Many parents want their child to grow up comfortable in English, and many of them learned English at school, as a second language. The worry that follows is a reasonable one: if I am the one teaching my two-year-old apple and dog, will they pick up my accent and my mistakes along with the words?
The short answer from the research is that you are not the problem, but you should not be the only source either. Here is what that means in practice.
What the research actually found
Most of what is known comes from studies of children who hear two languages at home. Two findings are useful here.
The more English a child hears, the more English they know. In a study of 29 Spanish–English bilingual two-year-olds in the United States (Place & Hoff, Child Development, 2011), mothers kept diaries of who spoke which language to their child. The share of a child’s input that was in English predicted their English skills. Unsurprising, but it sets the priority: quantity first.
Who the English comes from matters too. In the same study, once the total amount of English was held constant, two more things predicted stronger English: hearing it from more different people, and a larger share of it coming from native speakers.
That second point is the one that worries parents, so read it carefully. It does not say a non-native parent harms a child’s English. It says that, for the same amount of English, a mix that includes native speakers did better. The practical reading is to add native-speaker English, not to hold your own back.
Keep talking in the language you speak best. Researchers who reviewed this field for parents (Byers-Heinlein & Lew-Williams, Bilingualism in the Early Years: What the Science Says, 2013) put it plainly: it is better for parents to give plenty of input and interaction in a language they are comfortable in than to hold back because they are not fluent. A child who hears rich, easy conversation in your home language is not losing ground; that language is where most of their early thinking happens.
A routine that does not depend on your accent
Split the job in two. You bring the moments and the warmth; recorded native voices bring the pronunciation.
- Pick a handful of fixed English moments. Bath time, getting dressed, the fruit bowl, the walk to the car. Name the same things in English every time — shirt, shoes, banana, car. Young children learn words from routines they repeat, and you only need a small vocabulary to cover them.
- Say the word, point at the thing, then ask for it. “Banana. That’s a banana. Where’s the banana?” Asking the child to find it, rather than only showing it, is what makes them pull the word back out of memory.
- Let native voices carry the sound. Picture books with audio, songs, and apps that play a recorded or high-quality voice. You do not need to correct your own accent first; your child will hear several versions of water and settle on the common one.
- Little, often, and spread out. A minute in the morning and a minute after nap beats ten minutes in one go. Young children remember words better when meetings with them are spaced, and better still when a sleep falls in between.
- Stop while it is still fun. A two-year-old who wants one more round will come back tomorrow.
Which words first
Start with what your child can see and touch every day. The first words English-speaking toddlers say, according to the MacArthur-Bates vocabulary inventories collected in the Wordbank database, are mostly the same few kinds: people (mommy, daddy), animals (dog, cat, duck), food (milk, banana, apple), body parts, toys and everyday sounds.
That order is a good guide for a child learning English as a second language too. Dog is useful the first time you see one in the park, and the more often a word comes up in your day, the sooner it sticks.
What about screen time?
If an app or a video is part of the plan, keep it small. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children aged 2 to 5 have no more than about an hour a day of screen media, of good quality and ideally used together with a parent. The World Health Organization’s guideline for children aged 2 to 4 is the same hour, adding that less is better, and advises against sedentary screen time for one-year-olds.
An hour is a ceiling, not a target. A minute of hearing a word and tapping its picture fits inside it many times over, and it is the minute with you nearby that does the most.
What I am building for this
VocabPeek Junior is an iPhone and iPad app I built for parents in exactly this position. A widget on the Home Screen says an English word in the device’s own English voice — American or British — and your child taps the right picture out of three. A round is three words, about a minute, and the next one opens a couple of hours later, so the words are spread across the day. A short meaning can sit under each word in small type for you, in Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean or Traditional Chinese, or be switched off.
There is nothing for the child to read, no account, and no ads. It is on the App Store for iPhone and iPad, free for now.
Short answers
Can a non-native speaker teach a toddler English? Yes. Bring the routines and the conversation, and add native-speaker audio so your child hears more than one voice.
Will my child copy my accent? Children who hear English from several speakers tend to settle on the common pronunciation. Make sure yours is not the only English they hear.
Should I stop speaking my own language to my child? No. Speak the language you are most comfortable in for everyday talk, and add English on top.
How much English does a toddler need to hear? More is better, but there is no magic number. Consistency matters more than length: a few English moments every day beat one long session a week.