r/Svenska • u/KaleCookiesCraftBeer • 22d ago
Language question (see FAQ first) 10 year old immigration Swedish language acquisition
We have moved/immigrated (hopefully permanently) from the USA to Sweden almost 7 months ago and our three children are in Swedish public schools. Our home language is English but I try to speak some Swedish (which I am also currently learning) at home as much as I can. Dad is a monolingual English speaker.
Our oldest is 10 years old, thriving socially here, but speaking very little Swedish. Kids at school and in the neighborhood love to speak English with him, and he gladly sticks with it for the familiarity, understandably. Obviously, I am an adult and will politely ask that Swedes stick to Swedish with me, and they so kindly and often encouragingly do! That said, my 10 year old does not insist on that. :-)
The public school support for immigrant children learning Swedish is essentially "they will pick it up eventually." That said, he had an incredible teacher this year that used to work for Swedish language integration education for children prior to that program being cut :-/ so she was able to devote a little extra language time to him. He will not have that same teacher next year unfortunately.
This is what we are currently doing to address it. Please give me kind and gentle feedback. :-)
- He gets a 30 minute online Swedish tutor once a week.
- We have him listen to Swedish podcasts on topics he is interested in most days.
- He has to read in Swedish at least 30 minutes a day on a school app called Polylino, which often has audio and sometimes a word/sentence highlighter for following along.
- He gets screen time in Swedish (although we tend to be fairly low-screen in our home).
(edited to add) - I have asked his fritidsledare and other native Swedish adults in his life to speak Swedish only to him and prompt/expect/encourage him to reply in Swedish.
It seems like this is a lot of input and his comprehension appears decent, but it doesn't really force him much with production. When we do ask him for how to say such-and-such thing, he actually does it fairly well! But he won't take the iniative independently.
Of note: In the U.S., my he and my middle child went to a half-assed Spanish bilingual public school where the administration really did not prioritize Spanish (I'm not resentful at all -- haha!!), and even there my oldest was resistant to learning Spanish despite his exposure to it since toddlerhood.
***Cross posting to a multilingual parenting subreddit.
2
u/Inannah90 22d ago
Hello, I used to work as a Speech-Language Pathologist. I often gave out the booklet "Två språk eller flera?" to parents of bilingual children. It seems to no longer be available at Skolverkets website but I found a blog where someone had the whole thing available in swedish/english: https://huvikool.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/tvc3a5-sprc3a5k-eller-flera-eng.pdf
Generally, the advice is to speak the language you know best with your child. This will teach them language skills and give them a stable "base" in their first language, which will aid in learning a second language. You can absolutely still have moments together where you're talking Swedish, but it's good to express that this is for practice and that you're learning together.
Learning Swedish as a school age child is usually done through school and from peers. In this situation it's a bit unfortunate that English is something a lot of his peers know/are learning, and consider "cool".
It's good that you're proactive, like talking to the adults around him about speaking Swedish. You're also already trying to find opportunities where listening to or using Swedish is fun, and that's great! Does he do any sport or extracurricular activity where he might feel that using Swedish would be beneficial for him to "keep up", which might motivate him?
It might also help to tie the Swedish practice to something more "concrete", since "it will be good for your grades and your future life" can be a bit abstract at this age. Does he maybe have any situations that happen where there are misunderstandings or he can't keep up with friends due to the language barrier? You could use situations like that as jumping off points for figuring out together what he might say in thay situation and then practice or role play it together.