Will a summer in the home country fix it?

A summer in the home country adds real input, and input counts. On its own it is unlikely to close a gap, because the audit counts hours across the year and a few weeks is a small part of a year. No source read for this site tests summer trips. What follows is the mechanism and practical advice, not research findings, and it says so where that matters. The mechanism is simple: a burst of input is still input.

What the sources say, and what they do not

The sources read for this site do not study summer trips, visits to relatives or time abroad. Anything below about trips is reasoning from how the app counts exposure, not a result.

What the sources do say is about how much real time a language gets. King and Mackey, in The Bilingual Edge, give an example from a family with three languages: a child who hears one language only on weekends, while the other two are used daily, tends to end up understanding it but not speaking it. That example is about weekends, not trips. It does show the mechanism the authors worry about: the language with the least real time is the one that stays passive.

A second point, from the chapter on programs. Merrill Swain (1985) studied English-speaking students in French immersion in Canada. As King and Mackey report it, students who got a lot of comprehensible language but little chance to speak ended up with near-native listening and persistent speaking errors. This is their account, not the original study. It suggests asking what a trip gives the child to say, not only what it gives the child to hear.

How the audit counts a trip

The Family Language Audit takes the hours per week each caregiver spends with the child and the language that caregiver uses. A heritage-only caregiver counts in full, a caregiver who switches counts at half weight, and a community-only caregiver counts as zero. The total is divided by the child's waking hours per week. Those waking hours are a working estimate in the app's code by age band, not from a cited source (UNVERIFIED).

The audit scores one week at a time. A trip week with grandparents who speak only the heritage language can score high, and it should: those hours are real. The question for a parent is what the other weeks look like.

An illustration with invented weeks

ILLUSTRATION: an invented family, with the first three numbers taken from running the app's audit code. Take a child aged 7, with 87.5 waking hours a week in the app's estimate. In an ordinary week, one parent speaks only the heritage language for 10 hours and the other speaks only the community language for 20 hours.

• Ordinary week: 10 heritage hours, 11.4% of waking hours.
• Trip week: the same, plus 60 hours with grandparents who speak only the heritage language. That is 70 heritage hours, 80% of waking hours. The audit shows it clearing the 80% target that King and Mackey recommend for the early years. It also shows an amber overlap warning, because the 90 hours logged are more than the 87.5 waking hours; it uses the rows as entered and does not adjust them.
• A four-week trip is then 240 grandparent hours. Spread over a year of 52 weeks, with 48 ordinary weeks, the average is (48 x 10 + 4 x 70) / 52, about 14.6 heritage hours a week, or 16.7% of waking hours.

The last line is plain arithmetic of mine, not an audit output. It is below the line of about 20% that one study associated with children speaking a language, and that line is debated (see the evidence list). To reach 20% on average, this family would need 17.5 hours a week, or 910 a year. That is 150 more than the 760 in this illustration, about 3 extra hours a week across the 48 ordinary weeks. The numbers are invented to show the shape: a trip helps a lot, and the year still depends on the ordinary weeks.

Practical advice, untested

Nothing in this section has been tested in the sources read. It follows from the mechanism above.

• Let your child have long stretches with people who speak only the heritage language, and with more than one person if you can. Those are the hours the audit counts in full.
• Make room for your child to speak, not only to listen. Errands, games and meals with cousins give more chances than sitting through adult conversation.
• Do not treat the trip as a test. A child who speaks little there has not failed, and a child who speaks a lot there has not finished.

What to do before and after

1. Before you go, log an ordinary week in the audit so you know your starting share.
2. After you come back, choose one or two contacts from the trip that can continue, such as a weekly call with a grandparent or a cousin, and add them to the plan as regular hours.
3. Keep the short daily moments at home going. They are what fills the ordinary weeks.
4. Look at the audit again after things settle, and compare it with the week you logged before.

What is still unknown

• Whether a summer trip changes how a child speaks, how long any change lasts, or what the child gains from it. No source read tests this. UNVERIFIED.
• Whether hours in a burst count the same as the same hours spread out. No source read tests this either. UNVERIFIED.
• Whether the 20% line holds. It comes from one study that King and Mackey describe, and it is debated.

In short: a summer there is real input and worth having. Treat it as a large addition to the year, and plan for the other months. If you have worries about your child's speech or development, a speech-language professional is the right person to ask.