We live in Spain. I am British and DH is Spanish. My mum (also British) lives with us. We have a DS of 3.9 and a 7 mo DD. I speak English to DS and DD (and my mum of course) and Spanish to DH. DS goes to a Spanish preschool. He didn't really say much til he was 2 and a half...he had about 40 words in English by the time he went to nursery last year but wasn't putting 2 words together, they were single words. He had a handful of Spanish words but far fewer. within a couple of months at nursery his Spanish had come in leaps and bounds and now he pretty much speaks Spanish, full sentences and is beginning to conjugate verbs (does some pasts, past participles etc). But the English is really still single words. I still speak to him in English only and have started asking him to reply in English. So, for example he'll ask for juice "quiero zumo" and I say, how do we say that? and he'll attempt Please may I have a juice....comes out like Please I ave juice.
We don't go back to the UK at all as my mum lives here now and we don't really have any family there and anyway, mum has mobility problems and can't really either travel or be left.
Everyone else I know either has English as the home language or goes back for at least a month in the summer and a couple of weeks at Christmas and I'm beginning to worry DS (and DD later) will only ever really have a passive knowledge of English and will never really speak it. DS seems to have excellent understnading in English but just doesn't really use it apart from single words..."Mira mami, un witch!" (look mummy a witch) etc...
Should DH and I start speaking English together at home? He has upper intermediate English but hasn't really used it for about 3 years, so quite rusty. Not sure if he'd be up for it either, was always quite underconfident.
What do you think?