One day - One language

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How to increase a minority language exposure It is inevitable that in any multi-lingual family setting one or more languages get more time and focus than the others. Naturally one of the parents or any other adult speaking minority language just gets to spend more time with the kids. Whether a stay at home parent, caregiver or maybe the one that spends a long morning commute with the child. Or there is more relatives around speaking the language. Or simply the adult responsible for passing on the minority language is just not as comfortable with it, gets limited time, cannot naturally hold conversation with a young child or simply gets frustrated to be in it alone.  As the time progresses and LingoPapa works hard away from home to support us, he gets limited time to speak and actively teach children Urdu. It a language that needs more attention in our household. Not only we get the least exposure to it but it also needs more attention due to its Persian script and bad ha
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Majority language mistakes - don't teach, educate!

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We do not speak with our children in the majority language but this does not mean we do not educate them about correct use and grammar of the majority language.

They say that to achieve multilingualism you do not teach your child the minority language as such. You just need to make sure the kid has enough exposure to the language.
But with majority language if I do provide the exposure  (or your situation does it itself) and child is not picking exactly the right influences, I do think that it is my place to educate our kids about the correct way of using the majority language.

When I hear my child using really bad grammar in the majority language ( English in our case), I do step in and correct the child.

And this is how we do it:

The instruction or explanation of the mistake and correct use is done as far as reasonably possible in the minority language and the correct phrase is presented in the majority language. ( e.g English). 

Example of this:

LittleLingo: Yesterday I goed to the shop with my dad!
LingoMama: ***gives the explanation of the mistake/correction in minority language and offers the correct version in the majority language***
To je špatne gramaticky, správně se anglicky řekne 'went', když chceš říct, že jsi šel. Žádné 'goed' ale 'went'. Chápeš?
(Translation: This is wrong grammar, the correct English would be 'went'. It is not 'goed' but 'went'. Do you understand?)
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The same goes for expressing manners in the majority language. This is when I can witness child being rude or using 'street language'.

Example of this:

LittleLingo: Give me your book.
LingoMama: ***gives the explanation of the mistake/correction in minority language and offers the correct version in the majority language***
"This is not really nice say this. Ask him politely. Maybe you could say ' May I have your book,please?'"
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I guess that this approach will prepare us when LingoKids start spending longer time at majority language school and start studying subject in English. We plan to stick to this strategy - explain and discuss school work in minority home languages too. (More on this later)

It also needs to be mentioned that languages vary in the way things are expressed. For example while Czech  is very direct and not exactly abundant in conditionals, in English conditionals are used in well-mannered speech. This bring us onto topic of: "Oh, we don't say this in my language"(More on this later)

However,if you do not speak the majority language or do not have a good grasp of it yourself, I think it is a good idea to mix with native speakers and select suitable television or radio programs with great standard of the language.  ... and we hope that once day our kids will speak English with eloquence of Russel Brand :) 

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