Parents Partnering With Teachers to Bring Up Multilingual Children

By Karen Nemeth

I work with preschools, Head Starts and child care programs all over the United States to help them be more effective in teaching young children who come from different language backgrounds.

Everywhere I go, teachers ask me how they can work more effectively with parents to support their child’s education.  I believe that one of the best ways to build parent-teacher partnerships is to share information. To help that along, I’d like to share with you some of the key points from my workshops for teachers about teaching young children who come from different home language backgrounds.

The most important thing early childhood teachers learn is that young children need a rich, engaging, interesting, stimulating language environment.   Recent research has made it clear that this is the foundation that makes literacy and school success possible.

What is even more interesting is that researchers are also finding that young children need this to happen in any or all languages they are learning. If a child is growing up simultaneously with two or more languages, that child needs to hear stories, songs and conversations in each of those languages.  And, if a child started learning in one language and later begins an additional language – it is absolutely critical that they continue to receive enriching language input in their original language while learning the second.

We also know that children encode most of the concepts they learn via language.  That means that all the information they learn in their first few years of life is encoded in the language or languages they speak at home.

If they go to school and receive no support for those home languages, they may lose their ability to use the information that was learned in those first few years.  This puts them at a terrible disadvantage as they are growing and developing.

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