TL;DR: Sometimes the best way to encourage fluency in a minority language is to brainwash your child to worship the culture surrounding it. 🤷🏻♀️
It’s the age-old question for multilingual families: how do we get our child to continue speaking to us in the minority language?
My family lived abroad from the time my kids were toddlers until they were in kindergarten. During that time, they had lost most of their Korean language skills and English became their primary language. When we returned to Korea, the reverse happened. The kids were fluent within a month, and their play language had shifted to Korean within a couple months. After a while, I began to wonder if our kindergarteners might lose their English completely, despite my efforts to speak English exclusively at home.
Kindergarten to early-grade school seems to be a notoriously challenging time for kids to maintain fluency in a minority language. It’s an age when they start spending more time away from home. It’s when they become more social in the majority language. It’s when they want to fit in (or not stick out). They’re old enough to have a language preference, but not old enough to know that multilingualism can change the trajectory of their life, like being able to access multiple versions of the internet! 😲
So we had to take a different approach to embracing English, the minority language in Korea. We started associating English with all things wonderful and amazing: Trader Joe’s Jingle Jangle, the olive bar at Whole Foods, Netflix, trick-or-treating, and any other really fun, engaging, or sugar-infused activity.
Focus on fun traditions that you can’t find locally
We try to keep the English magic alive at home by celebrating the traditions that I know the kids will take to. I talk up American culture a lot because that’s what I know. I focus on fun traditions like easter egg hunts and gingerbread house decorating (after reading Gingerbread Baby, of course) that the kids typically wouldn’t have access to in Korea. I’ve arranged trick-or-treating with neighbors in our apartment complex, which was a big hit with the kids. I made a tradition of having cinnamon rolls for Christmas brunch. Whatever your tradition, it has to be something that’s appealing to your kid at their age. Keeping the language and culture alive takes more effort to plan and money to source, but if that’s not parenthood in a nutshell, I don’t know what is.
Find something that will pique their interest and hone in on it in your target language
Your child will likely have an obsession at any given time. However short-lived or long-lasting their thing may be, it’s something that you can absolutely harness to encourage interest in the language.
For my daughter, her thing is anything strange and mysterious. So I share fascinating stories about places in the US that I know will pique her interest like the Winchester Mystery House and House on the Rock, then we watch a short documentary about it. When we lived overseas, we did the opposite. We talked up Korea and bought uniquely Korean toys and showed them Korean TV shows. If your English-leaning kid is obsessed with Transformers, replace them with Hello Carbot (and show them the TV show in Korean). If they’re starting to grow out of Duplo Legos, they might be ready for iRingo blocks.
Go deep into one topic or theme
To bring English stories to life and make them more memorable, I like to do a deep dive into a certain topic or book. It drives the story home, and research shows that repetition is a key factor in learning a language. We typically read a famous middle grade book together, then watch its film and stage adaptations (bonus points if the story has been made into a musical; singing also supports foreign language learning). We always start with the book, then progress to more stimulating and sensory-engaging mediums. A few of the books that we’ve started exploring in this way include:
Matilda: We read the book, listened to the Broadway musical album, then watched the movie musical. We couldn’t get tickets to the musical in Seoul before it closed, unfortunately.
Coraline: We read the book, then watched the animation. (It would’ve been nice to read the graphic novel, too, between the book and the movie)
Charlotte’s Web: We read the book, then watched the movie. We plan to visit Sangha Farm, the popular farm-themed attraction, to round out our experience.
Likewise, if your child is learning Korean, introduce them to the washed out fairy who’s stuck in a public bathhouse by reading Jamsootang Seonyeonim (잠수탕 선녀님 and listening to the musical soundtrack. That’s the easy part. Now that you’ve hyped it up, you’ll have to follow through. Bring the kids to Korea to watch Jamsootang on stage (don’t worry—there’s no nudity). Then take them to a dinky neighborhood spa (or to Cimer, if you’re feeling fancy and your kids are in first grade or higher. It’s a convenient half-day stop en route to and from the airport).
For us, bringing the language to life means traveling to the US to visit family once a year. Actually going to Disneyland and overpaying for mediocre theme park food. Visiting these strange private museums and paying 20 dollars for admission. It’s a big price to pay for the even bigger gift of bilingualism. 🥲
Have no shame or qualms or reservations about it
This is one of the biggest challenges about speaking a minority language—for parents and children both. When you speak to your kids in English in Korea (or Korean in the West, for that matter), people will stare. Whether good or bad, you immediately trigger a slew of biases. I remember being embarrassed by my parents speaking loudly to me in Korean when I was younger and living in a small midwestern town in the US where we already stuck out (and this was before BTS and Squid Game, mind you). Whenever I feel a bit self-conscious about speaking English to my kids around others, I think about my Japanese friend who married a Korean man and resides in Korea. She has a decent command of Korean, but she only speaks Japanese with her son. She speaks Japanese to him before strangers. She spoke Japanese to him even at the height of the Japan Boycott in Korea. And guess what? Her son is perfectly bilingual.
If you’re lucky, it’s a battle. If not, it’s an uphill battle
I should note, it’s definitely easier to become enamored with English in Korea because of the national obsession here (my daughter is starting to realize that it’s actually cool to be fluent English here). The Korean language may not have the same clout in other countries, but things are slowly changing. It’s easier to find Korean imports, restaurants, language classes and events like Kpop festivals in the US and Europe.
Ya I know, it’s a bit excessive. Sometimes when I’m unraveling magical stories of America—homes with real chimneys and Mexica(ish) restaurants where you can dictate your order in real-time as it’s being made—I can see my husband rolling his eyes in the corner. My kids will have a very dimensional idea of America and the rest of the English-speaking world until they are old enough to read The People’s History of the United States. Perhaps I am setting my kids up for disappointment, but in the very least, I hope they’ll be able to express their disenchantment in English. 😏
I don’t have all the answers, but this is what’s working for us at this point and I hope it can be a starting/commiserating point for someone going through the same thing. Hang in there. We just need to get through this phase between when the kids develop a preference for the majority language and when they realize that it’s actually pretty neat to speak and live in two or more cultures.
Do you have any tried and true tips for getting a child to embrace multilingualism? Please share them in the comments for everyone to see!