Who else is raising children multilingually in a monolingual environment?

[Finny]

I'm sure there are lots of folks here in countries where multilingualism is a given...however, I'd like to hear from other folks in primarily monolingual countries (e.g., the US, the UK, Australia, etc) who are raising kids multilingually.

What languages are you teaching your kids, how are you teaching them, and what challenges do you face?

My wife and I live in the US, and are raising our 2 kids (maybe a third in a few years) bilingually (English / Spanish). My wife speaks 99% English, and I speak to the kids in 100% Spanish. The main challenge is that no one else in our family or social circle speaks anything but English, so I'm always a bit worried about if they're getting enough input, even though I know they only need 25-30% of Spanish during the day to develop it. There's a local dual language program in the public schools, but we're planning on home-schooling, at least for the first several years, due to how developmentally inappropriate the schools are these days (and I say this as a bilingual preschool teacher).

Our kids are 2 and 1. Our 2 year old understands everything in both languages, but primarily speaks English, although she'll use some Spanish when we're together (e.g., when responding to me or when we're reading together).

I'm interested in teaching the kids French in a few years, but will have to learn it to a high level first.

I'm hoping this thread can become a long-term discussion among parents in monolingual environments raising kids multilingually, as the challenges are often different from those in naturally multilingual environments.

[Ani]

I am working on it. I have 4 kids. Oldest just turned 8 this month and the youngest is 18 months. I have been speaking only French to my youngest since the day he was born despite the fact that I am not a native or even particularly advanced speaker. I am studying *really hard* every day to get ahead of him. I am under no false pretenses that he will become a balanced bilingual as a result of my imperfect French attempts but I am just trying to give French a foothold in my house.

I also homeschool and teach French as a subject. Theoretically at some point we should "get over the hump" and it should get easier but goodness it is hard. We use Tatou le Matou in Kindergarten. I tried to go to Alex et Zoe for my son but we had to shelve it because there was too much handwriting for him and I didn't want to waste the book without fully doing it. You know up to 6 years old kids love repetition but after 6 they take one look and say "I've already done that!". So we are back to it now between 2nd and third grade. My bigger kids are solidly A1.1 speakers with atrocious pronunciation. I think I might have found a tutor for them though so let's hope for that

My dream is that when they get a tiny bit older they will want to learn languages (or at least 1) and I will be able to give them help and materials and they will run with it. I think it was around 9 when I wanted to learn French and my parents gave me a terrible little cassette tape/ listening guide combo. I couldn't even hear the pronunciation of the words but I listened until I practically wore a hole in it. I'd be in a whole different place if I had something like Assimil back then.

[PeterMollenburg]

Hi Finny, Hi guys,

First up, thanks Finny for starting this thread. I'd only been thinking a few days ago to do something along these lines, so you beat me to it.

My daughter turned two nearly a month ago. I'm Australian (native English speaker) and my wife's native language is English as well (from New Zealand originally but very much Australian for a many years now). I'm a French learner with an estimated B2 level. I speak and have only spoken French to our daughter since birth. She communicates predominantly in English with us, but at times will prefer a French word. The aim is to homeschool as well for us with our daughter and any future children. I never speak English to my daughter unless it's by pure accident (very rare). I'm sure my pronunciation is very good but my grammar would not be perfect and my use of idiomatic expressions still rare. I read to my daughter in French and she occasionally watches French TV programs (some originally French, some dubbed).

Lately i've been encouraging her to pronounce French words- a word each page of a book for example, and if she says something to me in English I get her to say it again in French. I'm attempting to reinforce that to communicate with me she'll need to use French. I'm trying to encourage her activite participation in the Language. Many times i've heard of Italians and Greeks here (simply because there are plenty of them in Australia) growing up understanding their heritage language but not knowing how to speak it back. The reason i think is simple, they weren't encouraged to use it (which may have been for motivational reasons perhaps), or if they were they still didn't use it. The thing is if a child realises they won't get a response using Language A then they will likely aim to use Language B with that particular person in the family.

I also recently met an African guy in passing from Zambia. He mentioned how his daughter won't speak back to him in his native language despite him speaking it continually with her (she only answers in English- they live in Australia). I didn't get to the nitty gritty but I beleive again encouragement could be part of the issue. Another factor is potentially lack of media.

