Arsthbt

We are a family living in an English speaking country with a 3 year old. My wife and I speak both French and English and we are committed to raise our kid bilingual in both languages. So far our approach has been to expose him only to French since he will eventually pick up English from the outside world :) So his day care is in French, we (and our family) only speaks to him in French and the cartoons he watches are in French… as a result he only understands and speaks French right now. We are happy about this, but are starting to be concerned that he does not understand/speak English, especially when we have playdates with other kids who only speak English, we don't want him to feel that he is different from them.

Our long term plan for us is to follow a strict OPOL approach (my wife will only speak English and I will speak French to him). Should we start the OPOL approach now? Or Should we continue with only French for a few more years? Also we are planning him on sending him to a bilingual school English/French, so I am not concerned about him feeling different at school, my concern is mostly with our friends kids and other family members who don't speak French. I also have the irrational fear that he will not learn English well… which I know is very irrational, since English is the main and only language where we live.

You probably need to get started on English exposure soon. At some point he wants to play with other kids and unless you live in a French speaking enclave, that will happen in English. I suggest moving either daycare, or cartoons, or some TV/audio-books to English. I wouldn't worry too much about overloading your child: young kids have a remarkable ability to learn and absorb languages.

Provided he integrates normally into the local society, English will become the dominant language over time. I don't think the OTOL approach is particularly useful: we always spoke strictly non-English at home with the kids: It's best to maximize native speaker immersion in the non-local language and leverage any opportunity you can find.

Bi-lingual schools are a double edged sword. You really need to assess the school, their capabilities and their approach to bi-lingual education. We have seen example where it worked well (a good one was: alternate instruction language every month) and others were counterproductive (taught by non-native speakers).

We found that the trickiest part to get right are the formal parts of reading and writing: spelling, genders, grammar, etc. So any formal schooling in these area would be helpful provided they can be done well and approbriatley.

If you want a child to be truly bilingual, you have to start with both languages at the very beginning.

The important thing is the separation of languages. This can be accomplished in multiple ways. The two most common are:

• OPOL - "one parent one language" - instead of the parent, any person with significant presence in the child's life works as well, such as a babysitter.




• mL@H - "minority language at home" - when at home, speak to the child in the minority language, when outside, use majority language

Some people use odd and even days, etc.

Even with a very strict adherence to whatever language separation technique you use, most bilingual (and multilingual) children go through a phase where they mix languages.

This is usually just a phase, and insisting on your language separation technique helps getting over it.

I think you are in danger of already having left this too late. Children learn language by making sense of what they hear before they start to speak at all. To be truly bilingual, and "accent-free", they need to hear both languages from a very early age. If your child has been isolated from native English, he may well become a very fluent English speaker, but with an obvious French accent.

As an anecdote, one of my work colleagues in the UK was French and very fluent in English but with a strong French accent, and so was his wife. They had both worked in many different countries world wide, and their plan for starting a bilingual family was to work in the UK until the children were around school age.

The parents spoke French at home but they allowed the children "full access" to spoken English from birth. By the time the children were four or five they had completely natural English accents, could communicate in both languages, and clearly understood that there were two separate languages. Amusingly, it was obvious from what they said themselves that they didn't understand why their parents wouldn't speak English to them when they were perfectly well able to do so!

Having "programmed" their ears and brain in both native English and native French, the second stage of the plan was to move back to France, and start their formal education in a "naturally monolingual" French environment. Formal study of English could come later, but the important foundation of hearing and speaking native English was already in place.