Learning to read for multi-lingual child

[pena]

Hi Questions here to parents with multi-lingual children.

Which approaches did you take to introduce reading skills to your multi-lingual DC? Did you start with one language exclusively and progress to the other languages later, or did you do both/all simultaneously? and at which age did you start? which language did you choose to focus on supporting them - the school one vs the 2nd or 3rd? how do you minimise the confusion and keep their motivation?

Sorry so many questions, but DS is 5 yrs old and showing an interest in reading - I'm struggling as to the best way to help him. He goes to a French school and speaks French to DH and learns Mandarin with me. English we've kind of left to languish so he speaks as well as one can from watching Power Rangers.

Many thanks for sharing your experiences.

Hi Pena, before answering your questions let me give you our family background and experiances on this:

I am english
DH greek
We live in Greece.

3 children - dominant language in early years of their lives was english. They all went to an english speaking nursery school for 2 years (3-5) before going to Greek school where they were introduced to Letterland and did some VERY basic pre reading and writing skills.I then left any formal lessons in english although of course we did read books etc and english was still the main language at home.

After 1 year (at age 5)in greek nursery (no reading and writing taught) they started learning greek. I was quite happy with them leaarning greek first as a) it was the school language and b) greek is very phonetic and they therefore aquired the skills and concept of reading very easily.

English was started in earnest at 8 (outside of school) and they also started french at school. (All greek schoolchildren start a second language at 8, by 11 many are doing 2 foreign languages.)

I staggered the greek and english partly because of the different alphabets (not to get confused) which may not be such a problem in your case as french/english script is completely different from mandarin.

You don't say where you live but I am imaging France as you say DS goes to a french school. So presumably he will be learning French this year or next year. I would let him get to grips with that before introducing mandarin.

If it is his english that you are worried about I would recommend finding somebody who can spend time with him on a regular basis to expand his verbal english skills. If he is fluent in English the reading/writing can wait for a few years.

Hope this long ramble has been of some help!

Should have previewed! The letterland was (obviously) introduced at the english nursery school not greek school.

I'm very interested in this as my daughter is binlingual although not in age to start to learn to read yet, but it will come fast.
From what I read it's best to acquire reading and writing skills in one language first and then tackle the second one, once the basics in the 1st language are there.

Is mandarin your first language Pena?

I'm really interested in this too. My DD is still only tiny but is being brought up bilingual English/Italian and I had thought of teaching her to read English before she goes to school, so that's out of the way before she starts to learn reading and writing Italian.
I had heard that it's better to stagger the reading and writing, as they only begin to grasp the necessary skills at an age where they start to lose their ability for parallel learning, but then that's probably another urban myth. I did think of starting with English, though, as unlike Italian (or French) it's not very phonetic and takes longer to learn. Mind you all the children's books in my house are in English, so I suppose she doesn't have any choice.

I'd be really interested in hearing other people's experiences and what methods (if any) they used.

I posted this thread last week and although it was not about bilingualism at the beginning I got many comments about it. Hope that helps, and with time we get the answers we need

I suspect it depends on the similarity of the languages/writing systems. I had Gm as my first language but was taught to read age 4 in English, by my Gm speaking mother (we were living in England at the time). I don't think I was specifically taught to read in German, but must have worked it out for myself.

I think a child who was fluent in English and another indo-european language with a reasonably phonetic spelling system based on the roman alphabet would probably pick it up without any specific tuition. But if the language difference involved a change of alphabet, such as Greek or Russian, then I'm would have thought the child would need specific instruction and varying degrees of practice to get the hang of both. And a non-phonetic system such as mandarin would definitely require additional instruction.

We are a bilingual family but my kids got to school in English so they are learning to read in English. I'll leave the French reading for later... unless either one showed an interest. I think they have enough to learn without having to do French.
DS does read some French but in an English way but he hasn't shown particular interest (he is nearly 7) and I think there are - at this point - more important things for him to do... like reading English well!

I recommend this book , it's excellent.

