Will my child be confused if she is exposed to languages other than English in the nursery?
Children are flexible thinkers and enthusiastic learners of language. They have a fascination for the sounds and symbols offered by different languages. Charmian Kenner describes in her book Home Pages how 'monolingual children in the nursery project found their encounter with different languages stimulating. They began to talk about the languages spoken by their classmates'.
A niece of my own has an Urdu- speaking mother and a Japanese- speaking father. She was born in Japan and was brought up speaking Japanese as her first language and Urdu as her second language. When she was three years old she came to London to visit me. Within two weeks of arriving she was speaking sentences with words from all three languages.
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