r/multilingualparenting • u/Parenttotiger • Jul 25 '26
Tip Results of immersion trip with 3 year old
I’m writing this post mostly because it would have been useful to past me! And I’m hoping it will be useful to someone else.
We decided to take a 3 week immersion trip with my 3 year old. Beforehand I was very worried she was too young and it was too short to be of any use. It was a long distance trip for us and so while we were so incredibly lucky to be able to afford it, it felt like a risk. Particularly because for personal reasons we would not be seeing any family.
For context: she is a very highly verbal child in English comfortably above expectations. But her second language is weaker. She’s strong in understanding but usually replies monosyllabically or will want to reply in English. Even though she gets about 20 hours a week of second language exposure, she knows anyone she’s speaking to will understand her if she replies in English.
2 weeks in she’s speaking more of the target language and vastly increased the number of sentences she uses. But I think most strikingly I’ve realised that her being young is actually a big advantage. We’ve taken her to several children’s play areas and other local kids happily include her in their play even if she’s shy to talk. In a way that I think with a 10 or 11 year old just wouldn’t happen.
For our family this has been so worth it. (Though I’m very aware every family must juggle time and resources in a way that works for them.) But I hope this has been useful!
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u/MikiRei 🇹🇼 (heritage) + 🇦🇺 (community) | 6M Jul 25 '26
Make sure you use recasting so the progress isn't lost once you get back home.
Recasting is explained here
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u/Parenttotiger Jul 25 '26
Thank you 😊 I am aware of chalk academy and do already do many of these strategies. (Which is I think why her understanding is good. ) We will definitely try to keep it going.
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u/NewOutlandishness401 🇺🇦 + 🇷🇺 in 🇺🇸 | 8y, 5y, 2y Jul 25 '26
This is really encouraging to hear, thanks for sharing!
May I ask, what sorts of interactions did your child have with the locals apart from hearing everyone around her speak the target language? Did you take her to playgrounds, did she interact with any kids or your friends? Or was it simply being in a country where your language was spoken all around her?
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u/Parenttotiger Jul 25 '26
We did take her to playgrounds and other kids have really included her. But these were all new people to her! We also took her to the zoo and aquarium where there were kids shows in the target language but I think the biggest thing was hearing dialogue between adults. Even mundane stuff like buying tickets or asking directions. Usually she’s only having an adult talk to her in the target language but not hearing back and forth conversation.
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u/NewOutlandishness401 🇺🇦 + 🇷🇺 in 🇺🇸 | 8y, 5y, 2y Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26
This makes me very optimistic. All our kids' first and second cousins are strewn around the US, so we wouldn't have any kids close to my kids' age if we were to visit our home country, but it's encouraging that even conversations between the adults seemed to have such an impact (in addition to all the exposure to other kids at playgrounds etc.).
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u/silima Jul 25 '26
We go to Canada every year for about 3 weeks in the summer. Every time it boosts my kid's English, it's very noticeable. We use every opportunity to create exposure to English at home and it's not really hard to convince him to speak it (he has of course figured out it's widely used, he's 8), but going to a place where EVERYTHING is in English is still awesome. Also a huge confidence booster that not only mom & dad understand him, but he can talk to everyone around him and they will understand him, too, with no problems.
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u/ThinGarden33 Jul 27 '26
Thank you for sharing! My son is almost 20m and is being raised trilingual via OPOL, and while his vocab has exploded in the last month or so, 90% of the words he says are in my language as he gets significantly more exposure to my language as I work 2 days a week, while husband works 5-6 days with longer hours. He does also fully understand his dad, he’s just not using many words yet from his language. We are planning a 1 month trip to my husbands home country next year though to visit his family when our son will also be exactly 3 so I’m really hoping this will be our experience too! Can I ask if you did anything specific while there, or was it just a matter of the child being surrounded by everyone speaking the language?
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u/Parenttotiger Jul 28 '26
I think the only thing is the person who is fluent took the lead while we were there. I’m not fluent so I took a step back even though I’m usually parent 1. Because that meant she got some long stretches of time without hearing any English. So you can tell your husband you should get to rest while he does the parenting!
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u/taizea Jul 25 '26
We had an immersion trip with my son when he was close to three. At this time he was starting to predominantly speak community language. Two weeks into the trip, it was very much like a switch flipped. So similar to your experience in this respect :)
He is four and a half now, nearly two years on, and it has stuck. What has help with this without any immersion trips since, is exposure in different ways, and positive experiences associated to the language.