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Showing posts with the label learn a language

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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FUN TIP:Shop & Learn "Shopping List Trick"

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When more than one language is spoken at home, it can be challenging to create as much exposure as possible to your minority languages.  Sometimes even the facilitating adult may feel that it is a real chore or maybe they are not made for all this teaching. Here is one of our little FUN TIP s on how to make it fun and part of your routine. LingoPapa and LingoKids love to go food shopping together. ( Seriously, they are definitely NOT taking after me!!!) LingoPapa came up with a lovely ritual that engages the kids to learn new vocab, revise and also get exposure to the script of their second minority language. I actually noticed that LingoPapa really enjoys it (I did not know how good he is at drawing till now!)  and children love doing it.  And it is really simple - they put together a shopping list.   Using pictures and the desired language - Urdu ( اُردُو)  in this case. LingoPapa's Urdu  اُردُو  shopping list for minority lang...
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