Talk to Me About Regret

[Anonymous]

Agree. Raising bilingual kids with broad horizons is do-able, but very hard work. It's much harder work that most of the DC immersion parents fleeing weak neighborhood schools seem to grasp. Parents sometimes approach us in playgrounds asking for the name of "your tutor." We don't have a tutor, we have relatives!

[Anonymous]

Our friends' kid switched in K from regular DCPS to an immersion Spanish charter and in two years her Spanish vocubulary has grown incredibly. Neither of her parents speak Spanish. Her reading and math skills remain on par with our kid (her BF) who is at a regular DCPS. For various reasons I am not sorry we are not at her school. But it really is amazing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Our friends' kid switched in K from regular DCPS to an immersion Spanish charter and in two years her Spanish vocubulary has grown incredibly. Neither of her parents speak Spanish. Her reading and math skills remain on par with our kid (her BF) who is at a regular DCPS. For various reasons I am not sorry we are not at her school. But it really is amazing.

Bilingual parent here- definitely agree that immersion schools only benefit kids. Sure they might not always come out fluent, and some schools are better than others- but overall I think it can only help.

[Anonymous]

Hey, my kids are bilingual but didn't begin at immersion school until 3rd grade, now top students in HS and college, and fluent in 2 languages.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:NP here. Yes you can become fluent in Spanish without immersion. I am one. I've gotten jobs that require fluent Spanish.

There is also research on how second language fluency improves executive function. Have not read that about Montessori but it makes sense.

So many the LAMB model will be the best? I don't know.

You sound really nice, so I just want to make it clear that I'm not disparaging you.

I am a truly bilingual person having spent my childhood bouncing between the U.S. and my other country. My mom spoke to me in Spanish and my dad in English. I also work in a place that requires true bilingualism.

I have to say that most Americans who tell me they speak fluent Spanish don't. Not the use of the word "most" not "all". I very much doubt that it is as easy as just moving to Bolivia for 12 weeks. You can get a good grasp, and maybe a solid cultural understanding- but that trip plus some college courses will not make you fluent by any stretch of the definition. Languages are hard work.

I also do not think that Mundo Verde, etc are magical institutions where kids come in clueless and come out fluent. Parents putting in the hard work plus the school's efforts are key. Traveling to Spanish speaking places, hiring a Latina au pair, speaking to your kid in Spanish all the time- that's what makes kids fluent. Even with all this, some kids are not gifted in languages.

I speak three additional languages on top of English and Spanish. I'm close to fluent (by my definition, haha) in one of them, the one I learned when I was young. The other two are a struggle (but most Americans consider me fluent).

My whole point is that languages are hard and there is no easy solution. Even if you're gifted I'm languages like I am, there is no substitute for hard work. Immersion schools totally will give your kid a leg up, but that's not an easy way to teach your kid a language. An immersion school will definitely help, but won't do all the work for you. If you decide not to go the immersion route, that's not to say your kid is monolingual for life. But if you do want another language, you can do it with lots of hard work.

As a final note, there are lots of weekend classes and summer camps in foreign languages around DC. So if you don't make it into LAMB or MV or whatever, you can always drive to a weekend school.

+1, from another truly bilingual person. Americans have a very loose definition of "fluent" and even "bilingual".

[Anonymous]

Remember, folks, that multilingualism is a continuum, not a binary feature. It doesn't mean having a perfectly balanced set of abilities across all languages. Folks calling themselves "truly" bilingual are perpetuating a number of myths long debunked by linguists who aren't stuck in the 1950s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilingualism#Myths_surrounding_multilingualism

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:NP here. Yes you can become fluent in Spanish without immersion. I am one. I've gotten jobs that require fluent Spanish.

There is also research on how second language fluency improves executive function. Have not read that about Montessori but it makes sense.

So many the LAMB model will be the best? I don't know.

You sound really nice, so I just want to make it clear that I'm not disparaging you.

I am a truly bilingual person having spent my childhood bouncing between the U.S. and my other country. My mom spoke to me in Spanish and my dad in English. I also work in a place that requires true bilingualism.

I have to say that most Americans who tell me they speak fluent Spanish don't. Not the use of the word "most" not "all". I very much doubt that it is as easy as just moving to Bolivia for 12 weeks. You can get a good grasp, and maybe a solid cultural understanding- but that trip plus some college courses will not make you fluent by any stretch of the definition. Languages are hard work.

