MULTILINGUALISM IN A PRE-PRIMARY GROUP

In the school that I work the immigrant children are just a few and the L1 is Catalan. Although that, there are some groups that break the rule. One of them is a class of the kindergarten who has 2 immigrants, 2 daughters and 1 son of immigrants, and a boy who, despite he is Spanish, speaks English with his father. Besides that, the L1 most spoken is Spanish.

This group has 26 children; 5 have Catalan as mother tongue, 2 speak Nigerian and 19 have Spanish as L1.

The last ones started to speak Catalan when they were in P3 and despite now they speak both, they use Spanish when they are playing or they ask something to their classmates, but not to the teachers.

Of this group of 19, there are two special cases because they speak two languages at home. The first one, speaks Spanish with her father and Portuguese with her mother; the second one, uses Spanish with her mother and English with his father, although he is Spanish too.

The group of 5 were able to speak Spanish when they started school, but with a lack of fluency. Now they have improved a lot because they have to speak it while they are playing with their friends who have Spanish as L1.

The last group has two girls from Nigeria; both speak Nigerian and some English, because sometimes they use it at home. One of them are in Catalonia since she was 3 and she has no problem with Catalan and Spanish, but the other came  on April of last year and she is learning a mix of Spanish and Catalan, but she is enhancing a lot everyday.

As you can see is not a typical group in the school that I work because, as I said before, their mother tongue is not Catalan and there are 2 immigrants. 

The L3 in the school is English.  I’ve been working as English teacher since 2011 and in the kindergarten they have a natural way of learning languages. In my opinion, besides the reason said before, this group in particular has no problems in the language learning process because they are learning other languages at the same time since they were 3 or younger.