How to raise a multilingual preschooler
In India, multilingual children are not uncommon. However sometimes a single language seems to dominate your child’s vocabulary. The good news is that it is apparently never too early to teach your child a new language.
When is the best time to introduce a new language?
Babies can tell the difference between two languages by 6 months itself. Thus it is alright to expose a child to two languages from the very beginning. The best time to introduce a new language is around 3 years (however most children still find learning new languages easy till they are 10 years old). This is when your preschooler already has a grasp on one language and can be a very sharp observer when it comes to languages in general.
How would a parent go about introducing a language?
There are various methods to do this:
- If both parents speak a different language then each parent can speak that language to the child or with their relatives or other speakers of that language around the child. General exposure in that manner will help the child learn both languages.
- When both parents speak the same language and the child is enrolled in an English-medium school then another great and common approach is to speak to the child only in their native language at home and encourage him/her to speak in English at school.
- You can encourage your child to speak to certain people in certain languages. For example if Grandpa knows Tamil/Punjabi then let the child try to talk to his grandfather only in Tamil/Punjabi. The parents can speak another language at home. The help or peons at the school might speak Hindi so encourage your preschooler to try and learn a few words in that language. In this manner if your child comes across someone who speaks one of these languages, he can continue to try improving his skills in that language. Even if he/she learns only a few words, it still helps him/her exercise the brain.
- It is important to remember that the more your child is exposed to a certain language and not just in speech but through television, movies or books, the faster he/she can pick it up. Watching Spanish cartoons like Dora and Diego(the Spanish version), will help your child pick up that language.
- There are a lot of language apps that you can download and make your child listen to and learn those languages.
Won’t so many languages confuse a child?
There are certain myths that need to be debunked about multilingual children:
- Knowing two or more languages at an early age will not affect your child’s speech development nor will he/she be “confused” because of it.
- Your child’s ability to speak or understand English in school will not be compromised if he/she also learns another language at home.
- The child will mix up languages. Although this does happen, it does not have to be a bad thing. As a child it is alright if he/she makes a few mistakes in his/her sentences. This kind of natural mix-ups happens to adult bi-linguists as well.
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