Multilingualism

Children who grow in a multilingual environment have many advantages and some disadvantages. In fact, there is only one disadvantage: "language delay". International families' babies tend to start to speak later than those who have grown in a monolingual family. This is so because the more input the baby gets, the slower the process of producing language. However, this is only one first stage obstacle because as soon as the child starts to speak, language will flow normally in any language that it has been exposed to. Nevertheless the phenomenon of "passive learning" can happen. According to this, some can understand a language but he or she refuses to speak it, maybe because he or she feels unconformable using it.

Anyway, growing multilingual kids does not need great methodologies, only steadiness and time exposure. The magic formula is that each partner has to talk to the child in his or her native language. For this reason it is advisable to establish a "vernacular family language" other than the language of the country, since the child will naturaly learn this one. In spite of this, "learning shifting" will be normal and has to be viewed as part of the learning process (lack of vocabulary).

On the other hand, no-multilingual families can choose "artificial bilingualism"; that is to talk to their children in a foreign language. In this case, the accent does not have to be a problem and, as in the previous case, this language exposure has to exist in all contexts, even when there are feelings involved.

So bilingualism or multilingualism is a key to foreign language learning; but for this to be effective we have to be exposed to a multilingual context at an early age because children act as sponges before any external stimulation. Despite this, complete bilingualism is difficult since there will always be a language which will dominate the others (the mother tongue). We can achieve this, thought, but only with a strong motivation and equal linguinstic immersion in each language real contexts.