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Hi, I'm wondering if anyone has any experience with this. My education is in linguistics, so I'm not overly concerned but I am curious. I am an American living in the Czech Republic. My husband is Czech. We adopted our daughter when she was 11 weeks old. DH and I speak Czech together, because his English isn't great and my Czech is fluent. He speaks Czech to DD. I speak English to DD. She is now 2 and understands both languages very well. She has a fairly large vocabulary but doesn't yet duplicate words in both languages, except maybe the word "more" and the word "no." She says most nouns in English and most grammatical type words in Czech, oddly enough. Most of the time her phrases are mixed and mostly she simply speaks in single words anyway. Anyway, she her favorite book from the time she was 9 months old was Dr. Seuss's ABC. She loves any sort of ABC song, toy or book. I seriously am not trying to force this stuff on her to have a wonder child but I have responded to her interest by getting her more of those sorts of things. She can now identify half the letters on her own and repeats all of them well in English. Given that Czech is a small language all the best toys, books and songs with ABCs are in English and not in Czech. So, she is definitely learning the Engish names and sounds. If she continues at this rate, I expect she could be reading before she enters school. And that brings up some issues for me. I definitely want her to learn to read in English and I will have to teach her that myself, but I know Czech teachers and they will have no patience with her saying the names of the letters "wrong" or sounding out words "wrong", even if it is English. Does anyone have any experience with how difficult it is to teach a young school age child to sound out words differently in different languages and say the letters differently? How does this tend to shake out?
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Hi there. For what it's worth, my training is also in linguistics, and my native language is Polish. I started school there and then in 2nd grade came to the States, where I was in ESL classes for a few months. So I think if your DD is already reading, regardless which language, you could look at it like an ESL (ok, CSL) situation. The Czech teachers should be thrilled with simply teaching new sounds to an already literate child, rather than starting from the beginning. But I don't know how exposed Czech teachers are to multilingual readers. Another thought to cross my mind is my niece. She just finished Kindergarten, and she is reading in both English and Spanish. Her mom taught her the Spanish at home, but before Kindergarten, she would use books in both languages to try to get her up to speed before school started. Honestly, I don't think your DD will have any trouble. Her brain is already familiar with both languages and both sets of pronunciations. I think giving her teachers a heads up that she may be using the English names or pronunciations would hopefully prevent them from insinuating that her reading of Czech is "wrong". Hopefully they would use this information to remind her that when reading in Czech, different rules apply. Congrats on your smarty pants! :gnome:
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