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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]PP again. From this thread it seems like the challenge with YY is learning English rather than Chinese, and parents should supplement with English.[/quote]

[b]The research is pretty clear that bilingual education improves learning in the native language.[/b] There are  literally hundreds of peer reviewed studies proving this.

Could YY in particular improve ELA instruction? Probably . The PP whose kid went from YY to a top private and needed added writing instruction would probably have had the same problem coming out of Murch.  The one advantage privates have over publics is that the small class sizes let teachers assign and grade a lot more essays.[/quote]

Agree with this and would just add that I believe the research shows that there is often an initial lag in language development for kids who start out with two languages, but then the kids typically catch up and even surpass monolingual counterparts.[/quote]

YY parents love to claim this, citing studies. My inconvenient question is, who's your competition?

At our JKLM, ELA instruction has been a lot stronger than what we got at YY, and so is the Chinese instruction at our MD heritage program. It can be difficult to justify the need to "catch up" when many of the YY kids never progress beyond what amounts to kindergarten spoken Chinese. Yea, you don't want to hear this as a parent, not when you love the warm and welcoming program, lovely campus etc.
[/quote]

Do those heritage language programs work?  I'm not sure how kids can learn a language with once a week instruction.  As an alumni interviewer, I've interviewed kids who attend those programs. They tell me they haven't learned much.  I also grew up in CA with dozens of friends who attended heritage programs in Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, and even Polish.  They all learned very little, mostly because the teachers at the schools had no training in teaching.  They were just native speakers who were down on their luck and were friends with the person who ran the language school. Maybe you've found a school that has higher teaching standards.  If so, could you share the school's info?[/quote]

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