WHAT'S THE STORY?

Is learning to read and write in two languages a challenge for bilingual children, and what can parents do to support them? Claire Winterton investigates how she can help her six-year-old son

- Claire Winterton

As a book lover myself, I couldn’t wait for my son to understand the pleasure of reading and to experience the sensation of losing himself in an exciting new world.

But I didn’t know how or when to start the process, especially as Remy went to our local village French school here in south-west France, so official learning to read didn’t start until he was almost six. Should I have taught him to read in English before he started in French? Should I have been worried that if he learnt to read in French at school he’d never want to learn in English?

He wasn’t showing any desire to learn to read, but he was very aware that his friends of the same age in England could either already read or were well on the way to mastering it.

We explained to him that it’s just different in the UK – children start learning to read at age four or five, but in France they wait until the famous CP (classe préparatoire) when children are five or six.

Remy accepted it happily enough, but I’d sometimes hear him say: “I can’t read yet” when he was with his UK friends. This made me sad and I couldn’t help wondering if it was affecting his confidence – did he think he wasn’t clever enough to learn to read like his friends?

With all these questions whirling around in my head, I decided to investigate by speaking to some experts and parents who’d been through the same situation before.

FRANCE VS UK

First, I wanted to understand the differences between the two school systems and how they affect the child and the learning-to-read process.