Can Bilingual Children have Above-Average Intelligence?
The Teacher Who Advocates Bilingual Parenting and Is Encouraging Reading in New Jersey, United States.
The “Nós, Brasileirinhos” page was created in March of this year by teacher Vivian Valim-Vaz, to talk about bilingualism. Children’s songs, posts with lots of colors, videos, and the puppet Marcos Roberto have been attracting foreign mothers and fathers who have children born in the United States or who moved to the country still in the literacy phase of their children. Vivian is a teacher and has lived with her husband Mateus Vaz and two daughters Ana Laura and Maria Luiza, in New Jersey, where the family has its own fencing business. The girls were born outside Brazil and learned to read and write at school in English, but their mother did not abandon Portuguese at home.
Vivian is an advocate of bilingualism. When she realized that the children of Brazilians who live in the Newark, NJ area were growing up without speaking Portuguese, she decided to do something. The pandemic gave her time to matured the idea, and she created the page with the help of her sister Patrícia, who lives in São Paulo, SP. The area in which the teacher lives with her family is one with the highest density of Brazilians in the United States.
Keeping children fluent in both languages is not an easy task. Still, Vivian explains that bilingualism brings many benefits for children’s development and keeps them articulate in the language that, in most cases, is the only one spoken by grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins , and friends in Brazil.
More than two thousand people follow and interact with the Instagram page. Parents and educators find games that make it easier for children to assimilate the Portuguese language quickly. Visitors also find information about the benefits of bilingualism and demystifying myths, such as what makes people think that children who speak two idioms have language delays.
One of the stars of Nós Brasileirinhos is the character Marcos Roberto, who brings videos with questions and challenges in Portuguese so that mothers and fathers can use and interact with children. Each video has hundreds of likes and dozens of comments left by mothers at their children’s request. Vivian explains that this interaction helps families to introduce our language to their children gently. The teacher says that some of the games are in the final stages of manufacture and will be available for purchase soon to help pay the costs to maintain the page.
But Vivian’s plans are not just on Instagram when it comes to encouraging reading. With the help of her daughters, the teacher decided to install a community library, commonly called a free library, in front of the family business, where any interested child or adult can pick up a book; with the optional return, the teacher explains.
“We will soon install a second library in Clifton..”
…also in New Jersey and a few miles from Lyndhurst, where the first is. In addition to her books, Vivian points out that book donations in Portuguese and English help a lot and are welcome. “I kept books for years because my goal was to encourage reading, especially among children. And in the future, I want to send them to jails where there are Brazilians imprisoned.”, she concludes.
