On paper, a teacher speaking only Swiss German gets into big trouble with the hierarchy. I said on paper.
In primary school, the % is set in stone most places, however I do not always understand where the % number comes from
In Kindergarten, I am pretty confident that anything exist: from the over secure German from Germany who hasn't even noticed there is a dialect around here to the local dialect fascist of the worse kind. But most people would be in-between.

Nice thing about the system: After the Primary school teachers have done their job, you don't notice what happened in the earliest years at all by the time the students enter middle/high school. At least with my students. I notice whether they communicate with educated adults or not, but can't guess their past teachers' language policy.

Rewording the above thought: at some point, the student is entirely responsible for his level in High German, as I could name rich family kids in Basel who just suck at High German although their parents are educated readers with a house full of books and a High German better than most Germans.

@jetset - A quick question - you talk about an OPOL household but you only seem to talk about about the one daughter - how did the other child get on? With our two children we seemed to have two completely different situations - and in fact still do, as I usually speak English to one and Swiss German to the other.

Snap Longbyt!

OPOL is the most frequent method but any combination can work, and indeed we favoured a method that promoted the minority language .. so with our first son who lived in the UK until 3.5 years, we spoke only French. He learnt English in daycare and with grandparents, and with us if we had English speaking visitors with us (I am British, husband is French).

With our second child (born in CH) we speak one language, one parent, as we both speak minority languages (we are in the German speaking part of CH, I speak English and husband speaks French).

Like many parents, we researched the best way to promote bi/multi-lingualism in our household, and what I hold in my head is that the key is consistency and a certain fluency (but not necessarily mother tongue) in the language you are using.

Our eldest son is now 8 and has never had a problem with using another language in any setting .. until last week when we were in Delémont and he got really cross with me speaking in English to him and his brother on the bus. No such problem with English speaking on the buses in Baselland however ...

Pfft. I only have (almost) 3 years of parenting experience under my belt .

At the only 9 months old, our youngest is an experiment in progress. Right now her vocabulary is just dada (and she calls everyone and everything dada ). Unlike her older sister, she will spend her formative linguistic years in Switzerland and I suspect it will be more of an effort to teach her English.

My priority definitely is that they are fluent in both languages. If that means we have to take a different approach with different children, I'm all for it!

And for clarity, I wasn't quite sure what the "snap longbyt!" from ECB meant. Please explain .

My son was 12 when he came here two years ago and even he picked it up in no time just from talking to his friends. It's funny to see that when he's with us he speaks English or High German and the moment he meets his friends it's all Swiss German. He changes within the languages in seconds, according to who he's talking to.

These are just the sort of things I was thinking of. Our elder daughter, when small, spoke English to me, but Swiss German to her sister on the assumption it seemed, that although many adults speak English, all children understand only SG. Which, in her world at that time, was true.

I think 'problems' sometimes start when a child, in a Swiss German environment, brings friends home. I could speak pretty fluent Swiss German so obviously I spoke SG to my daughter's friends. Some kids still speak English with the parent who speaks English with them, some don't - and as I hardly noticed anyway, it was quite difficult to stop the rot.

It's a children's game .. there is a pack of cards with matching pairs. Each player takes it in turn to place a card down (picture side up). You are meant to do it rapidly in turn, and when the card placed down is the same as the one underneath, you should shout "snap". The first one to call it out, gets the cards. The winner is the only one left with cards at the end.

So, in British English we can say "snap" which means "same here". Longbyt found her approach varied from child to child, and so has ours.

Thanks for the explanation. Learn something new everyday. In American English it has a different (and more negative) connotation, but it didn't really apply to what I had said, hence the confusion.

I am curious to see how things vary between our two kids. I notice that my eldest likes to talk to her sister in Swiss German as well. I do encourage her to sometimes talk to her in English so that she can "help her learn it."

@Longbyt, I think my Swiss German is too bad and too rudimentary and my daughter is too young for rot to start. She had a playmate over this afternoon and I spoke to the little girl in Swiss German. My daughter still spoke back in English. For the most part, I try to play dumb about understanding what she says to her father for example. I'll just say, "oh, what did you tell daddy?" For now, this still works, but she'll likely figure me out soon.

Another interesting language/bilingualism (actually multi-lingualism) thread on EF.

I read the following book (written in French by a British woman IIRC) a number of years ago: http://www.amazon.fr/Lenfant-bilingu...8&sr=8-1-fkmr2 Didn't agree with all of it, but a lot of good points.

I think the most important thing is to adapt to the situation and not be too dogmatic (easier said than done for me). A lot of people speak of the OLOP principle - good theory, but we do not do things that way too much.

Before coming here we were already a bilingual family - with my speaking almost English only with our daughter, and my partner speaking French or English. After moving to CH, the situation has changed with four languages now to manage (I'm counting SQ as its own language). My youngest now probably has French as her preferred language, followed by SG (she gets a real kick out of speaking that here, especially as our level of understanding is very basic) and HG, followed by English. I'm not too worried though.

To get back to the OP's question, learning SG has got to be
1. fun,
2. natural,
3. useful.

So for 1, games, songs, cartoons, etc. Loved the anecdote above about a doll that could only understand SG

For 2, OLOP and the SG native speaker only speaking SG would make it more 'natural'.

For 3, a trip to CH, or Skype video calls with relatives would help. Also, is the OP making an attempt to learn SG as well? If the child sees the OP also learning what seems to be a 'useless' language, that might make acceptance easier.

Good luck, and don't worry about it as other posters have said. I'm part of the fortunate group who has a had a child go from 0 to fluent in the first year of Kindergarten (and 'Hort', after school child care).