I don't honestly understand what your point was here. Yes, languages take time. However, there are plenty of adults all over the world (and yes, even in the US) who learn languages to high levels every year. And fluency doesn't mean perfect, error-free speech. It just means a rapid ability to understand and make yourself understood. Per the CEFR scales, you hit that level at around B2 and definitely by C1. Any dedicated and cognitively normal adult can reach those levels with enough time and effort in a couple of years at most with a level 1 language (e.g., a Romance or Germanic language for English speakers, not including German, which is a 1.5 language). The DOD and FSI train recruits to reach those levels in L1 languages in about half a year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Reference_for_Languages

Waxing at endless length about how difficult languages are to learn and how you don't believe most people who tell you they're fluent doesn't really advance the conversation. The ultimate test isn't whether anyone on DCUM thinks people are "true" bilinguals (a nonsense term) or "truly" fluent (more nonsense) or not; it's whether people can use their language skills to achieve their personal goals (work-related or otherwise). If they aren't up to snuff, people will find out.

[Anonymous]

I learned Spanish as an adult (and yes, I'm fluent...suck it haters!) and am currently killing French. If most people you meet aren't fluent, it sounds like you need to start meeting people who actually do things that require the languages they claim to speak.

I'm a bilingual teacher and use Spanish daily at work with my kids, my parents, and my teaching assistant. I also use it with my kids, who I taught to speak the language. Now I'm teaching them French. My kids are actively bilingual and passively trilingual, and will be actively trilingual before long.

Languages are like anything else in life--if you spend enough time with them, they get easier. Ignore the people who tell you it can't be done and get busy doing it.

[Anonymous]

And one more note. Once again, there's no such thing as "true" bilingualism, any more than you can be a "true" American. It's a useless term. No, not even people raised with parents who speak OPOL will get you that; lots of studies have shown that people always have things they're more comfortable doing in one language than in another, even if those differences are subconscious. It's a continuum of abilities, and being much stronger in one language than the other(s) doesn't mean you aren't bi/multilingual unless you subscribe to a definition that pretty much no one in multilingual research or education still uses.

The kids I teach come into my classroom on a continuum. Some only speak Spanish. Some speak a mixture of that and English. Some speak primarily English and almost no Spanish (these are the worst ones, by the way, because they're most likely to have the same bad behaviors common to the monolingual English classrooms). However, these kids are already bilingual because they're being exposed in the classroom to a mixture of Spanish and English (mostly Spanish, but I do use a little English in certain areas). If they stick in the bilingual program, they'll learn to read, write, speak, and understand both languages comfortably over the long term. The ones who start learning the 2nd language in school will be sequential bilinguals while those who came into school with exposure to both will be simultaneous bilinguals. In the long term, it won't make a difference.

In other words, kids who go to immersion schools and retain abilities in additional languages are multilingual. The degree to which they are will depend on a range of factors, but multilingualism is not something you only get if you hear all of the languages from home. That's just one more form of desperate elitism that we don't need on the way to a more civilized society.

[Anonymous]

Oh come on. My near native Chinese speaking kids joke about how the upper grades YY students they interact with speak "GPS Chinese." These kids sound like robots in Chinese. They don't know slang/kid Chinese, speak haltingly using fairly flat tones, and understand little. Just because a kid attends a DCPS or DCPCS immersion program for years doesn't mean they've become multilingual. It generally means they learned a little of the target language, enough to pull off a fair imitation of a GPS at any rate. But if the family has at least one native speaker in the home over a number of years who speaks mostly in the target language, and requires kids to reply in it most of the time, they become proficient, if not fluent.

[Anonymous]

so OP, how are you feeling now?

[Anonymous]

All is fine. Just new preschool parent jitters. DC is thriving socially and loves school. We will travel abroad for 2 months this summer and have an au pair starting this fall. Everything will work out fine.

-OP

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:All is fine. Just new preschool parent jitters. DC is thriving socially and loves school. We will travel abroad for 2 months this summer and have an au pair starting this fall. Everything will work out fine.

-OP

OP how do you like Montessori? We have toured one of the charters and are interested but not sure it's the right fit. I'll say up front that my husband and I have no experience with Montessori but friends who have kids in primary year programs love it and we were impressed with the school. Can you share what you like and don't like? The classrooms were very quiet but the kids level of concentration was impressive. I like that they don't have a lot of technology (I think there is plenty of time for that). I'm curious and trying to learn about the philosophy (I've read about but want to learn from real wirld experiences). Thank you!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We chose Montessori over language immersion for pre k 3. Now we regret the decision. Will these early jitters pass or did we royally mess up? Anyone else experience a similar situation?

We chose BASIS over Latin. We messed up.

[Anonymous]

We did the opposite as op and switched from Montessori to bilingual this year.

I do sometimes have regrets. Both Montessori and immersion have good things going for them. And both schools we've tried have been good on differing ways. I'd probably also have regrets or wonder "what if?" if we passed up the opportunity to switch.