Experts say speaking two or more languages helps widen a child's horizons and that there is no one perfect strategy for multilingual education - Made for Minds
Two-and-a-half-year-old Enrique sits on the living room floor, his snub nose poking out over a picture book of colorful triangles, circles and squares. "Ou est le triangle rouge?" — "Where is the red triangle?" — his French mother Chloe Bourrat asks in French. "Ici!" replies Enrique as he taps the red triangle with his finger, beaming at his mother. "Donde esta el circulo amarillo?" — "Where is the yellow circle?" — his Spanish father Juan Koers asks in Spanish. "Aqui!" exclaims Enrique.
Like Enrique and his 8-month-old sister Alice, who live with their parents near Madrid, more and more children around the world are growing up with two or more languages at the same time.
Though the parents usually speak Spanish together, Bourrat speaks almost exclusively French with the two children, while Koers almost always speaks Spanish. Experts call this approach "one person, one language." It is one of several methods that have established themselves in multilingual education.
Yeliz Gözmez from Frankfurt has chosen a different approach with her family. She and her husband were both born in Turkey, and at home they speak Turkish with their daughters Melissa (7) and Mila (4). "Away from home — that is, at day care, at school and in their free time — the children speak German," says their mother. Experts call this method "Away from home versus at home."