My kids sat at the kitchen table, in the house we rented in Mérida, México for the summer, so excited for their first clase de español. Although my kids understand Spanish completely, we love spending the summers in Mexico to get them to practice more speaking, enrich their vocabulary, and immerse them in the culture. Other summers we have enrolled them in cursos de verano, and they love the day camp atmosphere and meeting new friends. On this trip, however, we decided to hire a teacher to give us language and culture classes.

The first class was mainly talking, letting the teacher get to know the kids and their language abilities. They played games, read stories, sang songs, and she asked them question upon question about their home, friends and school. I was so excited to hear them chattering away! At the end of class, Miss Lulu sat me down and asked me bluntly if anyone ever correct their errors: “Noté que han desarollado unos… hábitos malos en cuestión de gramática” (“I noticed that they have developed some bad habits in their grammar.”)

Uf… I was a little speechless at first. “Um, no tanto.. de vez en cuando…” Never wanting to interrupt a story or thought, and definitely trying hard not to embarrass them, I was usually so happy to hear them speak to me in Spanish that I let errors go. Maybe because we are on the go, or maybe because we are so used to hearing them- both my husband and I are not really accustomed to correcting these same mistakes that they continue to make.. But looking back to how many times they have repeated the same errors over and over, left me rethinking error correction. I had unwillingly let them burn these phrases into their little bilingual heads:

Soy más rápido de Toñito.

¿Puedo tener agua?

Yo me gusta esta quesadilla.

Voy a la baño.

I cringe as I type these, yet not a day goes by without hearing these. I hear how Miss Lulu corrects these easily in class — with no humiliation.

“En español, di ‘soy más rápido QUE Toñito,’ mi amor”.

”Repite: “¿Me das agua por favor?”

Obviously there’s a time and place for correction, and no reason to make hesitant speakers even more self-conscious. Especially for my more sensitive kids, if I were in public, I should make note and remember the lesson for later. We talked about the need to model proper Spanish — or at least give the kids exposure to different native speakers so they aren’t only getting input from me!

Another great strategy is that Miss Lulu has been singing plenty of songs, and playing lots of silly games (that I am attempting to learn!) that practice certain grammar points with endless repetition. One game, where everyone has to escape el lobo, has the kids describing what the lobo is doing in the morning.

“Me estoy bañando”.

“Me estoy vistiendo”.

She also has been using the specific phrases in context during their conversations, practicing both grammar and introducing new vocabulary at the same time. For example, we had a lesson in tropical fruits.

A mí me gusta la pitahaya.. ¿a ti te gusta?

A mí me gustan las huayas… ¿a ti te gustan?

Before this summer, correcting my kids’ mistakes in Spanish simply was not on my radar. Now that I’ve seen different strategies that work, and now that my children’s Spanish really has reached a new level of fluency, I am going to try to start breaking these habits before they are further cemented.

What are some mistakes that your kids have adopted or acquired? How have you been able to break bad language habits?

{Image courtesy of Becky Morales}

Photo by Juria Yoshikawa

More than one study has proven that the best way for children to develop their language and reading skills is through dialogue. This is particularly important for bilingual children. It is a fallacy to think that just sitting your child in front of the television set to watch a program in Spanish or to let them mouse around with a bilingual computer game will expose them to the kind of vocabulary needed to become proficient in the minority language.

So motivate your child to interact verbally with you and you’ll be teaching him the basics of language: phonetics, vocabulary and grammar. These will eventually help him develop more complex skills such as reading and writing.

5 Ways to Enrich Your Child’s Vocabulary:

1) Don’t change the way you normally speak – You don’t have to simplify your vocabulary when you talk to your children. They will get what you’re trying to say even when they don’t understand every single word. I’m pretty sure part of the reason why my daughter’s vocabulary is so extensive for her age is because I always speak to her the way I would if I were talking to, say, my husband.

2) Expand on the conversation - You can do this by responding to your child using longer sentences based on his simple phrases. When my 3-year-old daughter, Vanessa, says something like: “Yo amo mucho a mi perrito”. I say something like: “Yo también lo amo mucho porque es bueno y juguetón. Y, ¿tú por qué lo amas”? I also do this a lot when I read her a book and she points to something in particular. I expand on what she says by asking her to describe the object in more detail or relating it to something we did or saw recently. That always gets her going.

3) Understand that her mistakes are part of her progress – Grammar and pronunciation errors will happen as your child establishes her own knowledge of the language. Maybe she understands the rule about conjugating certain verbs, for example, but she’s not aware of the exceptions – and if you know anything about Spanish, then you know those abound. Just give her the correct model in your response, but don’t make a big deal out of it. My daughter does this constantly with the verb poner. So she’ll say, “Por qué papito ponió su mochila ahí”? And I’ll respond, “Papito puso su mochila ahí para no olvidársela“. I’m pretty sure that, as with other things, she’ll eventually get it.

