Bilingual Preschools, Volume I

Child: "I love you."Adult: "I love you, too."Child: "I love you, three!"Child to preschool teacher:"Eric is red, Paul is dead - and Tini is fat!"(Utterances of children learning English in a bilingual preschool)Language competencies are part of the core of skills that every citizen needs for training, employment, cultural exchange and personal fulfilment ... It is a priority for Member States to ensure that language learning in kindergarten and primary school is effective ... in particular by teaching at least two foreign languages from a very early age.European Commission: Promoting Language Learning and Linguistic Diversity: An Action Plan 2004 - 2006 (p. 8)The need to have a good working knowledge of at least two foreign languages has dramatically increased for citizens across the European Union in the past decades. Consequently, more and more children are nowadays learning English in preschools where English is used as a daily medium of communication. In such an immersion setting, foreign language learning starts early and proceeds in as natural a way as possible.Drawing on data from eleven preschools in four European countries (Germany, Belgium, Sweden and the UK) this study investigates the progress of preschool children learning English over a period of two years. Children's understanding of English words and grammar, the effect of immersion on L1 language development, comparisons with English monolingual children, as well as intercultural learning are all addressed in the first volume. In addition, environmental learning in an immersion context, labelled 'Green Immersion', is outlined with reference to the bilingual zoo-preschool at Magdeburg Zoological Garden in Germany. The second volume is more practically oriented: It gives details on best practices in bilingual preschools as well as background and training on topics such as second language acquisition, intercultural communication, green immersion, material development and guidelines for language use and