Multilingual Immersion
- Kei Lau
- Apr 14, 2019
- 2 min read
One of the complications that I am quickly facing as a parent raising a multilingual family is maintaining consistency. Often when I'm out with English speaking friends, I tend to speak to my son in English. When I realise I've switched languages, I try to revert back to Cantonese and repeat in English.
I believe that in order my son to become truly trilingual, he needs to be immersed in the languages. Therefore we offer him as many opportunities as possible to hear all three languages. Especially as a multilingual family living in a monolingual country, we need to encourage learning of the minority languages at home first. Therefore we are currently focusing on developing 🥟's knowledge of Cantonese and Italian ahead of English. We believe he will pick up English when he socialises at playgroups and goes to nursery.
Multilingual learning through nursery rhymes
When I became a mother, I had to quickly brush up on my nursery rhymes. As we are raising 🥟 trilingual, I had to find nursery rhymes in Italian and Chinese too. It turns out that many of the nursery rhymes that we sing in English are also sung in different languages. At home, we play Cantonese nursery rhymes in the morning and Italian nursery rhymes in the afternoon. I sing Cantonese nursery rhymes to him throughout the day and my husband sings Italian nursery rhymes at night and on the weekends.
It is a known fact that nursery rhymes help with children's oral development. The repetitive nature of nursery rhymes and simple tunes helps children to remember words and also allows them to understand similarities between words.
Other benefits that I've discovered with Nursery Rhymes include:
- Social development - Whenever we attend playgroups, we usually sing nursery rhymes in a circle and this helps develops social skills.
- Motor Skills - We often sing nursery rhymes with actions for example "Twinkle Twinkle" or "Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes".
- Bonding - 🥟 loves it when I sing "Row, Row, Row your boat" whilst I bounce him around on my knees.
- Calms baby down - Often when 🥟 gets fussy, I sing a nursery rhyme. This often distracts him from crying and he calms right down.
Multilingual learning through playgroups
We attend Italian and Cantonese playgroups as well as regular English speaking playgroups. This gives our son an opportunity to be fully immersed in that language for 1 hour. He can also learn to socialise with other children who speak Italian or Cantonese. I believe that in the future, he will start to identify himself with these children and this will encourage his learning further.
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