Question about trilingual children--Help, please

[Guest JTmom]

I have a 2 year old son and an another baby on the way. He is currently exposed to three languages: Korean, Spanish and English. I would like to home school him eventually. Right now, he spend most of his time with his Spanish nanny and I speak mostly Korean to him and his dad speaks Spanish. But we speak English to each other. I am concerned that I may be hindering his future education because I try not to speak English to him. Should I alternate between English and Korean on certain days so that he could learn English more easily. I don't want him to suffer when I try to teach him to read/write. Eventually all of his education would be in English, so I am confused as to what I should do. Thank you.

[Whereneverever]

What is the language most spoken where you live? If you live in the US or most of Canada he will pick up English pretty easily because it's spoken everywhere. I would keep speaking to him in Korean and Spanish- what a great gift to him!

[ourjourneys]

I agree. I think that English will come naturally if you are in an English speaking area. I think it is a wonderful blessing to be able to have the fluency in Korean and Spanish. I have friends who only spoke Arabic and French in the home. Then when their children reached 5 they would let them watch sesame street and have playdates with English speaking children. They had no problem picking up English and were ready for reading and writing English.

[Steven]

Books like "The Bilingual Edge" argue that there is really very little research to guide families trying to raise bilingual kids. A lot of the advice that is given is just best guesses that have been circulating for years. I think the real key is to find something that works for your family and enables you to fully communicate with your kids.

 

We are raising our daughter bilingual English and German, but have also added a little Spanish into the mix. Neither my wife nor I are native speakers of German, so we decided against either of us trying to speak German to her all the time. Instead we speak German when we can comfortably do so and speak English for more difficult situations. That being said, we tried to make sure that used used German in as many different situations and for as many topics as possible. We also repeated a lot of what we said in both languages.

 

Speaking purely from our experience, this has worked very well. Our daughter, now 6, is very fluent (perhaps native level, if we believe our German friends--definitely better than my wife or I), and is able to switch back and forth between languages very easily. There is no mixing. (We were always very careful not to mix the two languages in the same sentence, even if the conversation shifted back and forth between English and German.) Of course, we supplemented her German with lots of contacts with German speaking families in the area, CDs, DVDs, books, and a couple of trips to Germany (none over 3 weeks).

 

The book The Bilingual Edge argues that you need about an hour a day of stimulation in a language to develop native fluency in it. So if your children are getting some use of each language every day, our experience would suggest that speaking exclusively one language is not necessary. Personally, I would be reluctant to leave English development exclusively to the the child's outside contacts.