Multi-cultural families facing the dilemma of how to bring their children up with two or more languages are seeking help from a special workshop being held in Dubai ton Sunday.
The Raising Bi-lingual Children workshop aims to give parents confidence and guidelines on how to effectively teach their children more than one language as they grow up.
Course leader Silke Rehman, a native German speaker, has drawn from her experiences and training to provide the workshop which is being held at the Business Centre, in Shangri-La Hotel, as part of the Kickstart UAE programme.
When her daughter was born six years ago, Rehman and her English/Urdu-speaking husband were living in French-speaking Switzerland. At the time, they had no idea how they would teach their child their own languages let alone the native tongue ofSwitzerland.
Now living in Dubai, 36-year-old Rehman says: "My rescue was a workshop on multilingualism that taught me all the essentials in two-and-a-half hours. I made language choices, set my objectives, developed a strategy and acted on it to the best of my abilities."
Fluent
Thanks to the course and the Rehmans' consistent approach, their daughter is now fluent in German and English, speaks basic French and is learning Arabic at school.
Common mistakes include parents frequently changing languages when speaking to their children and being inconsistent in speaking the target language.
But with a little knowledge and confidence, Rehman says offering the chance of another language is an "absolute gift" to your child that will stay with them in the long term.
"It's a big commitment to maintain it and it is easiest to start at birth but, in principle, you could start at any age with motivation and exposure," she says.
Rehman is planning to repeat the three-hour course in mid-February. To find out more, write to Rehman at cwrehman@yahoo.co.uk