[Ani]

Lately i've been encouraging her to pronounce French words- a word each page of a book for example, and if she says something to me in English I get her to say it again in French. I'm attempting to reinforce that to communicate with me she'll need to use French. I'm trying to encourage her activite participation in the Language. Many times i've heard of Italians and Greeks here (simply because there are plenty of them in Australia) growing up understanding their heritage language but not knowing how to speak it back. The reason i think is simple, they weren't encouraged to use it (which may have been for motivational reasons perhaps), or if they were they still didn't use it. The thing is if a child realises they won't get a response using Language A then they will likely aim to use Language B with that particular person in the family.

I also recently met an African guy in passing from Zambia. He mentioned how his daughter won't speak back to him in his native language despite him speaking it continually with her (she only answers in English- they live in Australia). I didn't get to the nitty gritty but I beleive again encouragement could be part of the issue. Another factor is potentially lack of media.

Ahh so my French project baby isn't too different in age than yours I have the advantage because I am the stay at home parent but I think you can get her to speak back to you in French. My husband is supposed be the source English but he keeps trying to speak in (extremely bad) French because my little one follows commands better in French. I see how hard he has to work at the end of the day just to get the baby to throw something in the trash when he can do for me in French with no trouble. The baby hears English all day too from me talking the others and the other children speaking with him. I was just thinking about fathers being the source of a minority language and how hard they would have to work. Practicing, repeating, miming.. coaxing out a few words and knowing when to celebrate a sound vs ask for more.

We are working on not having every animal be a cat. Right now we have cheval (à da da), miaou, whou-whou. We are working on mouche because he likes them a lot for whatever reason :-p

Once age 6 rolls around though, peers have more and more influence. Not sure how to tackle that yet but technology gives me hope.

[PeterMollenburg]

it's so cute when my daughter says (sometimes she has a preference for the French term) 'bac à sable' in her little way. I've never heard her say 'sandpit'. Birds were a big feature early in her life and continue to be a point of interest. Thus, 'oiseau' for some time took precedence before 'bird' ever got a mention, but lately 'bird' is more common although she has no issues repeating 'oiseau' right after the English version. 'Ballon' remains the first choice in place of 'ball'. Today after getting home from work my wife said our daughter kept saying "viens ! viens !" to the chickens (we recently took on a few chickens- former 'battery hens'). Anyway it's a beautiful experience being a parent and amazing to watch their language skills develop- particularly when one is acutely focused on language learning in some form or another (or one foreign language or another). I'm usually at home 2 to 3 (full) days a week and obviously around otherwise. Still English probably wins out 70% of the time in terms of her production but it's often no problem to get her to reproduce the French equivalents. If I'm at home and been speaking a lot with her or reading to her, often French will take precedence even with my wife around but only for a short time before English comes back.

I have heard of cases in which children are perfectly bilingual until they attend school in the monolingual setting. This is something i'm aware of in the background and yet another reason why my wife and I would like to spend a considerable amount of time in a French speaking environment in the future.

[Finny]

Great discussion so far all!

Ani...good to hear from another homeschooler too! I think it's great you're teaching your youngest French even if you aren't yet at an advanced level. I've read that even if you make errors, as long as your kids get enough correct input, they'll learn correctly.

PeterMollenburg...of course! Yes, I share your concern of our kids fully understanding Spanish but struggling to speak it. I don't enforce responding to me in Spanish, although if, by the time she's 3, my daughter is still speaking to me primarily in English, I might become more insistent on it. As a teacher, I don't require my kids (who are 3-5) to speak in Spanish, even though I run the class in 90/10 Spanish/English, but I do periodically ask kids to repeat certain words in Spanish when they keep using the English word while I'm trying to teach the Spanish word. And even the most English-favoring kids get much stronger in Spanish (relative to where they started) over the course of the school year. So I might just follow the same approach with my kids.

Regarding communication, I only read to my daughter in Spanish. I don't really read to my son yet (he's not yet 1), even though I did with my daughter as a baby...it's harder to make the time when his sister is everywhere. However, he also gets the advantage she didn't get of overhearing conversations at home in Spanish (between my daughter and I). I began reading in Spanish-only several months ago when I realized that she was primarily bringing me English books to read since she spends all day with mom, who speaks English and reads 99% in English.

For language context, my wife and I are both native English speakers. I learned Spanish a few years ago expressly for work and family (i.e., to teach my kids), and I'd estimate myself at a C1 level.

[IronMike]

It's so wonderful to see all the homeschoolers in these forums. I'm going to start a new thread so we can talk about our methods, our kids, our struggles.

