Teach natural English to your child at home ✨ *with subtitles*

If you have a young child at home and you are helping them to learn English, but you are having a hard time getting your child to reply in English, to respond to you in English, this video is for you. I'm going to answer a question from a mom who sent me a question here on YouTube. If you have any questions about your own family situation, you're teaching English to your baby or your toddler or your preschooler or even an older child, write your question down below this video in the comments and I will do my best to help you. If you are super serious about teaching English to your children at home, I have a program for parents which you can learn about underneath this video as well. And because this time of the year is full of different holidays, I have created a fun little pack of coloring sheets for your child to learn some English vocabulary with you related to the different holidays for this season. And you can download that for free from the link down below as well. You will also be added to my weekly email newsletter where I send free English lessons every week. Okay, I hope that you enjoy this video and that you learn a lot. So this mom said, excuse me, I'm from Taiwan and I'm the only person in my family who can speak English. That means I'm also the only one teaching and speaking English to my son. He's four years old now. I started talking to him in English when he was a baby. Not all day long, but in the way you suggested. Narrating what I was doing in English and setting aside specific times such as during bath time or play time. I feel that my son understands me most of the time, but it's difficult to get him to respond in full English sentences. He picks up some words here and there, but most of the time he answers me in Chinese. Sometimes I give him choices. For example, do you want milk or soy milk for breakfast? But even then he usually replies in Chinese. I try to keep speaking English even if he responds in Chinese, though occasionally I give up and switch to Chinese as well. Once I encouraged him to say a complete sentence such as, I want to eat ice cream. When he said it correctly, I gave him ice cream as a reward. He did it perfectly and he also understood how to replace ice cream with other words like apples or cookies or even change eat to drink. I feel that I need to keep finding new ways to motivate motivate him to speak in English sentences. For example, I sometimes ask him to do me a favor by telling his dad in English that he looks like a piggy. My son thinks it's funny and is happy to pass along the message in English. Could you suggest what I should do when my son replies to me in Chinese? Should I just keep speaking in English and not push him or are there other strategies I could use to encourage him to be more willing to speak in English? So I think that many people can relate to this story and if not, there might be times when you will have a similar problem with your with your child. To answer her question, yes, there are strategies that parents can use to encourage their children to speak more English and I'll share those strategies with you in just a minute. But my first instinct here, my concern would first be, so you know when when kids don't respond in English, I'm saying English but in whatever language that we want them to speak, when kids are not responding, it's generally because they are not confident yet or they just don't have the skills yet. They can't do it yet. They don't fully know how to. There are always going to be those kind of kids out there who are maybe just a little bit more naturally confident and are able to to speak without much prompting. They just love trying. But I think more often for most kids who are learning a new language that is less comfortable for their parents, that's not their community language, they are going to need a lot of time and care to build their confidence. These children are going to need to know that their parent is not going to be frustrated with them if they get something wrong, that their parent is still going to be connected with them, is still going to love them if they can't get something right in the language. In order to try anything new, we need to feel a sense of security. We need to feel safe enough to be able to try something new. I think most of us think, of course, of course my child feels safe with me. Of course my child is safe to practice a new language. I'm their mother. I'm their parent. Of course they are safe. But I think that sometimes children don't know. Children don't know this. They can feel our anxieties more than we think that they can. They can feel that we really want them to do something. They can feel our frustration with them. And for children, often even a little bit of pressure is really off-putting. And they would rather do the comfortable thing, which is to speak the comfortable language that they're used to using with you. Your child does not want to disappoint you. And so if your child feels that there's any chance that they are going to make you feel disappointed or frustrated, they're not going to want to speak the language. They're not going to want to take that chance. Your approval is very, very important to your children. And they do not want to disappoint you. And I feel this, mom. I understand it's not easy to not show our frustration in these moments or to not show our disappointment in these moments because we're working really hard and we want our children to dare to practice English with us. It seems like a pretty simple thing to do. However, for a child, it's often not a simple thing. And it can feel like there is a lot of importance being placed on this that children will reject sometimes. So before we work on or go over any of these strategies that we can use to help our kids speak more English, my first question would be, does your child feel confident and secure to try speaking English? As parents, we're going to do the best that we can to try to remove any pressure, any feelings of disappointment or frustration. Remove all of those things from our English time, from our English playtime, from our routines. We'll try our best to remove those negative feelings or to try to hide them as best that we can. Practicing English at the beginning should just be fun, should only be a time of exploration and enjoyment with no pressure. And if we think that our children, our child just doesn't yet have the skills to be able to speak to us or respond to us in English, we just have to keep going. We need to continuously give them words, give them vocabulary, narrate our day in front of them, interact with them in English, lots of playtime, just like this mom says that she's doing. Maybe she wants to increase that even more and make sure that during these interactions, the child is understanding and having fun and feeling connected. If the child is not understanding, is not having fun, we need to slow down the pace a little bit. Keep the positivity and the energy high, but slow down the pace of what we're trying to teach. She says that she's switching into Chinese sometimes and that's not necessarily a bad thing. If she's doing quick translations to help her child follow the conversation and understand, that's not a bad thing. It would probably be better if she could use other ways to explain what she's saying, like gestures, pictures, actions. But if her child is really not understanding, it's perfectly fine to do some quick translations to help her child follow the conversation and enjoy the conversation. Alright, so let's talk about some strategies that you can use to help your child speak or respond in English. Again, I'm not sure that this mom in this situation is ready for these strategies. I'm not sure that her child is ready for these strategies. It sounds like maybe the thing that they should be concentrating on right now is building his skills and building his confidence. But if you are in a situation where you feel like your child does have the skill level and does have the confidence in English to be able to reply back to you, you can try something that's called the minimal grasp strategy. And this is where you gently, gently pretend like you don't exactly understand. So you don't say, what? What did you say? I don't understand you. But instead, you might say, I'm sorry, what was that? Sorry, what did you say? Sorry, I wasn't paying attention. I was, I couldn't hear you. What did you say? And very gently by asking this question in English, your child understands that they should be replying in English. But it's a very gentle nudge. Not, what did you say? It's not aggressively misunderstanding your child. The next strategy that can work really well is called expressed guess. So this is when your child says something to you in your first language during English time when they should be speaking English. And so you respond to them in English in a way that you show them you understand them. But you need a little bit more information and they should give it to you in English. So for example, your child might say in your first language, are we going to grandma's house? And you could say back to them in English, are we going where? Are we going where? Are we going where? So you're showing that you understood your child's question. But to get the information that they want, they should, they should tell you in English. So your, your four-year-old might say, mama, where's my ball? Mama, where's my ball? In your first language. And so in English, you could say back to your child, where's what? Where's what? I'm sorry, what are you looking for? I'm sorry, what are you looking for? We're not ignoring our child. We're not making our child feel badly for speaking the first language. We want them to communicate with us, right? But we are giving them a little hint that they should be trying to say what they're saying in English. And maybe they won't, maybe they won't decide to speak English. So we have to keep trying these strategies again and again, trying not to put any pressure on them, trying to keep the situation light. And finally, one more strategy that I'll share with you today is repetition. So your child says something in the first language and you repeat exactly what they said in English. Mama, I want an apple. I want an apple. They say this in your first language. And so you say, mama, I want an apple in English. Not making them feel bad, not making them feel like they're punished or anything like that. But it simply becomes a game where they're receiving the vocabulary in English. If you enjoyed that, make sure you watch this video next, where I will teach you all about how to teach naturally spoken English to your child at home. I'll see you soon.