One of the most common questions I get asked when other parents find out I'm raising my kids bilingual is how to go about doing the same thing. The simplest way to answer that question is: speak to your kids in the minority language as often and as early as possible. But the truth is that there are actually certain methods that can be implemented by a family to ensure they're kids grow up speaking more than one language.
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I didn't know anything about these methods before I had children. I just knew we were only going to speak to them in Spanish at home and that they would learn English at school and in their everyday life outside our house.
Eventually, I found out that there's actually a name for the method I planned on using and that there are a few others out there that families like to use.
1. mL@H: Also known as minority language at home. This is the method my family uses and all it means is that we only speak Spanish–the minority language–at home. It doesn't mean that we switch to English when we leave the house, it's just a form of saying that you speak the minority language to the kids and they learn English–the majority language–elsewhere, like in school, for example. We've been using this method since my kids were born and I'm happy to report that at 7 and 4 years old, they're perfectly bilingual!
2. OPOL: This is the most popular method out there and it stands for one parent-one language, which means that one parent speaks the majority language and the other one the minority. But it can also mean that each parent speaks a minority language to the child when raising them trilingual. The great thing about this method is that kids are exposed to both languages at the same time from the very beginning.
3. T&P: Or time and place. When using this method, parents choose a specific time (such as time of day, one day a week, the weekends) or a specific place (at the grandparent's house, at daycare) to expose their kids to the minority language.
