Reply to Has anyone's child become fluent in a language not spoken at home exclusively by learning in middle or high school?

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Reply to "Has anyone's child become fluent in a language not spoken at home exclusively by learning in middle or high school?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Yes, but they went to a foreign language immersion private school since kindergarten. There’s also a foreign language public immersion school in our city. [/quote]

There’s usually a lottery to get into one of them they are so popular.   I had French lessons with a handful of students handpicked in elementary school.  Useless unless the student has a real ear for language, kind of like musical prodigies.  It’s immersion or it doesn’t work for the average student.  What I didn’t understand about one of the Spanish immersion elementary schools is 50% of them were primary Spanish speakers.  [b]That was just plain dumb when the slots were so limited. [/b] [/quote]

Excluding Spanish speakers from Spanish immersion is not only dumb but is also unbelievably unjust.

The kids from Spanish speaking families benefit the most from Spanish immersion because it gives them an opportunity to retain their heritage language, something that is not a given for them, believe it or not. It is not just an extra skill for them it is a connection to their families and communities. To deny this to them because you think only rich White kids deserve language immersion is gross and ridiculous. [/quote]

Completely agree. I’m not for allowing kids who are struggling to learn English to use Spanish immersion to get around learning English—I think that it disadvantages them long term, and I know people here who did not learn English in high school and now basically can’t work at anything other than janitorial work, construction, or nannying. But there are lots of families like mine in which the kids fully understand Spanish but resist speaking the minority language and would benefit from more explicit instruction and use outside the home.[/quote]

That’s not the school’s responsibility to give Spanish speakers extra help in their native language because they refuse to use it at home.   Plus there are dozens of different languages in the city schools not just Spanish speaking children.  It’s also not just the Spanish speaking kids who don’t like to speak the foreign language.  You hear it all the time, the mother speaks to her child in Farsi and the child answers in English.  Many parents came to the US as adults and have never been able to learn English, whether from lack of trying or difficulty.

If we want to start bilingualism in this country we need to fully immerse students whose parents are English speaking and there are not any family members who speak another language.  [/quote]

This is kind of like saying that if we really want to train more engineers we should focus on teaching the people who haven’t learned arithmetic yet instead of the people who have strong foundations in algebra…[/quote]

Also there’s a difference between using a language at home, where you develop a feel for the grammar (without a formal understanding of the rules) and a basic vocabulary centered around everyday life. That’s not enough for professional use, which requires formal writing instruction and a much deeper vocabulary. Why would you want to deny children who speak Spanish at home the opportunity to develop these skills at school?[/quote]

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