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Showing posts with the label home language strategy

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 ba...
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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: Lit...
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Siblings' language: The fight with the killer language continues...

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Just to recap - in our family we speak THREE languages on daily basis. LingoPapa speaks Urdu with kids, LingoMama in Czech and language of the community is English. ( Parents also speak mostly English with each other). We have successfully established communication channels with the children in the desired languages. This means kiddos only speak to me in my minority language and different minority language with their father. But what started to happen as the children grow .... killer language crept in!!! We noticed that when out of earshot, LittleLingo (4 years old at the time of writing) speaks to his little brother in English (majority language). Sometimes, we had a bizarre feeling when we heard two two "English" kids playing in the living room. I mean who are these people? Right. As we live in English speaking country, LingoPapa and I concurred that we might want to encourage minority languages at home. The reasons for this are: 1) We would like the kids to learn...
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