Thank you for your replies. I will get the book recommended. There seems to be many books discussing the merits of bilingualism and how to get dc to speak multiple languages but too few on achieving literacy.

Bluejelly - English is my first language, but I learned Mandarin thru' my mother and went to Chinese school until age 13. However I am by no means IMO fluent enough to teach DS to read and write Chinese on my own. In fact, it was a real challenge in the early years to get used to speaking Chinese to him. It has gotten easier over the years, feels more natural but also tougher as I have to consult a dictionary all the time to find the closest Chinese words to "light sabre" and "the dark side" .

DS just started lessons with a tutor to read & write in Chinese. His progress has been amazing. He can read simple sentences in Chinese. In French, his school has just started letter/sound associations but literacy skills are not formally introduced until age 6. As I mentioned, we have done nothing in English yet.

What prompted my anxious posting is that his Chinese tutor would like to introduce ds to hanyu pinyin. This is a transliteration system using alphabets that helps children and beginners in Chinese to figure out how to read the characters. Bec. it uses alphabets but with a different pronunciation system, I'm concerned that it may confuse him, if not overwhelm him and put him off reading in any language!

Some say that you can teach literacy in two languages simultaneously, but these are typically for 2 languages only, and for languages in the same family groups only e.g. Spanish/French with relatively similar pronunciations. There appears to be no hard and fast rules here.

Even tho' I also grew up multi-lingually, I find that there's still a fair bit of trial and error involved in raising multi-lingual children. Like frogs, I think I just kinda figured things out myself when I was learning to read. My brother on the other hand had real learning difficulties (in any language). I sometimes wonder whether he was just overwhelmed by having to learn to read in 3 languages which was also complicated by a slight stutter.

Also v interested in the answers, though non the wiser yet, possibly until I've read the book as well. DS is now in reception & learning to read in English soon. Not sure if or when to introduce Dutch either.

My children are growing up bilingual English/Italian and are at English school in Italy (I'm English). DS1 is 4 1/2 and learning to read at school in English. I've noticed that he's just reading Italian words by himself (street signs, cereal boxes etc), and seems to find it very easy, not surprisingly as it's completely phonetic. Pena I think that your son would find pinyin easy too for the same reason - it's easier than learning English. But if the child couldn't read well yet in any language then I would instinctively start with characters and leave pinyin until later. If you were chinese and had not learnt the Roman alphabet at all as a child then pinyin might be difficult, but for your son it should be as easy as falling off a log to learn later on. I read somewhere that Asian language speakers develop language in a different part of their brain than Europeans (I'm obviously generalising), and that people bilingual in the different language families develop both those parts of their brains. Monolinguals who learn a language from the other family as adults (like me, who learnt Chinese at 26yo) learn that language in the same part of their brain as their first language, however. The gist is that the bilingualism develops your brain more, so being bilingual is actually making your son more intelligent. I assume that the more different the languages are the more pronounced this is, and learning characters must come into that. If your son is having no problem with it then great! Much better than struggling over them at 26yo imo

How do you say light sabre in Chinese btw? That would appeal to my ds1 (wo yao kan dianshi is his favourite expression!)

Where are you in Italy normalness?

I'm in Bologna

My dd1 is bilingual - English at home, Gaelic at school
Her first 2 years of school are total gaelic immersion (she is a term into p2), then she will start english in p3 - and hopefully be at p5 level in both English and Gaelic by the end of p5 - this is what the school aims for.

Thanks normalness - the more I read up on this topic the more fascinating I find the whole area of emerging research on bilingualilsm. Yes I have heard of such research and the teachers at DS' school who've taught in bilingual schools confirm as much that multi-lingual children appear to have an aptitude for learning.

With DS learning to read, we've decided to leave pinyin to later and just let him continue to learn the Chinese characters alone. The funny thing is that in the last week, he appears to have figured out how to read in French, and I noticed that he has been trying to deciper the pinyin (but using French phonetics which sounds something like a frog trying to speak Mandarin with a heavy accent - go figure) on his Chinese flash cards - so much that I started covering up the pinyin so he doesn't "cheat".

