Hanna Jałoza
What happens when a child is growing up in intentional multilingualism, and then the parents move into a country where there is another language in use that is not known by any family member?
I am a professional German teacher from Poland who used to work with children in kindergartens and primary schools. In 2020, shortly before the pandemic started, I became a mother of the small Gosia, and I began to speak to her in Polish and German. As Gosia was three years old, we moved to Finland without any preparation time for learning Finnish. In my presentation, I want to talk from both perspectives – of the language teacher and mother – about the challenges we had at the beginning of our life here in Finland according to learning our daughter Finnish. What helped us most of all? What worked in language learning by the younger children? How can we ensure the child’s well-being when communication is not working because of problems with the new language? I want to present the methods that helped our daughter grow into the Finnish language landscape and are easy to use for other parents of non-Finnish speaking younger children, but also for all of the parents of small children which lives in another country.
