[clara]

Sabra,

Of our three daughters, the eldest began with two languages at the time she began to learn to speak (English and Swiss-German a dialect): exposure at kindergarten to German led her within a year to be able to freely translate when singing songs from one language to the next and back again. English was spoken at home.
Within several years she felt more at ease expressing herself generally in Swiss-german, although she has always spoken to me in English.
My husband is Italian and is fluent in three other languages as I am in two others. The middle child, now at three speaks Italian as we live in Italy : My husband spoke Italian to her in Switzerland as there she was exposed to Swiss-German. Now that she has Italian everyday at kindergarten and within the broader family, he speaks Swiss-German to the two small ones so that they do not lose passive knowledge and Italian to the eldest- she now goes to an Italian school and has been exposed to it on a daily basis since last August. (She does have private tuition support for her homework and revison of the year's cariculum. ) I continue to speak English and all three, including the youngest of 20months has no problem understanding what is said or asked of her in any of the three languages. She has begun to say words and small combinations in each of them: They all have intermitent inter-languages which is absolutely normal and indicates an active absorption of what they are learning.
(I am also a qualified language teacher and have had experience in this area)

The basic principle in multi-lingual education for children is that the source of the language module(parent/teacher) remains consistent: whoever speaks a certain language should stick to it and not constantly be skipping from one to the next in the middle of conversations. Children absorb from each person they develop a realtionship with as an entire unit and that includes language: while my husband swapped languages on moving countries he is consistent as to when he speaks which. The children have recognised this and respond accordingly.

I never pressured the eldest to be fluent in any one of them: her active and spontanous ability to translate from one language to another was a strong nough indication that she was coping well with communicating bi-lingually. Our three year old regularly tranlates words or short phrases to me from her Italian (which at three is still not always clear) to Englsih, done with ease and a charming, knowing little smile. When family call on the phone from Switzerland and speak in german, she has no problem chatting to them and understands easily what they say. Visits there has her chatting in German within a day or two.

I believe the key to successful, stress free multi-languse learning in the home is for it to be a natural process of how you normally communicatewith one another and never to place any pressure on the children to perform or display any level of fluency. It will come and any grammar they might not know or lack of vocabulary can be redressed by repetitive reading, telling of stories, singing rhymes and advanced language structures can be learnt with peers at school - and that does not place them so far ahead of the others as to render them "above" classmates or have them equally bored to death because they know it all. The challange of learning a languge with the class even though they may have grown up with it is still there.

My eldest once, at a lunch, was chatting to a German lady. My daughter was 7 at the time and was speaking in swiss dialect telling a story about one of her cats: seeing that the woman did not understand a word, my daughter was quick to apologise and retold the whole story again in German - not entirely free of mistakes, but that was not the point. She had the confidence to change language mid-stream and did so graciously.

Give children the responsibility and respect of believing they can and they will amaze you with just how much they are capable of, even when they are very young.