Multilingual Children

I read lots of questions and doubts from monolingual parents or parents with a weak grasp of the target language they want to teach their kids, and it reminded me of some advice I gave to a couple once.  It was at a homeschool conference and they were considering to homeschool their children, but they didn’t speak English very strongly and would be homeschooling in English (we live in Canada)… they were concerned that they would pass on all their poor grammar to their children and missing the exposure to native English speakers was the one thing holding them back from deciding to homeschool.  So I told them to read, read, read… read aloud to them, encourage their kids to read lots of books (maybe a little reward program)… with lots of exposure to good literature they will just intuit the correct grammar (and spelling also!), and the parents would have the opportunity to improve their English as well.  Reading books is a great tool for language learning.