Stages of Second Language Acquisition - Speech Emergence

Ready to start learning Spanish at home with your child?Join Mighty Bilingual Families  and start today!We know how challenging parenting can be... add raising a bilingual child to the equation... Wow. That's a lot! but we can do it. Together, we're creating a community of bilingual families!This is a really fun stage, because in most cases there's a one day turn around where all these words seem to click and your child or you start producing full sentences in Spanish. Again, it's important to note that the phrases that start being produced during this period come directly from all the input or all the language that has been absorbed during the last two stages. In order to help your child produce sentences during this stage, ask why questions. Make sure that the questions that you ask have a response that requires words your child is familiar with. In other words, don't ask, "Why did world war II happen," if you've never talked about anything related to World War II. You can ask why questions about your daily routines or why questions about the game you're playing, and perhaps you've played this Lego game multiple times and they have enough vocabulary in their bank account again to produce those responses.During this stage, because the responses are a little bit more elaborate, it's very possible that your child will make grammatical mistakes and it is crucial not to correct these mistakes. If you remember when you were a child you made plenty of mistakes and it was only through listening to the correct way of saying these sentences or the correct way of conjugating verbs that you were able to eventually use the correct form. Here's a way to correct without correcting. Example, your child says, "I no like ice cream." Instead of saying, "No, it's don't, I don't like ice cream," instead of saying that, you can say, "Oh, I know, I don't like ice cream either." You're basically giving them the correct way of saying it in your communication without correcting what it is they're saying. You're simply giving them the right way of saying it within your own phrases.** Application- Ask questions which require a simple sentence response - Why?- How?- Explain?