Reply to Yu Ying - advice please

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Kids almost always do "fine" in Chinese at YY without any supplemental instruction or assistance from parents because the bar for Mandarin just isn't set very high, particularly for speaking. The instructional emphasis is on writing and grammar. When we sent our YY student to a summer immersion sleepover camp attended by a whole bunch of kids from Mandarin immersion schools in NY and NJ (both public and private weekend programs) after 3rd grade, we were surprised to learn that they had a lot of trouble keeping up on speaking and listening. They weren't just trailing campers who spoke dialects at home, they were behind the curve period.[/quote]

If you are comparing to kids who go to weekend immersion, then of course yours will not be as fluent in speaking because weekend school means they use the language at home. I think the spoken skills my kids are picking up are what would be expected for a non-native speaker from a non-native speaking household to demonstrate.

I do agree that the benchmarks that they are supposed to achieve have been watered down, but that doesn't mean that they themselves cannot outperform those benchmarks. IF the goal is to meet benchmarks, ie get a C, yes, they are not going to be fluent. I would hope my kids are striving to get an A, or in YY's case an E. Don't want to get into how ridiculous I think the grading systems used today are, that's another thread.

Going back to the original question, in light of some other more recent posts, if you are OK with the idea of the dual language, your child will still get a good education with the addition of better Chinese skills than trying to pick it up later in life.

One thing I have observed is that English reading was also slowed a little in both kids. Compared to some of their peers who go to other schools, they picked up reading a little later, but once they got it, they picked it up pretty quickly and I feel like they're catching up, if not already caught up. According to school assessments, they are on track and at grade level, but like I said earlier, the goal is not to be a C student, and the standardized testing has a pretty low benchmark for what grade level should be.[/quote]

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