How to get your child to answer you in your L2

The Gist

Your child needs to feel like speaking the “other language” is a useful exercise.

Telling your child to “speak to me in ____” probably won’t work.

Playing Dumb often will.

At my house, we are a bilingual household: I speak only English to the kids and my husband speaks only Spanish (an approach creatively called: One-Parent-One-Language). 

At around age 3, which is when kids start “sorting” things, my kids realized that there were two systems happening in our house: Spanish for Dad and English for Mom. They ALSO realized that Dad spoke English, and that most people around them only spoke English.

So, they did what most kids would do: they tried to simplify their lives by speaking only English.

This was a funny and interesting time in our house, because my husband and I knew that we wanted the kids to be bilingual Spanish/English speakers. 

And I knew that in order to do that, they had to have MEANINGFUL opportunities to speak Spanish. 

Because we live in the US, meaningful opportunities for English speaking are all around us. And while we do live in a place where many people speak Spanish, it’s not the majority language.

So, we had to strategize. And here’s what we did. It took a teeny bit of effort and a little bit of time. (But it was easy and it worked.)

Whenever the kids would speak to their Dad in English, he would pretend not to understand.

Yep - he would “Play Dumb”. It’s a thing.

So, they would say in English: “Dad, I see a cat”, and he would say - playfully - in Spanish, “que?”; and they would try again in English, “a cat”. And he would say - playfully again - “que?”, and then they would say in Spanish “un gatito!” 

BINGO! They were using Spanish to make sure their Dad understood what they were saying.

If the kids couldn’t remember how to say something, my husband would give them the words for what they wanted to say and wait for them to repeat it.

The idea was not to test their knowledge. So, there was no “how do you say that in Spanish?” going on. The idea is to USE it and to LEARN it.

Playing Dumb really worked for us. Fast forward a few years, and my kids (who also go to a bilingual school -- more on that next time) are fully bilingual and biliterate. But it started with that developmental stage at age 3 where we playfully insisted that they had a meaningful reason to use both languages.

If you’re in a bilingual household, what’s worked for you? How are you creating meaningful opportunities for using the “minority” language in your family? I’d love to hear.

All my best -

Gabriele