Help navigating trilingual environment!
Oct 8, 2017 23:46:20 GMT 9
Post by Aisling on Oct 8, 2017 23:46:20 GMT 9
Hi everybody and Adam!
I posted in the Introduce Yourself thread to say hi and briefly outline my concerns, but I was hoping that if I'm a little more specific you might have concrete advice to offer!
We live in Brussels and our Brussels Sprout is 2y4m and currently exposed to three different languages - English with me, French with his Papa and Dutch in part-time creche (full-time school in January). My husband and I speak English together and it is our home language. Apart from that we have adopted the OPOL approach when we are each alone with Sprout. Sprout's dominant language is French, which isn't surprising as we adopted him at 17 months from an all French environment. He picked up understanding in the other two languages pretty quickly but French remains dominant. Many of our friends are French speakers and, as we live in Belgium, we are closer to his French speaking family who we see a lot more than his English speaking family. So currently his only source of English is me and the balance in languages is EN & NL are ml and FR is the ML. I expect that might change when he starts school in January and Dutch takes over as ML.
It's important to both myself and my husband that Sprout and his little sister (due in December) both speak English fluently. Especially as we will travel to Ireland a few times a year and nobody there speaks French. We don't want them to be the odd-cousins-out.
Until now I've responded to Sprout regardless of which language he addresses me in, as long as I understand what he's saying. Did I make a mistake in responding to him when he speaks French, as now he knows I speak French he won't make the effort in English? Can I fix this now and how? Is it really brutal to suddenly stop understanding him until he uses the English word?
All and any advice much appreciated!
Aisling
I posted in the Introduce Yourself thread to say hi and briefly outline my concerns, but I was hoping that if I'm a little more specific you might have concrete advice to offer!
We live in Brussels and our Brussels Sprout is 2y4m and currently exposed to three different languages - English with me, French with his Papa and Dutch in part-time creche (full-time school in January). My husband and I speak English together and it is our home language. Apart from that we have adopted the OPOL approach when we are each alone with Sprout. Sprout's dominant language is French, which isn't surprising as we adopted him at 17 months from an all French environment. He picked up understanding in the other two languages pretty quickly but French remains dominant. Many of our friends are French speakers and, as we live in Belgium, we are closer to his French speaking family who we see a lot more than his English speaking family. So currently his only source of English is me and the balance in languages is EN & NL are ml and FR is the ML. I expect that might change when he starts school in January and Dutch takes over as ML.
It's important to both myself and my husband that Sprout and his little sister (due in December) both speak English fluently. Especially as we will travel to Ireland a few times a year and nobody there speaks French. We don't want them to be the odd-cousins-out.
Until now I've responded to Sprout regardless of which language he addresses me in, as long as I understand what he's saying. Did I make a mistake in responding to him when he speaks French, as now he knows I speak French he won't make the effort in English? Can I fix this now and how? Is it really brutal to suddenly stop understanding him until he uses the English word?
All and any advice much appreciated!
Aisling
Reading Adam's book you learn that the two 'core' principles for our bilingual monkeys to be exactly that (i.e. bilingual) is exposure to the ml and need to use it/speak it, so your Sprout (love it!) is more French dominant, and he realizes you can speak French, probably he won't find the 'need' to use English. Chances are it's not going to be easy to get him to speak to you in English, but see it as going to the gym after a long time without exercising: of course it's going to be pretty difficult (and probably discouraging!) trying to do that at the beginning, but if you stick to it, slowly but surely you start seeing results. 
