Heather Hodges

At the Garnett Bilingual Preschool (www.garnettbilingualpreschool.com) we enroll students who speak either Spanish or English and put them in a classroom together with a bilingual teacher. Our school is a dual immersion program in which the kids hear not only 50% of each language every day but rather 100% of both. When a teacher gives an instruction in one language, she will then repeat what she just said in the other language. For example a teacher might say, “Let’s all sit down to hear a story.” She would then say in Spanish “Vamos a sentarnos para leer un cuento. ”

It has been an incredible experience for my own son, Elijah, who is in his second year of preschool. He has soaked up the language adventure and made friends across cultural and language lines. He and his best friends alternate between Spanish and English while they play. They will interject a Spanish word in an English sentence if they are not sure of the English word and never skip a beat. At home he sings in Spanish and will make comments like, “Look, the grass is verde and the perro is blanco.”

I have spoken with some concerned parents who are worried that teaching their child a second language will confuse them. Research absolutely refutes this. Children who learn a second (or third or fourth) language in early childhood will read sooner than monolingual children, score higher on standardized tests (ACT/SAT), are creative problem solvers, perform better in math and logic, and are more culturally sensitive. Some parents are concerned that the vocabulary of their bilingual child is delayed. In reality if you will count and add the words a bilingual child knows in each language it will usually be greater than a monolingual child’s.

Language acquisition is a fascinating subject and one that requires more study and conversation. I have the opportunity this summer to go to Europe to visit a childhood friend who speaks at least 5 languages. She is from Spain and we met in Paris in 1986. After university she moved to Germany where she met and married a Polish man. She now has 4 children. On a daily basis the children hear four languages in the home, English, Spanish, Polish, and German. Fortunately for me, all of her children are fluent in English.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 13th, 2007 at 5:07 am and is filed under Bilingual Preschool, Language. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.