Multilingual Early Language Transmission (MELT) - Mercator ...

Spanish-English) child. She followed a toddler (age 1;10) and showed that early trilingual
phonological differentiation is possible. Simultaneous multilingual exposure does not appear
to delay children in their initial language discrimination or production capacities. Bosch &
Sebastián-Gallés (2001) reported some research results of assumptions who were made to
believe that simultaneous acquisition, of two or three languages, would slow down normal
language development and simultaneous exposure to more than one language might even
lead to an ‘enhanced language discrimination capacity.’
Montanari (2011) stresses the fact that much more research is needed; studies need to be
conducted with children learning pairs and triplets of typologically related and unrelated
languages; more work needs to assess whether all children, irrespective of learning style and
type of environment in which they are raised, show signs of differentiation in the course of
development and more research to investigate whether the development of each language
in multilingual children is autonomous or interdependent.
4.2 Early immersion approach in pre-school education
It is difficult to clearly define early immersion, because of the different situations, the
complex pre-school settings and its contexts. Below some definitions of the concept
‘immersion’ are presented.
Obadia (in Arnau & Artigal, 1998) gives a definition of immersion program: “An immersion
program (also known as a multilingual, intensive or extended program) is defined as a
program in which one or more subjects are taught in a language different from the language
of the home at either the elementary, secondary or post-secondary level.”
Wode also (in Arnau & Artigal, 1998) defines immersion: “According to Genesee (1987) the
Canadian usage of the term immersion is such that it is applied only to those programs that
are designed for majority-language children and that devote medium of instruction;
programs with less than 50% are labelled extended core. The reason for this distinction is
that government funds will only give to programs that do, in fact, carry at least 50 % of the
curriculum in the foreign language.”
Immersion is a method of teaching a second language. The target language is used for
instruction. Cummins (2000) describes two-way immersion with two major models of twoway
programs: 90/10 and 50/50 programs. These models represent the proportion of time
devoted to the minority and majority languages in the early grades of the program. The
90/10 model aims to promote the minority language as much as possible in the early grades
on the assumption that the minority language has a lower status in the wider community.
The 50/50 model is based on the belief that both languages need to be acquired from the
beginning of schooling and the best way to do this is to split the instruction time between
the two. Cummins (2000) agrees that both programs can work well.
Double immersion has also proved to work effectively (Laurén in Arnau & Artigal, 1998).
Genesee & Lambert (1983) studied how early double immersion, in French and Hebrew,
works with English-speaking children. Both languages here have respectable sociocultural
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