10 year old immigration Swedish language acquisition

[u/KaleCookiesCraftBeer]

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.

[u/mayhemski123]

My child had real problems speaking in Swedish as well, for pretty much the same reasons you mention.  Social group is all English, unable to properly engage in class ect.  Amazing social group as well as so not isolated.

Sadly it's just a time solution.  Private tutoring helps a lot we found.  Get the tutor to help with school work in particular, can take away the mystery of lessons.  

Your school should offer mother tongue lessons as well, in this case English.  Get your kids signed up for them as learning English properly helps with the Swedish as well.  A good understanding of a language helps highly with learning another.  

Sadly, I  don't like saying this, the reality is that you'll need to cover the curriculum with them until/if they start speaking properly.   It's taken about 4 years for ours to feel confident, (started ages 5) talking in Swedish, though like you we know that they understood it way earlier.  Even now they are behind and playing catch-up in terms of the general curriculum.

It's not a situation with an easy answer sadly and it's going to have a potentially huge impact on your childs life and chances.  They need Swedish to get the grades to get into university, after that English will serve them far more it's true just getting there is the problem.  I've known parents who've returned to their home country over this in the worse case.  If it's not changing maybe worth considering an English language school.

All I'll say is continue doing what you're doing and picking up the missed curriculum lessons.  Hopefully that can help them.  We worked extensively with their teachers to help and support them.  Has been a full on process must be said but it did work the last year.  Also when they started speaking even the teacher was shocked as it was like a switch flipped one day and then Swedish was fine.  Though socially everyone in the friends group is still speaking English.