Living in South Florida is like living in a paradise. In addition to the wonderful weather, we are a melting pot of people from all over the world. It is easy to meet people and share cultural histories and learn about different people without having to get on a plane or travel long. Along with cultural, national, and political information we can share with others, there are also language differences. In preserving people’s heritage, it is often very important to pass their native language down to future generations.

The best time to learn a language is from birth to early elementary school years. This does not mean we aren’t able to learn languages later in life, quite the contrary. On the other hand, it is easier and more natural to learn languages from birth. The acquisition of language will be different when we are exposing our children to two or three languages at one time. Generally speaking, we can’t expect a child that is learning multiple languages at one time to accelerate at the same rate as the child learning one. Just like washing three cars by hand at the same time will take longer to clean than one. Meanwhile, those three cars can be as clean as the single car being washed with extended time, just like the multilingual child can become fluent in various languages.

In the past, one of the local preschools had offered a Spanish speaking class. I do not know if any preschools currently offer such a class. I thought that was a wonderful idea, until I saw who registered for the class. It is a great idea for those children growing up in an English speaking house to learn another language in the early years of school. In my opinion, it is a bad idea for a Spanish speaking child to attend an exclusively Spanish speaking class when they are only speaking Spanish at home and will continue their education in English speaking schools.

When doing preschool screenings in local schools, in English, problems arose when I wasn’t notified that a child was bilingual. While a child that speaks English at school and a different language at home may perform well in each environment, the knowledge of vocabulary becomes slanted based on setting. I was testing overall language skills that involved home and school, many bilingual children did not pass the screening. They were language different not language delayed. It is unfair to tell a parent that their child is functioning below age level in language skills when their home vocabulary is within average range in a different language.

It is very important for parents to notify teachers if their children speak a different language at home. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the child is in need of English as a second language support (ESOL), but it could help the teacher to understand the gaps a child may have in their verbal or comprehension skills. These gaps should decrease as time goes on.

However, if a child is below level in both (or all) languages that they are exposed to, there may be a language delay or disorder and you may want to limit the child to one primary language. Language assessment should be done on the dominant language to see the areas of deficit. If you are lucky enough to find a Speech Language Pathologist to test levels in multiple languages, that could also be informative. If the results of the evaluation reveal deficits below certain levels, speech and language therapy may be indicated. The primary language chosen to remediate should match the current and future learning setting. For example, if the child is in an English speaking school, the emphasis should be on English vocabulary.

As a speech language pathologist, I see many youngsters that have families that speak different languages. I understand that communicating in their native and family languages is very important to them. Many times I ask these parents to reinforce the work we do in sessions. That could mean conversation, reading stories, practicing what we are learning in session and doing homework together in English. Exposure to multiple languages doesn’t have to stop when a child is language impaired, but priorities in language choices spoken at home may have to change.