Dual language questions

[Anonymous]

^^can you expand?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I am a former YY parent. We thought that the school had a lot of strengths and were drawn in by the promise of fluency in Mandarin. Some kids are overwhelmed at first, but it could happen in any program. My nephew who attended a well regarded DCPS cried every morning for four weeks, then was fine once he got used to going to school.

We ultimately left because the school was not meeting our child's needs in other areas. We really disliked the evaluation system and in our case, it masked some issues. Students are evaluated on whether they are working below, meeting or exceeding expectations.

Yes, since you're not at the school anymore and this is anonymous, please give more details about what needs you felt your child didn't have met, what issues the evaluation system masked, and any other issues you had. Thanks!

[Anonymous]

What I have heard, and what I observe with my kid and my kids' classmates at a dual language elementary, is that if you don't speak the target language at home, you have very little hope for long-term native fluency in the target language. We have had Spanish-speaking nannies and au pairs and my kids speak passable Spanish and (having started at the school last year) are catching up to their grade level, but they are by no means fluent. I lived in other and had fully bilingual friends with fully bilingual kids, and I'd hear their kids chattering back & forth in both English and the target language, shifting comfortably from one to another. I NEVER hear this from the English-dominant kids at our elementary school. The langua franca (sp?) on the playground is English, even amongst those who have been there since PS.

Am I bothered by this? Not really. My kids are well above their grade levels in English and Math, and I think they will come out of the elementary school fairly fluent in Spanish. The dual language program offers a good challenge that keeps their mind busy, and I don't see their other skills suffering. Will they be fully bilingual? I doubt it. Will they survive in a Spanish only country and further develop their language skills? Absolutely.

But, IMHO, true bilingualism (sp?) starts at home with immersion at home. It is then reinforced in a school setting. My friend's daughter is very verbally fluent in French, and they started at Stokes last year. Since she was in an English-only school to start with, her French reading and writing are behind but she's catching up. Both pieces of the puzzle need to be there, and it takes a lot of effort. I honestly don't think it's possible to achieve full bilingualism unless someone in the household speaks it exclusively

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:What I have heard, and what I observe with my kid and my kids' classmates at a dual language elementary, is that if you don't speak the target language at home, you have very little hope for long-term native fluency in the target language. We have had Spanish-speaking nannies and au pairs and my kids speak passable Spanish and (having started at the school last year) are catching up to their grade level, but they are by no means fluent. I lived in other and had fully bilingual friends with fully bilingual kids, and I'd hear their kids chattering back & forth in both English and the target language, shifting comfortably from one to another. I NEVER hear this from the English-dominant kids at our elementary school. The langua franca (sp?) on the playground is English, even amongst those who have been there since PS.

Am I bothered by this? Not really. My kids are well above their grade levels in English and Math, and I think they will come out of the elementary school fairly fluent in Spanish. The dual language program offers a good challenge that keeps their mind busy, and I don't see their other skills suffering. Will they be fully bilingual? I doubt it. Will they survive in a Spanish only country and further develop their language skills? Absolutely.

But, IMHO, true bilingualism (sp?) starts at home with immersion at home. It is then reinforced in a school setting. My friend's daughter is very verbally fluent in French, and they started at Stokes last year. Since she was in an English-only school to start with, her French reading and writing are behind but she's catching up. Both pieces of the puzzle need to be there, and it takes a lot of effort. I honestly don't think it's possible to achieve full bilingualism unless someone in the household speaks it exclusively

This is really interesting! My experience already completely and totally disagrees or is different from your experience. I only have one kid, in 1st grade at YY. To say that our household does not support him in learning Mandarin is a huge understatement! We have no Mandarin experience in the home and no cultural connection to China. That said, I had 2 recent interesting experiences that come to mind that show me that I disagree completely with you on the possibility of true bilingualism:

1. My DS was at a friend's house for a playdate recently. The mom of the friend he was visiting sent me video she taped from the hallway because she was so amused of their play, which was some combo of legos/transformers/bey blades, and they didn't see her recording the audio, which was of them playing their games and acting out their characters in Mandarin! This host kid has no prior Mandarin, parents speak none, and neither of our households have any extra supports (like nannies or summer camp in China, and definitely no relatives who speak it). And yet, of their own accord, on their own, they were playing for quite awhile and speaking only in Mandarin, although the mom did pass by other times and they'd be going back and forth, but not in a sentence, it would be a period of Mandarin, then a period of English, then back to Mandarin, etc, all on their own. Were they fluent? Of course not. But they were playing and conversing and understanding each other, at 6/7 yrs old, in Mandarin, on their own with no prompting.