P.S. Light sabre I've roughly translated into "lei-se jian" but have not figured out "may the force be with you"

LOL at translating light sabre etc into Chinese!

Interesting thread although I have to admit to being a singular-language family here!

But we live in Hungary and DS goes to a British international school where everything is taught through English. There are lots of different nationalities in the school though and I did go to a meeting with DS's teacher on the subject of learning to read. Quite a few of the non-English speaking parents asked about teaching their children to read in their mother tongue. They were advised to let them learn in English and that the children would then naturally use the skills they have been taught learning to read in English to read in their mother tongue.

My DS is in year 2 and is now fluent in reading English. Without any tuition I recently found out that he is also quite capable of reading Dutch. Dutch is quite phonetic, more than English anyway, and he just needs some help with some double vowel sounds, particular to Dutch.

Yes - my most recent readings on this topic say as much that typically bi & multi lingual kids will use their knowledge of one language's alphabet to decipher another language. And just as they have sussed out the rules behind different languages, they will also accept the rules behind literacy without any real problems.

DS is starting to do that with French and English, but we've decided to concentrate on French first unless he asks for help reading cereal boxes or road signs. The funny thing is that he sounds something straight out of "Allo Allo" when he pronounces English words.

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I think if it is just a couple of games you could do it in english, it shouldn't harm his french. I spoke english to my 2 although we live in Germany and after about age 3 they knew our language was english but they watched german teletubbies and bob the builder type stuff on german TV and we had a couple of books in German which they loved.Later on when they went to german kindergarden I had all the classic songs to practise with them like the christmas songs etc.. I just did the english versions another time.

Wow! That's really early. My ds is 5 and only just starting to do letter sound association but I guess the French system starts reading skills later.

Can you leave the English to someone else? Many books on this topic advocate OPOL one parent one language in order to achieve the best results in terms of proficiency and fluency.

From our own experience with ds, I recall that at around age 3, he became increasingly aware that dh and I spoke different languages on top of English. So we kept to OPOL to ensure that he doesn't mix the languages as much (they still will mix & borrow if they don't know the word in one language) and develops adequate proficiency in all three. If ds asks me about something in a French or English book, I would tell him what it is (that's if I know it) but also always tell him what the Mandarin counterpart is. He seemed to find it amusing when I told him papa says "pomme" your friend says "apple" and I say "ping guo" but I think it helped a lot to group and reinforce the different language sets in his mind by associating them with specific people.

With regards to reading skills, ours is still a work-in-progress. We've decided to focus on French as this is his school language - its papa's job to teach him with maybe some surreptitious coaching on the side from me - being the neurotic insecure mother that I am. I think once we feel that he's comfortable with French then I'll spend time to teach him English, which will probably happen sooner than I think.

Since your ds is only 3 perhaps it would be more helpful to focus on expanding his vocabulary in French, and leave reading (in any language) till later (or to someone else).

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I don't think it is such a big deal really. I speak mainly dutch to my DSs, but if they ask me a question about an english word, I will give them the english answer, speaking Dutch. And then I would give them a dutch answer as well. (is this clear? Probably not)
If my DS said is it an A for Pineapple? then I would say in dutch: yes it is A for Ananas (pineapple in dutch) but in english it P for pineapple.

just the thread I was looking for

Pitchounette I have same 'problem' as you except my lo's are english/german bilingual if they can be bothered.

DD is learning letters and the 20 keywords with a vengenace in Reception class and I'm finding it quite hard to do the phonetic way of spelling things because I've noticed she seems to hear things differently to the way I do. DH keeps telling me off because if I practice english words with her I say the word in English but then talk to her in German. He reckons it confuses her, at which point I said 'you do it then'

When practicing letters and words I try and to it in both languages like A for apple and A for apfel. They are 2 completely different sounds of A but she seems ok with it. Saying that lately she's started saying 'mama I don't understand you' in this ever so annoying 4 going on 14 voice I think I'll have to get that book that was mentioned earlier on.