Multiple languages - what to do with English?

[pizzanoodle]

Hi everyone,

We are an Italian-Chinese couple and we have a 3 year old daughter.

We do a one-person-one-language system. One of us speak Italian to her. The other speaks Mandarin to her.

We realise that her English is lagging a lot behind, even though she has an English nanny and goes to a nursery.

Our question is therefore whether we should speak English to her when all three of us are together? Or introduce more English to her somehow.

What do you think? Would be interested in your experiences.

Best,
Mel

she will pick it up at school, and already has a head start with the nanny, you don't need to do anything else

She’ll learn it at school, I exclusively talk to ours in Urdu and my husband exclusively talks to them in Swedish. Our son didn’t really speak English until he was about 3.5 at nursery. Our daughter is almost two and doesn’t speak any English, we don’t live in the UK anymore, but where we live everyone speaks English, so she’ll still become fluent.

Do you speak English with your DH @pizzanoodle ?

My experience is that school language takes over pretty quickly, even if they seem to be lagging behind in English when they start school.

Id put more effort into keeping both the Italian and the mandarin tbh.

Fwiw my own experience - ‘only’ two languages at home - French and English.
dc1 - no issue with either p, French wasn’t quite as good as English age 3~4yo when starting school /nursery. English easy ever an issue
d 2 - very very at ease with French, much less do with english. Started school struggling with English despite nursery/CM etc…. And obviously DH. Caught up by the time he was 6yo.
Both were only using English apart when steaming to me by the time they were about 8yo.

I really wouldn’t worry about English!

I wouldn't worry about it. Research tends to show that bilingual/multilingual children tend to lag behind in either one or all languages, particularly vocab wise, until around the age 7 or 8 when they seem to come into their own generally ending up with larger than average vocabs in each language and becoming able to flit between languages with ease.

They learn very quickly at school and the nanny will have laid the groundwork. My DC have 5 languages. You will find that having learned 2 at home, then English at primary school (they won't be the only ones learning English), they will pick up whatever they learn at school easily.

In my experience (working with multilingual children in a previous job) children who speak other languages at home and English at school do fine because there's a social motivator to learn English and they're already pretty far along the road of speaking and understanding their home language(s).

Children who become used to speaking English to their parents at home quickly end up resorting to it and often end up in the position where they lose their home language and end up unable to communicate with grandparents etc. If your child lives in the U.K. he'll have English all around him - radio, tv, listening to people etc I wouldn't worry about it!

Do keep up with the Italian and Mandarin at home. That is really important.

If you start young enough with multiple languages you will not have any problem. I agree that the English will sort itself out pretty quickly. As well as the nanny there will be TV soon, if not already.

We are in Azerbaijan, my DS10 speaks English to me and (usually) Azeri to DW and MIL, sometimes a bit of Russian. Last December we moved him from an English school to a French school, he has picked up the French really quickly.

What a wonderful life gift , keep it up
the English will come
3 languages is a really good start

This. It's much more of a gift to give multiple languages than be ahead in English early. DC catch up!