Parents should not assume that young children’s natural language abilities will lead to true grown-up language skills without a

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问题    Parents should not assume that young children’s natural language abilities will lead to true grown-up language skills without a good deal of effort. Erika Hoff, a developmental psychologist who is a professor at Florida Atlantic University and the lead author of a 2015 review article on bilingual development, said: "For everybody trying to raise a bilingual child, whatever your background and reason, it’s very important to realize that acquiring a language requires massive exposure to that language."
   Pediatricians routinely advise parents to talk as much as possible to their young children, to read to them and sing to them. Part of the point is to increase their language exposure, a major concern even for children growing up with only one language. And in order to foster language development, the exposure has to be person-to-person; screen time doesn’t count for learning language in young children—even one language—though kids can learn content and vocabulary from educational screen time later on. "For bilingual development, the child will need exposure to both languages," Dr. Hoff said, "and that’s really difficult in a monolingual environment, which is what the U.S. is."
   "A child who is learning two languages will have a smaller vocabulary in each than a child who is only learning one; there are only so many hours in the day, and you’re either hearing English or Spanish," Dr. Hoff said. The children will be fine, though, she said. They may mix the languages, but that doesn’t indicate confusion. "Adult bilinguals mix their languages all the time; it’s a sign of language ability," she said.
   Dr. Hoff works in South Florida, where there is a very educated and affluent population raising children in Spanish and English. "The children start out as baby bilinguals, but the older they get, the more English overtakes Spanish," she said. "The ones who are successful bilinguals as adults are still much better in English than they are in Spanish—they didn ’t go to school in Spanish, they don’t read books in Spanish, and when you actually measure the size of their vocabularies, or the grammar they understand, or the coherence of the narrative they produce, they are not as proficient as they are in English." Parents will need to be mindful about introducing the child to literacy in that language. They will need to be thoughtful about ways they will encourage the child to maintain the language.
In the following part immediately after this text, the author will most probably focus on______.

选项 A、methods for encouraging children to maintain language
B、Dr. Hoff’s view on children’ s learning languages
C、a vivid account of the children’ s language level in South Florida
D、reasons for children studying a specific language

答案A

解析 结构题。根据文章第四段最后一句“家长需要多想想用什么办法鼓励孩子一直拥有那种语言技能”可知,A项“鼓励孩子学习一直拥有语言技能的方法”正确,且整篇文章都是在讨论如何培养健康的双语宝宝,故本题选A。
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