My name is Linda and I am an anglophile. There, I've said it. I have always been in love with the English language and the culture, and so it was that I decided, many moons ago, that when I had kids I would raise them to be bilinguals (Norwegian/English).
When I had my first child, Christiania who's now almost 12, I realised that speaking to your baby in a foreign language, no matter how much you love that language, just feels very awkward. I gave up within a week...maybe half a week even. Instead I ended up reading to her in English and letting her watch English children's shows (God bless BBC). Although she never showed any signs of even passive knowledge of the language I like to believe that her little brain got so used to the sounds of English that when I finally enrolled her in Reception Class at our local international(/immersion) school she took to the language like a duck to water.
When Christi was 6 years old we moved to York, England, for a year. Having spent two years in English school made for a smooth transition and she started Y2 at a regular school in England without any problems. Her brother Nicholas who was 3 had a rougher time of it when he was sent to nursery without knowing the language at all. I had read to him in English as well but nothing could really have prepared him for the shock of having to spend 6 hours a day in a place where no-one understands what you're saying and vice versa. It is true what they say though, nothing speeds up the process of learning a language like the need for it. He understood almost everything people said to him after only two months but it took him a few more to start speaking. When we left for Norway the following summer he insisted in a flawless British accent that he was 'an English boy now'. LOL.
Since we returned both Christi and Nic have attended the local international school, and last Autumn our youngest, Benjamin, started too. Two weeks ago he finished his first year and like the others he has built an impressive vocabulary over the past 10 months. As with Nic and Christi I have read books to him and made him watch English tv. Well, I haven't had to make him do the latter really because his older siblings tend to decide what to watch and they often choose to watch Disney Channel with the audio switched to English, having become 'purists' (aka haters of dubbed shows) like their Mum. In addition to the books and the tv the amount of English spoken around the house has increased over the years simply because it's the natural language to use when discussing homework and school assignments with Christi and Nic. I suspect Ben has been pining to actually learn so he could get in on the fun or at the very least find out what we were talking about. He is to date the only one who has insisted on using English at home of his own accord from day one. Even when he only knew a few words he would use those instead of their Norwegian counterparts when talking to us, and what's more he started calling us Mummy and Daddy.
As you can tell from this I have not always been a non-native in the OPOL sense of the word. This is a very recent thing. I only decided when school was out for the summer that I would try it over the holidays to keep Ben's English alive and kicking 'til Autumn and perhaps to strengthen his grammar a bit. His vocabulary is good but he stills tend to use Norwegian grammar structure.
Right now I feel very comfortable doing the OPOL thing, speaking English most of the time (maybe 90%) and I can see myself keeping it up for longer than two months if I feel there is a need for it.
Also, if all goes well, I hope to introduce them to a third language, providing I can manage to get a basic grasp on it myself, namely Spanish. Don't worry though, I have no plans of creating trilinguals while I'm at it, just to help lay the foundation for learning a language they will have to study at school in the future. But this is really a story for another day ;-)
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