Foreign language - what happens if you skip it for 1 year?

[Anonymous]

My kid skipped her language in 8th grade.

She is now in 10th and is actually really glad she skipped 8th grade.

She took Spanish 1 and Spanish 2 in middle school. Then Spanish 3 in 9th grade. We debated about having her take Spanish 2 over, but she wanted to give Spanish 3 a try and it went fine.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If he gets annA in Spanish 2 this year, I don’t think he’ll be able to repeat the glass.

Even if he skips a year? I guess he may be able to manage Spanish 3 in 9th, but I know the schools keep telling you to not do this. So they'll just grudgingly allow you anyway? What's the alternative if he gets an A and skips a year, besides starting a new language?

PP is wrong. Repeating is fine, even with an A, but you don't get double credit.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If he gets annA in Spanish 2 this year, I don’t think he’ll be able to repeat the glass.

I don’t think that’s true.

The kid can just register for Spanish 2 again in 9th grade, even with an A. The school doesn’t care.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:While I think he could catch up with one skipped year and summer review, if he plans on taking four years in high school, I’d just repeat Spanish 2 in 9th. So 2-3-4-AP plan. Unless he really wants to get to AP Span lit. If you think he’d rather be done with world language after 11th (cuz he wants all the AP science classes or whatever), I’d do 3-4-AP-nothing.

I agree with this.

I’m the PP whose kid skipped Spanish in 8th grade.

My kid doesn’t love Spanish, so she has no interest in AP Spanish Lit. Either of the above options seem valid.

[Anonymous]

Yes. Pretty bad planning.

[Anonymous]

We did private for the COVID year (8th grade). The private school made my child repeat Sp II. It was fine. Public school was so weak on Sp. 1 and 2 from middle school that she got all As and knew very little. Spanish 3 was harder for 9th grade high school and a lot of the middle school kids were not as prepared as she was for Sp. 3. If your kid takes it again in 9th grade, it's fine. Mine got all As at the public school and the private school. And didn't know very much. Foreign language is definitely weak at our public, well-regarded high school.

[Anonymous]

Yes, a lot of kids DC knows took a year or two off in MS and some repeated their old language class in 9th. These are just random kids he spoke with who brought it up. I'm sure there's a lot more.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If he gets annA in Spanish 2 this year, I don’t think he’ll be able to repeat the glass.

I don’t think that’s true.

The kid can just register for Spanish 2 again in 9th grade, even with an A. The school doesn’t care.

This is correct. My child is repeating Spanish 2 in HS with an A in middle school.

[Anonymous]

I'm finding that my kid, who took French 1A/B in 6th, needed a lot of support at home to effectively learn the langauge. It was not enough to do in-class work; she needed to do 20-30 mins a night of practice because there were weekly quizzes and the content moved fairly fast. She never would have known this if I had not helped her, as there was almost no HW in elementary school and HW was not assigned very frequently in French itself. We had to sit down and practice, often using external websites. I feel like MCPS need to help 6th graders learn how to learn foreign languages, especially since they are courses that will appear on their HS transcripts and becuase all the knowledge builds on itself.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm finding that my kid, who took French 1A/B in 6th, needed a lot of support at home to effectively learn the langauge. It was not enough to do in-class work; she needed to do 20-30 mins a night of practice because there were weekly quizzes and the content moved fairly fast. She never would have known this if I had not helped her, as there was almost no HW in elementary school and HW was not assigned very frequently in French itself. We had to sit down and practice, often using external websites. I feel like MCPS need to help 6th graders learn how to learn foreign languages, especially since they are courses that will appear on their HS transcripts and becuase all the knowledge builds on itself.

Well that’s a different issue - and true in my kids’ experience, too. They both earned the seal of biliteracy by graduation and yet were placed into low-intermediate spanish in college via placement tests.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's fine to repeat or skip if you don't care about the language and just want to satisfy the legal requirements, but every year from 6th grade on is not "too much too soon" . If anything, it's too late. Language acquisition is primarily achieved in youth.

OP here. Agree in general (and DS is getting exposure to another FL at home, my native language), but learning it in school is also different from actual immersion. I'd argue that even in Europe, where kids start them earlier, it's still English that dominates because of TV and the internet (and not whatever language they learned first.)

Also, if he skips and then repeats, he'd probably still end up with 5 years of Spanish (levels 1-4, with Spanish 2 being taken twice; he can take higher levels if he wants to, but I'm not counting on it.) He didn't start it before 6th grade because... that wasn't an option. I'm not sure doing Spanish 3 or 4 in 9th grade instead of Spanish 2 is going to really make a difference to his Spanish knowledge years from now.

In Europe a larger proportion of the learning is "speaking" as well as a larger proportion of the testing.