Budding Biliteracy

Punk 1, six years old now, has been working away at her literacy skills, at least in the formal sense since we of course laid the groundwork at home, for the last couple of years through school (Junior and Senior Kindergarten = 2.5 hrs/day, starting at age four). It is there that she learned to identify all letters and accompanying sounds, and it is there that she started to read. She had been waiting to finally start school since she was two, she was self-motivated when she finally got there, and clearly expressed an interest in reading and writing. All we had to do at home was support her by helping her sound out words, spelling words to her so she could write them, and eventually letting her read to us.

At first, all her reading was in English, though when she asked me to help her, our conversations around it were in German. I spelled English words to her using the German alphabet, and she read the words back to me in English. Oftentimes, she then translated the word into German and asked for help writing that as well. Or she tried to sound out English words, and asked me, in German, for help when she ran into trouble. It may sound confusing, but it really wasn’t – she knew to speak German to me (yay OPOL!), and it was quite natural for us to use German to talk about these English words. It also really helped her learn the German alphabet – she knew it through the ABC-song, of course, but this way her knowledge of the individual letters became much stronger.

Since biliteracy had always been part of the plan, it only made sense to see whether she was able to do in German what she was doing in English. Initially, she was a bit reluctant to try, but her curiosity (or competitive streak?) quickly got the better of her and she tried. And to our amazement, as well as hers, we realized that pretty much everything she had learned in school in English had transferred into German so that she was able to read and write German almost as well as English. She stumbled a bit with some things, such as letters that don’t exist in English (Ä/ä, Ö/ö, Ü/ü, ß), and common vowel or consonant clusters (sch, ch, ei, ie, eu, etc.). But once I explained those to her, things became noticeably easier.

Reading German still seems to be a little harder for her because her German vocabulary is relatively smaller and she comes across more words she doesn’t know. However, she can – and does – read German (though she generally prefers to read in English). She even seems to love the lengthy German compound words and is keeping track of how long the words are that she has read all by herself without any help from me (she stands at 17 letters, I think, though unfortunately I can’t remember the word).

Things are about to become more interesting as she enters grade 1 this September. French literacy will become increasingly important since she will continue in French immersion, and of course we will keep up the English at home. And we will also continue with German, though outside of starting her on a subscription to a German kid’s magazine for her age group (yay for publishers which do send such magazines overseas!), we haven’t really made any plans. We are not registering her for German Saturday School this year as she is likely to be too far ahead again – instead she has promised to do a bit of ‘work’ with me at home. Mainly, we will continue doing what we’ve always been doing, and make whatever adjustments we think are necessary (based on her age, developing interests, etc.) to keep things going.