Multilingual Reading - what should I do?

[albert]

Following on from the very interesting thread about teaching children to read, I am in the situation of starting to teach DS (4.5 years) But the question is 'What language?' He is trilingual English (me), Portuguese (DH) and Italian (school). I guess I teach him the English version but should he learn to read in the other languages at the same time or should we just stick to one language? Has anyone any experiance of this, I really don't know where to start.

From what I know, when children start to read in one language they "get" it really easily in other languages. Is your child already learning to read at school? If that's the case then you could just teach him to read in English.

It doesn't bother my son (4yrs) whether the words I ask him to identify are in English or French as they use the same alphabet - he's going to start Mandarin soon and we have an interactive CD ROM to help him become familiar with some basic characters...he knows perfectly well that it is a form of writing but the 'letters' go together differently. Still, he won't do it if he doesn't like it so I leave him be to work it out for himself.

Jo