Ask-A-Linguist Message Details
| Subject: | Trilingual child, day care suggests teaching English at home |
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| Question: |
Dear experts, We live in the US (community language is English). My wife is a native Chinese speaker and I am a native German speaker. Our child is 2 years old. She has been in daycare since she was 6 months old. We use OPOL with no English spoken to our child. But we do usually converse in English between us in front of the child. Our daycare teacher strongly suggested in a recent conversation that we should teach her the English words as well. Otherwise our child would have a high probability of acting out because of a building frustration due to a lack of communication/language ability. This does not seem to fit with OPOL or MLAH. It certainly would also not feel natural to me. Also, if our little one says an English word my reaction is to acknowledge that it is a proper word in English and that ''in German it's ...''. So far I have not given the learning English part much thought. After all it is the community language and she has 40 hours per week of scheduled exposure to it. It should come just naturally. If we get 40 hours per week of German and Chinese, I think we are lucky. What are your thoughts? |
| From: | Curious |
| Date: | 08-Jan-2013 |
| Replies: |
