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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
I suppose it depends on your priorities in the end. Regarding homework, we don't believe it has much, if any value before high school (a belief system shared by the Finnish school system), so we only considered homeschooling or private schools with minimal homework; this was a decision we made that had nothing to do with language but with our overall educational philosophies (we're teachers). Regarding literature, my spouse handles reading in English while I handle the other two languages. Our kids do just fine there. On top of this, the research is rather clear that multilingualism increases overall vocab compared to monolingualism. In your library example, we go to the library frequently; it has plenty of books in Spanish and English. They can check out whichever books they want; they just know a particular parent will read them. Regarding movies and theatres, we happily go--we just talk about them in the language we're using that day. It has nothing to do with pretending English doesn't exist; it's simply about deciding to use the languages you want to teach.

Our method doesn't have to work for you, but it works very well for us and for a number of other families we've come across. It's not a competition, and there are many paths up the mountain.[/quote]
You aren't actually saying anything different, you know - you'll have to discuss homework in English at high school age, and you have a parent at home who supports English literacy because someone has to. I'm not arguing that it works you - I'm pointing out the pitfalls of that approach, because all of them have flaws.[/quote]

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