Bilingual children who develop a language at home that is different from that of the education setting have to learn to navigate between two languages and two cultures, and they need to adapt and respond to their environment.
It is very common nowadays to walk around any city or large town in Ireland and hear many different languages. Main streets are populated with road signs in Irish and English and with shop fronts that signal the presence of ethnic food, with signs written in Chinese, Arabic and Polish.
Establishing communication channels helps teachers to learn more about the children, their history and their home environment, but it also helps parents on learning more about what happens in school.
While in the past it was common practice to refrain children from speaking their mother tongue in school, compelling evidence has been showing the benefits of supporting children’s learning across languages and through the inclusion of their mother tongue.
A bilingual person is someone who speaks two languages. A person who speaks more than two languages is called 'multilingual'.People may become bilingual in different ways. Some bilinguals have acquired…