Multilingualism

The idea to offer English alongside Portuguese and German in the International Child Care Center Curumim emerged from many conversations with parents who are interested in language development for their children and an experience in multicultural relations. The main motivations of multilingual education are the emotional and linguistic benefits, which are distinctly made accessible and attainable to the children.

An education that promotes intercultural exchange, promotes tolerance at the same time. It enables individuals to know and accept cultural differences and to be open-minded. Language and culture are in a close relationship.



The advantages of the Bilingual Education


The advantages of a Bilingual education are not limited to simply learning a foreign language. According to many linguistic research projects the advantage of the bilingual education is the following:

Bilingual children have two or more words for articles and thoughts. Therefore, the connections between words and terms are not set in stone. These children, compared to monolingual children, are more flexible and have better creative thinking skills.
They can communicate more naturally and with more expression, they keep a better relation structure to parents and grandparents, as well as to the local sphere in which they live, and to the world beyond.
They draw the use from different interpretations in literature, tradition, ideas as well as in behaviour (Tess, 2002).


With the immersion principle the child learns a language in every day discussion and repetition naturally and as simple as possible. This is the most well-known and effective of a multilingual education.

In our two bilingual groups, our educators speak and always moderate all activities in a certain language. Hence, the children connect the languages with a reference person and orientate themselves more easily. Thus the children develop the ability to switch their language in different situations. We speak here of „situation-dependent –speaking”. In our child care center our pupils enjoy speaking both languages because they learn by playing, singing and talking to those around them.