Bilingual education

Posted on November 3rd, 2009 in Being bilingual

Bilingual education for your child

bilingual education

I am a big believer in multilingual education for children. Do not not believe the experts that will tell you it will affect your child’s language development in a negative way. In is untrue. It will develop their brains and organizes their gray matter in ways a mono lingual person can never have.

I wrote a page about bilingualism and bilingual education for your child.

It is worth reading. I posted it to the main part of my site as it is a rather long post and could be printed with greater ease.

Education and bilingual children

Transitional Bilingual Education – Typically a transition to bilingualism takes a child about three years. Even if the child falls behind a little in their mother tongue as long as you give both languages attention the child will get caught up. It happens when a child moves to another country or has parents speaking at home another language before the age of eight years old.

Dual Language Immersion Bilingual Education – This is what I recommend. My post above give you ideas to do this if you are or if you are not multilingual.

Late development education of a dual language – This happens when you start beyond the critical period of about eight years. That is say at age thirteen your child moves to a Spanish speaking country and needs to learn the language or even if you simply start teaching your child latter in an immersion environment or simulated immersion. I think in the teens children can approximate native speaker sounds but often times do not become bilingual as defined by a PET scan of their brain. That is they store the information in another part of the brain then a native speaker. This is why my theory is start kids young with a bilingual education and do not worry about them lagging in their first language.

I guess what I am looking for is more ideas on bilingual education. If anyone has any ideas please comment.

I invite all ideas or experiences. I would like to create a larger resource for bilingualism and bilingual education. Even if you are not an expert please comment. The more the better.

Tags: Bilingual education