[Finny]

So about a month ago, after a bit of reading on some multilingual parenting forums, I decided to change my approach with my daughter from simply repeating things (that she'd said to me in English) in Spanish to repeating them and asking her to repeat them to me in Spanish. It took a few days for her to get the hang of it, but within a week, we could see a big difference in her willingness to approach me in Spanish.

A month later, she probably speaks to me in about 80% Spanish spontaneously (i.e., without my repeating things in Spanish or repeating things and asking her to repeat them to me in Spanish), compared to a month ago, when she was probably at around 10%!

It was a phenomenal change and very, very fast. So I'm putting this out there for other parents in my position who have had this issue and couldn't figure out a way around it. It was an idea I was resistant to because I didn't want to pressure her into actively using the language before she was ready, but it increasingly looks like she'd been ready for a while, but had simply been using the community language to speak to me because a.) she knew I understood it, and b.) she always got what she wanted in it. In the forum I visited, the advice was frequently to insist on the child using the desired language with you once the child was capable of distinguishing the two (or more, I suppose). And she'd been there for months.

Now that the habit has been mostly established for her to speak to me in Spanish (I probably only make her repeat things in English about 5x a day during normal interactions at this point, and I spend all day with her since it's summer), I think it'll be smooth sailing, Spanish-wise, for the foreseeable future. Now about that French... Right now, I've been introducing that to her very gently, whether by watching Frozen or occasionally reading to her from whatever I'm reading in French at the time. With Frozen, we watch that once a week, and I give her the choice between watching it in Spanish and in French; lately, she almost always chooses French.

[PeterMollenburg]

So about a month ago, after a bit of reading on some multilingual parenting forums, I decided to change my approach with my daughter from simply repeating things (that she'd said to me in English) in Spanish to repeating them and asking her to repeat them to me in Spanish. It took a few days for her to get the hang of it, but within a week, we could see a big difference in her willingness to approach me in Spanish.

A month later, she probably speaks to me in about 80% Spanish spontaneously (i.e., without my repeating things in Spanish or repeating things and asking her to repeat them to me in Spanish), compared to a month ago, when she was probably at around 10%!

It was a phenomenal change and very, very fast. So I'm putting this out there for other parents in my position who have had this issue and couldn't figure out a way around it. It was an idea I was resistant to because I didn't want to pressure her into actively using the language before she was ready, but it increasingly looks like she'd been ready for a while, but had simply been using the community language to speak to me because a.) she knew I understood it, and b.) she always got what she wanted in it. In the forum I visited, the advice was frequently to insist on the child using the desired language with you once the child was capable of distinguishing the two (or more, I suppose). And she'd been there for months.

Now that the habit has been mostly established for her to speak to me in Spanish (I probably only make her repeat things in English about 5x a day during normal interactions at this point, and I spend all day with her since it's summer), I think it'll be smooth sailing, Spanish-wise, for the foreseeable future. Now about that French... Right now, I've been introducing that to her very gently, whether by watching Frozen or occasionally reading to her from whatever I'm reading in French at the time. With Frozen, we watch that once a week, and I give her the choice between watching it in Spanish and in French; lately, she almost always chooses French.

I've been doing something similar with my daughter. I am not getting the dramatic results you are Finny (which is excellent btw!), but there has been improvement. While reading to her i will often choose a word a page for her to repeat, the other night i took it further. With a small childrens book of say 2 to 3 lines per page over 10 pages, I had her repeat the whole book to me. I would say 2 to three syllables and she would repeat them. As I don't want her to despise French, I took a very 'optional' approach, telling her she could try and if she didn't like it she could stop at any time. I asked her a couple of times if she wanted to stop. I was quite impressed actually, and ensured plenty of praise followed

[gatto di ghiaccio]

I don't have children at this point and I don't know if I will. But since my husband speaks Italian, he is on board with primarily speaking Italian at home with any children. He doesn't have a lot of time to improve his Italian right now, but hopefully soon we can start speaking it at home more with just the two of us. Since there are not any plans for kids right now, I only have a vague idea of what I would do. I plan for all of my talking to the child from the very beginning to be in Italian (or anything other than English, really) and if I have any media on, it cannot be in English. Hopefully I can stick to this. Surprisingly, my parents are even on board with this and they think it is a great idea to have the children speak Italian at home. Living in the US with nearly all monolingual English speakers in the family (except for my mother-in-law who will also be required to speak Italian to the kids), I have no doubt that they will learn English.

So, for those of you that are raising your children multilingual in a monolingual environment, what kind of reactions do you get from your family members? Is there support from your monolingual family?

I might even end up using Spanish myself with the children and having Italian be the home language. So the kids would be trilingual!