Multilingualism practices in early language education.

Abstract

The paper addresses the problem of multilingualism in early language education. Multilingualism refers to using competently more than one language. The paper describes the ways in which children acquire languages and explains why multilingual education is important. It underlines the necessity of learning several languages from early age and further multiple languages support. The paper also focuses on the importance of a soft transition between the languages and the ways to prepare teachers to deal with this efficiently. The opportunities of introducing multilingualism in early childhood instruction are presented. The paper gives examples of instruction that show the peculiarities of multilingual education. Several practical activities for multilingual primary classroom are described.