina also spoke two languages from the time she could speak. Her father gradually modified her instruction until he was speaking Spanish to her every other day. Then he got to the point where they would speak Spanish only during occasional fun projects, as he had done with her older sister.

By the time Sabrina was in junior high, and could take Spanish at school and learn the more formal rules of grammar, the entire McKee family spoke English at home. But by then, Sabrina was fluent in both languages.

Today, Sabrina McKee is the director of the preschool that her father started several years ago before his death. The McKee Spanish Language School in Salt Lake City has about 44 students and is one of a growing number of resources for parents who want to help their children learn a second language at a young age.

Given the fact that Utah has the highest percentage of bilingual parents of any state (due, no doubt, to the number of Utahns who serve LDS missions), it seems fair to assume that there is a general interest in raising children to be bilingual. And yet, compared to other states, Utah has a relatively low number of bilingual public schools.