Quadlingual Students

Mateo and I 

Today I worked with the second graders, where I led a lession with a group of quad lingual six year olds! This amazed me. All four of their first languages were French, but they also spoke Spanish, English, and German. It was interesting to see these children interact with one another as well as the other students in the classroom. As a language major with a linguistic concentration, it was interesting to see the prevalence of code switching among these quad lingual students. They would often implement syntactical structures, colloquialisms, and words into either their primary or secondary languages into whatever language they were currently speaking, and would switch mid sentence. I was unable to discern if they were conscious of the complexity in what they were doing, or had simply and entirely repressed the distinction into their subconscious. What was interesting within the structure of the lesson was the fact that speaking multiple languages in the classroom was often encouraged, as there was no formal instruction language. While I speak English, Spanish, and read Portuguese, I was out matched.