Reply to If your child goes to weekend language schools of your heritage (Chinese, Korean, etc.)

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[quote=Anonymous]I am not sure if you only asked for input from the Asian families so if the following is not relevant to you, feel free to dismiss.

We are a two-immigrant family and we are raising our children to be fluent in both languages.  On my end, DS, who is now 7, has attended mostly immersion Russian-language preschools where he got to fluent conversation, solid reading and some writing. I only speak Russian to him at home but this is changing as his schooling becomes more demanding.  At this time, my take on this is that language learning has to have relevance and context to children to be truly appealing. Otherwise it's competing with so many other things and not always winning.

So for us, the context and relevance is achieved in several ways.  Most of his preschool friends come from families with at least one Russian parents; his three closest friends are fluent Russian speakers. We have a solid library of children's books in Russian, and before letting him have screen time, I check if the cartoons he wants are available in Russian (they often are).  He attends an afterschool lesson group one day a week where they take Russian and math in a small group setting of 4 to 5 kids, with a great deal of homework.  We also have weekly conversations with family members who speak no English at all.  All of this is to show that language has to be more than a merely academic pursuit to be appealing.

My son is very young and I'm sure that a day will come when he will rebel against his Russian half in some way.  He is already beginning to address me in English but that is normal.  We live in an English-speaking society and can't really get away from this. But for now we're doing all we can to preserve his birthright language as a gateway to culture, future opportunities, and more intimacy in our relationship - I don't especially want to be forced to speak a foreign language with my flesh and blood.[/quote]

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