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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I also think that there is a chance that DC can choose later on to pick up the language as a teen etc and would probably end up at roughly the same proficient that way without endless language school every saturday as a child.[/quote]

Why can't the non-native English speaking parent just speak to the child in the other language at home?[/quote]

I am mixed and my mom only spoke Spanish to me growing up. I had a speech delay and communicated through sign language until I was 2.5. The speech therapy I was in was in English. My mother continued speaking only Spanish to me and later my sister but because I only spoke English, my sister also only spoke English. We both understand a lot of Spanish and I think if we spent significant time in a Latin American country we would become fluent. I was also put in a Dual Language public preschool but I was bullied by the other children in the class so I moved to a non-DL school for kindergarten. Three years later the DL program ended so even if I had stayed it wouldn’t have done much good. My point is, a parent can speak only the foreign language and it still might not stick. IME it only works if BOTH parents only speak the foreign language 24/7, but if you want to enroll your child in private they will need to be fluent in English by age 4 or 5. I know people whose parents didn’t teach them English even though the parents themselves spoke English and most of them say that learning English in an ESL classroom made it harder to learn other subjects and found the program itself othering and traumatic. Learning an entire language on top of kindergarten academics can be very traumatic, especially if your ESL teachers are rude and upset that you are a slow learner.[/quote]

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