Reply to Yu Ying - advice please

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Which Cantonese speakers?  They don't seem to have been on these boards for ages.

I'm a native Mandarin speaker who's lived in DC since long before Yu Ying opened. I've volunteered for this and that at the school over the years (but no longer do). I know a couple dozen YY and DCI families pretty well, including those who started in the original PreK4 group. I say with confidence that most of the families aren't very serious about the Chinese, and even if they are, not having a cohort of native-speaking kids in the school clobbers the language learning, unless a Chinese-speaking adult is in the home year after year.

The school doesn't try to expose the YY students to native Chinese-speaking young people in the Metro area (e.g. from the strongest Mandarin heritage programs in MoCo) when they could have started doing this long ago, even if they can't/don't want to recruit native speakers directly.  YY doesn't encourage the kids to hang out with native speakers their own age and it shows.  Parents love the program anyway, but from the perspective of those of us who speak only Chinese to our children, the arrangement is pretty silly. You hear the parents say, oh no problem, our kids will go live in China later to perfect their Chinese.  Maybe, but I doubt it, other than a few.  I doubt that my own kids will do this, and they have no trouble speaking Chinese all day, with the odd English word or phrase tossed in.  [/quote]

Why do you care so much. Seriously, give it up. So they will never learn Chinese to your standards. Big deal. Don't you have your own garden to tend?[/quote]

Sure, but I supported the creation of YY, and have volunteered there many times, making me a stakeholder.  I've grown disenchanted, mainly due to a persistent truth-in-advertising issue. [b]Parents of 3 and 4 years olds are assured at open houses that their kids will become "fluent" in Chinese by MS by dint of hard work (no native speaking peers or their families needed).  At a recent open house, a friend noted that this was said a dozen times.[/b]  But the truth is that many kids who've been at YY all the way from PreK to 5th grade struggle to speak or understand basic everyday Chinese.  The arrangement makes me think of the Soviet "we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us" approach. The immersion school I backed has not emerged as an immersion school.  This city can do better.

Why don't you care? Because your kid is behind the curve in two languages and you don't want to deal with that? [/quote]

Not the PP you're replying to, but I absolutely need to call BS on the bolded part about the school promising fluency to PK3 and 4 yr old parents.  I've been to open houses last year and this year, and I NEVER heard YY staff promise fluency.  Of course they talked about the advantages of having the DCI track and about higher levels of proficiency because of it, but they never said "Hey, start your kid in PK and they'll be fluent by 12th, without any other supports or classes outside the schoolday".  Never said it, and you should be ashamed of yourself for spreading that untruth as fact.
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