2. We were at a playground playdate recently and an older YY sibling (5th grade at YY) was talking to a native Chinese parent of another YY student. The mom started talking to the older child in Mandarin, and they went back and forth for awhile, and when the child walked away the parent said to the other parents "Wow, his Mandarin is amazing! Vocabulary, tones, [some other descriptors I can't remember] are all excellent!" Next time I saw that older kid's Dad I asked what supports they've used over the years at YY. NONE! No nannies, no tutors, no summer camp, and again this is a house with no Mandarin language supports or influences at all, no one understands Mandarin in that home.

I don't see any reason in the world why, if my kid and these other similar kids continue with their exploration of Mandarin through 12th grade, why they wouldn't achieve actual bilingualism. There's no question that the immersion year of Mandarin (now 2 immersion years if someone gets their kid in in PS3) is key, but I'm pretty sure the 5th grader didn't have any immersion year, so however good his Mandarin is in 5th grade, someone starting immersion in PS or PK will be even better.

I'm not a linguistics expert, so maybe I'm wrong, but since some of your examples of why you don't think it's possible have been shown to me to be very possible (elementary school kids as young as 6 or 7 playing and conversing in Mandarin on their own) and students with excellent language skills in a complex language that several native speakers compliment them on or attest to as being excellent... I have no reason to think that with follow through through 12th grade and whatever immersion opportunities Yu Ying offers (currently the 5th grade trip to China where they students go to a local school in a smaller town and do home-stays with local families), that my child won't be fluent by 12th grade graduation.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We're raising our children bilingual in a language not taught in a DC immersion program.

One of us speaks no English to the kids, and we send them to a heritage language school on weekends during the school year as well as summer camp abroad (not a camp for expats, one for ordinary local children who speak little English). We don't allow them to watch TV in English (they watch DVDs in the target language). My in-laws, whose English isn't the best are very involved, and we host au pairs who speak the target language year after year. Our kids don't need English to get through the day. They attend a high-performing DCPS elementary school, where they score high in English.

Few of the parents we know who choose language immersion in DC seem very serious about the exercise to us. The schools don't seem terribly serious about it either - some lack target-language speaking admins and fully bilingual children, policies and practices many parents in the school communities defend to the hilt.

I mention all this because I've become skeptical about how language immersion programs work in this city. I'd be surprised if most of these kids speak the target language well as adults. Things are different in the burbs and other US cities.

If I couldn't support target language learning at home consistently, I'd pass on having my kids learn a second (or 3rd) language until the upper elementary grades, at the earliest. Little kids learn languages easily, and all but forget them just as easily if they aren't reinforced into the teen years.

You know what though, it's not just the effort of the families you see, it's also their lack of another language.

We are a dual language family with kid in a school that offers immersion in the language. Plus, we do all the stuff you mention above. Without all of this at-home support, I wouldn't have much faith either. I see a lot of dual-gringo couples sending kids to bilingual schools and I think, this is very ambitious, unless you are going to really dive in, like the Suzuki method for music, and learn the language alongside your kid. Especially so for chinese (because I find that a surprising number of well-educated DC residents have at least basic spanish, but almost no-one speaks any chinese unless it is heritage).

The problem is that despite having sizable immigrant populations, the US only has English as the official language, and so the "immersion" public schools are never actually immersion. True immersion public schools would raise a lot of political protest in this country, screams of immigrants taking over, especially if they were Spanish-only schools. So the public immersion schools are always half-English which, when combined with living in the US and having English-only parents, is too much English for most kids to be able to become fluent in the target. In other countries with multiple official languages, you can send your kids to true immersion schools where only the target language is spoken. These are much more realistic chances for kids to learn a language that is not spoken by either parent, IMO.

[Anonymous]

So what is the standard to measure "fluency" or "being fluent" against? Seriously, I don't know. What is the measurement against which one compares a child by 12th grade to see if they are "fluent"? And is there really no data anywhere in the US that uses that standard, whatever it is, to test kids and see how fluent or not fluent they are?

I don't get the naysaying, but it will help a lot of the last two "doubtful of fluency" posters could say what their bar is, how they know whether a child is fluent or not. Or what standards the schools hold to measure if a student is fluent or not.

How is a student measured as fluent?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:So what is the standard to measure "fluency" or "being fluent" against? Seriously, I don't know. What is the measurement against which one compares a child by 12th grade to see if they are "fluent"? And is there really no data anywhere in the US that uses that standard, whatever it is, to test kids and see how fluent or not fluent they are?

