Reply to How to raise a quadrilingual child in a predominantly English environment?

Forum Index » Schools and Education General Discussion

Reply to "How to raise a quadrilingual child in a predominantly English environment?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]I've seen trilingual fluency work for kids of this age a fair amount, but I have yet to see quadrilingual work.  My DC attends DSW, which is not strictly speaking an immersion school, but all of the instruction takes place in German.  She has had a number of classmates who have one German-speaking parent, one parent who speaks another language, and then who speak English socially outside of the classroom, and these children are functionally trilingual - to the degree that anybody in Kindergarten can be proficient in [i]any [/i]language, even their native tongue.  I have seen research that indicates that one needs at least 6 hours per day every day in a particular language to become proficient.  Assuming one sleeps, and assuming a normal child, 3 languages at this age would seem to be a practical ceiling.

Whether it's better to learn languages simultaneously or consecutively is a matter of some debate, but if you're talking about attaining some level of fluency or near fluency, you're likely setting yourself up for disappointment going four at a time.  If you're talking about just achieving some level of basic familiarity though, I would say that I have never seen any evidence that studying multiple languages simultaneously has any detrimental effects on kids.  Just be sure to keep your expectations in line with practical reality.  [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics