Multilingual children: Teaching to Read
Parent question I'm afraid. My daughter is 4 1/2 and has 4 languages to contend with. I am a native English speaker, my wife is Mexican, living in Barcelona and my daughter is going to a French school. Her languages at the moment in order of fluency are English, Spanish, French and Catalan. She seems to be coping remarkably well and has started inserting French words into Spanish phrases in class which is a good sign. They are teaching her to read in class at the moment (in French and some classes in Spanish) but I read to her in English at night and have started to get her to identify words and teach her letters. Should I be doing this or is it going to confuse her as the sounds are quite different? An alternative I guess would be that English would be a mostly oral language for her until the age of 7 when they start teaching English at school? Anything else I should be doing?
