Losing native tongue

Learn about: Losing native tongue from Simona Montanari, PhD,...
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Losing native tongue

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Children who are bilingual might be very bilingual until age 5. But when they start being schooled only in English in the context like in the United States where English is very dominant are at risk of using their other language. Basically all the school is in English. The child gets the idea that English is the important language. The child is just not hearing enough at this point of the other language. Sometimes the other language may be slowly forgotten, maybe not used enough and the child might also completely lose it. It is very important that parents look for opportunities to educate the child not only in English but in 2 languages. Because other wise even if the child speaks the language at age 5 without schooling say for example the vocabulary level might remain at a level of a 5 or 6 year old. So bilingual education in 2 languages can prevent that from happening and allow the child to become fully bilingual and bi-literate in those two languages.

Learn about: Losing native tongue from Simona Montanari, PhD,...

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Simona Montanari, PhD

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Simona Montanari is Assistant Professor in the Department of Child and Family Studies at California State University, Los Angeles, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on language development and second language acquisition in childhood. She received a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Southern California specializing in language development in monolingual and multilingual children. Dr. Montanari has published her research in prestigious peer-reviewed journals and she is regularly invited to present on early bilingualism and trilingualism locally and internationally. Dr. Montanari has also been involved in the creation and implementation of an Italian-English dual language program in the Glendale Unified School District, for which she continues to work as a consultant. Dr. Montanari has two trilingual and tri-literate daughters, six and seven years of age.

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