Little Multilingual Learner

We have a little multilingual learner on our hands.  It's been such an interesting process to watch him take it all in, I thought I'd make a few notes to myself of his progress along the way.  

Recent trip to the zoo

While we were in the US, we only spoke to Elijah in English and he had no exposure at all to Portuguese or Spanish.  Towards the end of our time there, when Elijah was just over 1 year, he started saying a few words....goodbye, night night, mama, dada.   We were on a roll...or so we thought!

Then we arrived in Brazil.  When we were leaving places, Elijah would proudly wave at our friends and say"bye bye"....only these people spoke Portuguese!  They would either reply "tchau tchau"  (pronounced chow chow) or just smile and laugh since he was such a novelty.  Within a few weeks Elijah stopped talking all together.  

I'm not sure if he was taken back by people not replying the way they were in the US, or if he was just confused, or if it simply that everywhere we went he heard Portuguese and suddenly he realized he had a lot more to take in before he could talk.  In my collage TESOL classes we learned about a process called "mapping".  Basically, before speaking, the brain needs time to create a general "map" of how a language works.  So, for the past few months he has been a completely silent mapper.  He hasn't said a word.

Here's our language exposure plan:  Elijah has been constantly been hearing English at home and Portuguese everywhere we go.  We also want him to learn Spanish, so Jeyson speaks to him some in Spanish.  We also expose him to Spanish through movies and in the future books.  If he doesn't catch on to Spanish right away that's ok.  It is very similar to Portuguese so he should be able to pick up on it easily in the future, maybe even by sending him to a extracurricular language school (very common around here).  

Well anyway, as of this past week, we can tell something is clicking. He is starting to make tons of talking sounds.  He isn't saying anything, but he thinks he is!  This is a great first step.  He's gaining courage and trying out the phonemes.  I also noticed he is understanding and obeying commands in English.  Then other day I noticed he's getting Portuguese too.  

Normally I say "Fala tchau"  (say bye) when we're leaving somewhere and model by waving, and then he'll wave.  Then the other day as an experiment, I just said "Fala tchau" abut didn't model the waving. But he followed the direction and waved!  Wohoo!

I know it seems like a small victory, but I was so excited.  This multilingual learner is on his way!

Tchau tchau!