ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the key issue in the education of young bilingual learners. Most of the children who arrive at school with some competence in more than one language will probably have grown up bilingual or multilingual from their earliest days at home. They have not experienced successive acquisition, which means formally learning a second or third language. Becoming bilingual is not easy and there are myths about young children being able to 'soak up languages like a sponge'. There is another myth which says that young children can acquire a second or additional language faster than older children but, as Lightbown says, becoming completely fluent in a second language is not simple but necessarily takes several years. There is evidence that some educators, parents and policy makers believe that a child's first language will suffer when the child begins to learn a second language.
