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YK Pao Principal Warren Johnston offers tips on how monolingual parents can help support their child’s bilingual development

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1.       Extra Help
Hire a Chinese tutor to assist your child with homework where you cannot.

2.       Exposure
Expose your child to the other language through the radio, books, magazines, family members, family friends and the Internet.

3.       Story Time
Get your child to read a book to you in Mandarin and then explain the story to you in your native language.

4.       Switch Back
Discuss with your child what they are learning in school, but in the opposite language (i.e. if they had a class about volcanoes taught in English, discuss it with them in Chinese).Transferring knowledge from one language to the other greatly aids learning retention.

5.       Real Life
Play reading games to pass the time .Reading road signs in the car or the menu in a restaurant allows your child to observe language in a meaningful and socially important context.

6.       The environment
If you can speak to your child in both languages, do not say a sentence in one language and then translate it into the other, lest your child develop the habit of waiting for the translation when they do not understand-this will only inhibit the development of their second language. Separate the use of language. For example, have a “Chinese afternoon” one day, and an “English afternoon” the next.