4) Turn everything into a topic of conversation – Try to provide your children with all kinds of experiences in as many different places as possible and as often as possible. I love taking walks around our neighborhood with Vanessa because just about anything going on out there becomes a topic of conversation and helps expand her vocabulary: children playing basketball, Halloween decorations, the mailman delivering a package, etc.  In fact, it was thanks to one of our walks that she learned the phrase “darle la vuelta a la manzana” which translates as a walk around the block. Now, whenever she wants to take a walk, she says: “Vamos a dar la vuelta a la manzana, mami“.

5) Learn to listen. Being a good listener is such an essential trait, yet not everybody possesses it. My father used to say: “Calla y escucha”. Roughly translated into: “Shut up and listen.” The truth is you learn far more from listening than from talking – especially when it comes to helping your child enrich his vocabulary. It’s absolutely normal for little ones to go off on a tangent when verbalizing an idea or sharing a story with you. Just listen without interrupting and then you’ll be better equipped to ask the kind of questions that will lead to even more conversations.

What are some strategies you use to enrich your child’s vocabulary?

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“My husband and I are raising our sons to be trilingual–I speak to them in Spanish and he speaks to them in German. He will learn English since it is the majority language, and he understands it since my husband and I speak to each other in English. My oldest son, 22 months, has done very well with both languages, and easily moves between Spanish and German. The problem is, when he speaks, he almost always uses the second person singular form, the ‘tu’ form. Rather than saying ‘I want milk’ (‘quiero leche’), he says ‘you want milk’ (‘quieres leche’). My husband says that he makes the exact same error in German. I feel that with more exposure to the language, my son will correct this error on his own. My husband feels that we should tell him the correct way to say the sentence. I have tried my husband’s method, but my son continues to make the same error. Should we address his errors, and if so how?”

Dear Susan,

I think you and your husband are both right.  You’re right that your son will probably get his pronouns straight in a month or two by himself.  If he doesn’t, though, you may want to help him along, as your husband suggests.  But not by correcting him.

If we think about it, what the child has to learn is really pretty complicated.  When we call someone by name, the name doesn’t change. You are Susan whether you’re the speaker or the listener.  But the terms change when it’s “you” and “I.”  You are “I” when you’re the speaker, but you are “you” when your son is the speaker. You call your boy “you”—so he figures he’s “you.” (The other person may be “I.”) Many children go through this stage you describe, although most do it so briefly we don’t notice it.  They overhear others switching “you” and “I,” and get the idea that they need to do it, too. Others, like my grandson (!), stay in that stage almost a year.  My grandson E would say things like “Mommy, change your diaper!” (meaning his diaper, since his mother doesn’t wear them : ).  When he wanted someone not to play with his fire engine, he said “I can’t touch it.  I can’t touch it” in a distressed tone of voice.  The other kids couldn’t figure out that he meant “you” meaning “them,” so it was hard for them to cooperate with him.

I confess I was worried because for some children, this failure to change the point of view in their sentences may be associated with autism. When my grandson was 3, he was speaking a lot and had a tremendous memory, but was still not reversing his pronouns.  So, I’d say, “Oh look, E says, Please Grandma, will you push me in the swing. Can you say that?”  Or, “E says, Grandma, I want you to hug me.  Now you say it.”  (And of course, then I got to hug him.)  For a while, he just repeated my sentences like a parrot, but after a few months, he would hesitate like he noticed something was different, but didn’t know what. I didn’t say, “No, you’re wrong.  Do it like this.”  I just gave him the correct model and tried to make sure he was attending to it.

Eventually, E changed.  We don’t know when. We just noticed that he was reversing the “you” and “I” like everyone else.  Of course, we have no way of knowing whether my little tricks worked or whether he just finally grew out of it. In any event, since we made it like a game, no harm was done.

After a few months, if your son hasn’t changed or if you are worried, you should consult a speech-language therapist.  This isn’t an issue of bilingualism, but it would be good to find an SLT who is familiar with bi- or trilinguals, so he or she doesn’t automatically say the problem comes from hearing too many languages—as often happens.

It is so interesting that your son does this in two languages, and it makes perfect sense.  If I had spoken with you before I wrote my book, I would have asked you if I could put your example in it.  Let me know how it goes.

Best wishes,

Barbara Zurer Pearson

Barbara Zurer Pearson, Ph. D. - A bilingualism expert with over twenty years of research experience in the fields of bilingualism, linguistics, and communication disorders, Pearson is the author of the informative and extremely useful book Raising a Bilingual Child. She is currently a Research Associate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her pioneering work on bilingual learning by infants and children and on language assessment has been published in scholarly journals and in the book Language and Literacy in Bilingual Children. As Project Manager, she contributed to the creation of the innovative DELV tests, culture-fair assessments of language development published by The Psychological Corporation. You can see her answers by going here.

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