Reply to If your child goes to weekend language schools of your heritage (Chinese, Korean, etc.)

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
You have to force her to respond in your native language otherwise it's a waste of time and money, and she won't get the feedback she needs. Also get her books, movies and songs in that language, buy her toys and cute stuff from that country, make her favorite dishes from that cuisine, integrate it completely in your life.

Can you do playdates with other children from that class? Can you invest in a vacation in your home country, to show her how people live there?

It's difficult, I know. 
It's been really hard for the children to respond in our native language, especially since school has started again. This year I have decided to stand firm, because other parents with older children have guaranteed that this is the ONLY way a child can truly progress. We also have a hard time doing playdates or even talking to other adults, because everyone is so busy with other things, but occasionally it works out.
This summer I insisted that the kids only read in our native language, and they made great strides - they were happy at their own progress, which is the best motivator!

Good luck. 
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Trilingual PP here. What the PP above wrote is exactly what I'm talking about. If you turn your home into an immersion environment, you can teach your kids anything. My kids know that they can't speak to me in anything but Spanish or French or I'm going to either ask them Whaaa? or make them repeat it in Sp/Fr. I only read to them in Sp/Fr, etc. I only play media (movies, radio, etc) in Sp/Fr. They spend almost no time interacting with other kids in Sp/Fr, but they speak both well enough. To learn a language to a high level, a child needs to spend about 20-30% of waking time hearing the language. And if you want your child to be able to use the language actively, and not just passively, you need to insist on responses in the languages you're teaching, or else the child will take the easier path--as will all of us.[/quote]

We are raising our children trilingually as well and we have found that "home as an immersion environment" stance works only up to a certain age.  Kids start school eventually and their environment shifts to English.  All language is situational, and as committed as I was to only speaking my language to my children, making them translate their homework from English to Russian or Arabic to me (when they know I am perfectly fluent in English) was too contrived.  Plus if you want your children to excel in American public schools, you will need to support their literacy in English - you'd want them to do well and better than well at school, and because time is limited, every minute spent speaking one language takes from the other. It's a balancing act.  If they ask you to take then to a local library, will you say no? If they ask you for a story in English from the book that interests them, will you say no? If they want to go to the movies or to a theatre, will you say no? We don't. We find it pointless to pretend that English all around us does not exist.

This is when it helps to have an actual community of Russian and Arabic speakers around us - because we know whatever time we give to English at home will be balanced by their friends, playdates, relatives, other Russian/Arabic-speaking parents etc.  When you have a community around you, you no longer feel like it's you against the world.  The world, though, always wins, and I know my child's dominant language will be English.  I'm fine with that because I want him to excel in this country, where he was born and where he will likely stay. [/quote]

I'm the first PP quoted, and yes, it's always been a fine balancing act. My children are 12 and 7.

It is interesting that we three have different things that save us. 
For us it's reading - the kids love to read. Despite not having a large community of speakers, and despite having only 2.5 hours on Saturdays to practice their native language in a school environment, which is really not much at all, they are getting vocabulary, grammar, syntax, a sense of culture, history and geography, from the books they gobble up. Since they read so much in both languages, they don't lose anything on the English front. I curate their book selections to include the best children's literature.
We've taken to watching the news in our native language, and that's also helped with rapid-fire conversation and also with general culture.

As for the rest, well, I can't help it when they go out to play with the neighbor kids and revert to English. It's hard to translate every homework in order to discuss it with me, but after this immersive summer, my 12 year old has gotten much better at it.
I lived most of my life in countries OTHER than my native lands, so... I understand the struggle. 
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