I don't get the naysaying, but it will help a lot of the last two "doubtful of fluency" posters could say what their bar is, how they know whether a child is fluent or not. Or what standards the schools hold to measure if a student is fluent or not.

How is a student measured as fluent?

I think you'll find that bilingual parents will just test fluency themselves. I define it as effortlessly communicating and living your life (or part of your life) in the language. But if you want standardized tests, they exist. There are several competing ones for English. Must be some for the other major languages too.

[Anonymous]

I see a difference between fluent and truly bilingual. I am fluent in three languages, but do not consider myself truly trilingual because I do not have equal fluency across all domains. I can read in the other languages but prefer to read in English because it's my native tounge. I am not a language expert so can't explain the different between what I can do and being truly bilingual. My kids may end up speaking fluent spanish or at least passably spanish by the end of elementary school, but they will not be a native spanish speaker and fully bilingual, even with at him supports and a spanish speaking babysitter because I did not speak spanish to them every day since birth.

[Anonymous]

Oops "at home supports"

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:So what is the standard to measure "fluency" or "being fluent" against? Seriously, I don't know. What is the measurement against which one compares a child by 12th grade to see if they are "fluent"? And is there really no data anywhere in the US that uses that standard, whatever it is, to test kids and see how fluent or not fluent they are?

I don't get the naysaying, but it will help a lot of the last two "doubtful of fluency" posters could say what their bar is, how they know whether a child is fluent or not. Or what standards the schools hold to measure if a student is fluent or not.

How is a student measured as fluent?

If your child attends an immersion school, he/she should be tested by the school. My DC, who is currently in K, was tested at the beginning of K as having the same level of Spanish fluency/literacy that a native Spanish speaking child would be expected to have at the end of K. My child's non-native fluency was that of a 1st grader. Her Spanish fluency/literacy may be higher because the Spanish teacher does not test K students above a certain level, even if they top out/exceed the level(s) tested. My husband and I only speak English. However, both of us studied Spanish from middle school through college; and we provide significant Spanish language support/enrichment outside of school.

[Anonymous]

do all schools in DC provide this testing?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:do all schools in DC provide this testing?

All dual immersion schools should provide this testing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:What I have heard, and what I observe with my kid and my kids' classmates at a dual language elementary, is that if you don't speak the target language at home, you have very little hope for long-term native fluency in the target language. We have had Spanish-speaking nannies and au pairs and my kids speak passable Spanish and (having started at the school last year) are catching up to their grade level, but they are by no means fluent. I lived in other and had fully bilingual friends with fully bilingual kids, and I'd hear their kids chattering back & forth in both English and the target language, shifting comfortably from one to another. I NEVER hear this from the English-dominant kids at our elementary school. The langua franca (sp?) on the playground is English, even amongst those who have been there since PS.

Am I bothered by this? Not really. My kids are well above their grade levels in English and Math, and I think they will come out of the elementary school fairly fluent in Spanish. The dual language program offers a good challenge that keeps their mind busy, and I don't see their other skills suffering. Will they be fully bilingual? I doubt it. Will they survive in a Spanish only country and further develop their language skills? Absolutely.

But, IMHO, true bilingualism (sp?) starts at home with immersion at home. It is then reinforced in a school setting. My friend's daughter is very verbally fluent in French, and they started at Stokes last year. Since she was in an English-only school to start with, her French reading and writing are behind but she's catching up. Both pieces of the puzzle need to be there, and it takes a lot of effort. I honestly don't think it's possible to achieve full bilingualism unless someone in the household speaks it exclusively

I agree that learning the target language at a young age is a bonus and I don't care if my kid is bilingual or even proficient by the time they finish elementary school since they can always catch up in the other language later. My kid is above grade level in English and Math so I love having another language to provide a challenge and having something that he has to "work on" at school.

My kid goes to Yu Ying and my kid's tones are "perfect". It's incredibly difficult for adults to learn if ever so I'm happy that he has the opportunity to develop an "ear" at a young age.

English is my second language and I mastered it without my parents speaking it at home. My kid's Chinese tutor speaks excellent English (good enough to get a Masters at Georgetown) without ever having parents speak English at home. I don't think you need to have anyone in the home speak the target language to become bilingual.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:do all schools in DC provide this testing?

All dual immersion schools should provide this testing.

Only Oyster, I believe.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:do all schools in DC provide this testing?

I should add that my son is at Oyster. I thought that all dual immersion schools tested. Is that not the case? Can parents from other DI schools chime in on testing at their schools please?