Tri-Lingual

[bashirz]

Hello Everyone,

I'm new to homeschooling and I am using the Well Trained Mind. My daughter is in K. She speaks 3 languages and all pretty fluent. I was wondering if there was a book out there you could recommend where it gives some feedback on teaching a bi-lingual or tri-lingual child!

Thanks for your help. I'm researching now but I thought maybe someone had some recommendations!

Salam (peace)
T.

[CleoQc]

I haven't found a book that helped me, really.
But since we do have bilingual kids working on their third language (and fourth too!) let me share a bit of wisdom.

Teach her to read in the most phonetic of the languages she knows. Deciphering words is a bit magical, once you get it in one language, the knowledge *will* transfer to the other languages. I don't know a single French speaking kid who needed phonic lessons to read in English (assuming English is already a spoken language). Word recognitions will come easily and phonics are just not needed.

[Friederike in Persia]

Hi Bashirz,
sorry this reply comes so late, I haven't been on the board much lately.

We are a trilingual family and a bit further on the way than you, my oldest being 10.
When I was first pregnant I went to the library in the UK, where we were staying at the time, and just ordered some books on raising children bi/trilingual. I don't remember any specific titles, but they were quite similar from what I remember. I like books and learn well through them, so that I found it very helpful to read some on the topic, esp. with it being uncommon to have 3 languages in a family and lots of people challenging you when they are little. (As they get older and do well you get a lot of positive comments )

Most resources I have come across (books, articles and advice from people further on) suggest to teach your child reading and writing the dominant language first. For us this is English, because we envision them going to English speaking university and there are so many brilliant home-schooling resources in English. After a year of that you can add the next language. This went very smoothly in our case, cause German is phonetic and it was a walk in the park after having worked hard on English. A year after that mine then learned the Cyrilic script in Tajik school and have been using that fine as well. The two oldest are just learning the Arabic script for Farsi, but that we don't mention too much, cause it sounds quite a lot (dd10 loves it, dd9 struggles with the work load and we might have to drop something).

That would be my short reply. Feel free to ask more questions, if your interested.

[gonie]

Hello Bashir,
I wish all the best in this lofty journey.
U can check on Amazon for books on
raising Bilingual and precisely their is a
book titled: Raising A bilingual child (Living Language Series)
, which a friend recommended to me and i found it very informative
and practical and above all gives different options of how to go
about it.

[shehmeth]

Hi,

I know you posted this long time ago... But I just saw the post.. I was at the library yesterday and there's a book about multilingual children's... Once I'm in my Home computer I'll get you the name and post it here... hopefully it will help you out...

Kate