Bilingualism

‘International Montessori’ offers an environment rich in languages.

A complete and consistent bilingual English-French environment is offered by our centers. Each group is staffed by two teachers; one addressing the children in English whilst the other always speaks French. Thus giving the opportunity to children from a young age onwards to absorb the new language(s) as a whole.
Due to the full time exposure, the concrete nature of the daily activities and games, this approach to second language acquisition works particularly well in a Montessori setting. Young children absorb languages very fast, and often understand the vocabulary used in their group within four months.

In the Primary and Middle School the language skills mature and the children become bilingual at a verbal and written level. The teachers themselves are multi-lingual and are therefore in the position of exposing the children to this normality on a day-to-day basis. The students progress by means of reading, drama, writing stories, spelling lessons, and working with specific language materials such as Grammar Boxes and Logic Sentence Analysis & Construction. More and more, the second language also becomes integrated in the other subject areas.

Students of the Middle School have the option of extending their total number of languages to four, being English, French, Dutch and German. The program encourages the students of being able to express themselves at an advanced level in at least two of these not including their mother tongue.

This bilingual environment has been put in to practice over an extended period of time. Our experience is that this approach has a very positive outcome. By living and learning amongst such a wealth of languages, the children become multilingual and develop an openness to different cultures and habits.

Multilingualism has an extra bonus in that it assists the logical mind. Being able to speak several languages means you have several “answers” to any particular issue. Each answer has a slight different connotation. The user therefore refines the analytical capacities and abstract thinking abilities! What a great asset for the future!