The Middle Years Program

How do we create multilingual children?

The OG information session on the importance of mother tongue literacy was a fabulous success with attendance at capacity of 100. Associate Professor Louisa Willoughby and Dr Howard Manns from the Linguistics and English Language program in the School of Languages at Monash University defined multilingual literacy, shared the research on the topic and suggested some practical steps to support multilingualism. 

Howard spoke first about multilingualism and how people often dip in and out of languages, “Don’t expect your son or daughter to be perfect at speaking the mother tongue language, one of the major impediments to language use is the stress of perfection.”  The goal is to create a safe space where they are using the language rather than feeling stressed about using it correctly.

Louisa then shared the research on the benefits of mother tongue literacy including, “Multilingual children are more likely to go to college, get better jobs, have higher self-esteem, and a stronger cultural identity.” Compelling reasons to support mother tongue literacy, but parents often become stuck at how to proceed. 

This is when Louisa made some simple suggestions to support mother tongue literacy, “Enrolling your child in afterhours language classes, where there is structured teaching with a regular schedule will take the pressure off parents and facilitate language learning.”

She also mentioned the benefits of joining public libraries, for example Monash library has an extensive multilingual section of more than 20,000 books for a range of abilities and the Victorian Community Language School which caters for more than 200 languages with approximately 40,000 students. 

We all want to be the best parents that we can be, it appears that raising multilingual children will deepen their cultural knowledge, expand their peer group and support their self-esteem. A recording of the session will be made available shortly, for further information see:

• Victorian Language School: https://www.vsl.vic.edu.au/
• Monash Library: https://www.monash.edu/library
• Community Language Schools: https://www.education.vic.gov.au/school/teachers/teachingresources/discipline/languages/Pages/clsschools.aspx

Mel Fitzgerald MFitzgerald@oakleighgrammar.vic.edu.au

Melissa Fitzgerald

IB MYP Coordinator