Teaching english to my nephew

[questionquest74]

Hi! I’m about to start babysitting my almost 6 month old nephew a few times a week and I would really like for him to be fluent in english by the time he starts school. I’m the only person in my family that’s fluent (we live in Spain) and I was wondering how to best approach this.

I’m thinking of starting to talk to him exclusively in english from now on, as well as putting videos/movies in english even as background noise to get him accustomed to hearing it, but I don’t know if that will be enough as neither of his parents (who are with him for the majority of the day) speak the language.

Does anyone has some advise?

 

[alearose]

@questionquest74 Background noise is not a good idea. That has been found to impair language development at that age. You speaking English, singing songs, reading books, etc. is all great.

Source on background noise impacts: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5784839/#:~:text=Further%2C%20background%20noise%20may%20distract,momentary%20impairments%20in%20speech%20understanding.

 

[questionquest74]

@alearose I had no idea about background noise not being good for development so thank you for informing me!!

 

[angelbo737]

@questionquest74 He can get a good foundation in the language if you speak to him a lot (read books to him, narrate your day, talk a lot out loud to him). Ideally you’d be seeing him a few times a week for it to stick. Human input is the best so I agree you can skip background noise and tv etc for the first couple of years.

Also make sure the parents want this. There’s a myth that bilingual kids have delayed speech. It might seem that way if you only assess them in one language. So if the milestone is 10 words he might be able to say 7 in Spanish and 3 in English. But they might have less words in Spanish than monolingual Spanish kids, but they catch up by kindergarten. There are so many cognitive benefits to being bilingual though and if learns from a young age he’ll have a native accent which is awesome.

 

[questionquest74]

@angelbo737 Thank you for the advise!! And yeah both of his parents want him to be fluent, they just don’t know the language so they can’t really contribute much to him learning it.

 

[godfavorme]

@angelbo737 When I tried to speak Bengali to my parents as a toddler and they mentioned it to my Bangladeshi babysitter, she apologized for speaking Bengali in front of me. My parents had to assure her that they weren't mad, they were just wondering what I was saying.