Top Tips for Helping Your Child Learn a New Language

**Collaborative post**

Being bilingual opens up a variety of opportunities for young people. For instance, they may have broader career options, chances to travel and meet new people who speak a different language. It also helps them learn more about other cultures, helping them to respect peoples’ differences. However, the thought of helping your child learn a second language might feel quite daunting, especially if you are not bilingual yourself. The good news is, you don’t have to be able to speak another language in order to help and encourage your child to learn it. Here’s some advice from a prep school near Hertfordshire.

Start by labelling everything around the house in the chosen language; the front door, the fridge, the wardrobe. Constant exposure to these words will help your child learn basic nouns that they can eventually incorporate into conversations. 

Flashcards also work well too – you could hold up a card with the foreign word facing you and the English word facing your child and then ask them to tell you what the word is in the other language. Having someone to study with in this manner will help prevent boredom, so even if you feel like you’re not doing much, your support will mean everything to them. If you are not available to help them study due to other commitments, you could suggest that they invite a school friend round and allow them to study together.

Next time you’re planning a road trip somewhere, you could suggest to your child that they prepare a music playlist with some songs in the language they’re trying to learn. You could also watch foreign movies with English subtitles so that your child gets used to hearing the language spoken in casual conversation. What’s more, there are plenty of games and apps that they could play to familiarise them with keywords and phrases. 

Books are another fantastic option, especially if your child is already a keen reader. They will contain vocabulary, various sentence structures and appropriate grammar, providing a great foundation for learning a new language. They can always have a dictionary to hand so that if they don’t know what a particular word means, they can look it up, you can also look for best online language tutors for some additional help.

Encourage your child to take a ‘little and often’ approach to their language learning. If they spend one hour a week revising the language, they may have forgotten much of what they learn by the following week. Fifteen minutes of practice each evening will help them with their memory.

For more ideas on how to help your child learn a second language, you should speak to their teachers. They will be able to suggest some age-appropriate learning resources or may even have access to contacts at schools abroad that could put your child in touch with a pen pal.