Reply to Yu Ying - Do/Can Non-Native Kids Actually SPEAK Chinese?

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Reply to " Yu Ying - Do/Can Non-Native Kids Actually SPEAK Chinese?"

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[quote=Anonymous]The solution for the detractors, particularly given the waitlist at YY, would be for the "heritage speakers" to form their own charter school, however, like YY, they wouldn't be able to discriminate in favor of heritage-speaking children, obviously. At least, however, they would be able to hire an ED and teachers they that they feel speak Chinese well - and then, they would have less need to continually bash YY on DCUM. 
The idea that "If you don't do immersion right, the pay off can be negligible or even negative" is simply not supported by any evidence. The pay-off of learning a language doesn't have to be grade-level fluency in the language per se - it teaches to cope with failure (something the offspring of millennials lack generally), to problem solve, to decode language, to relate to difference, to feel comfortable outside one's own culture. This is very valuable. It also encourages language learning as an adult. As to negative effects, the evidence suggests that a child in a bilingual or immersion environment may initially have fewer words in the dominant language - but that these deficiencies are temporary and the child catches up as they age. Being committed to bilingualism or immersion study requires parents to suppress their own egos that their child is the best English reader on the block or gotten a certain score as a four year old - because when the kid is ten their English will have caught up to their peers AND they will have SOME level of fluency in another language. My sister and her husband are fluent and native speakers of Spanish and their nanny is a Spanish speaker. Her daughters are the best English readers on the block and understand Spanish but don't speak it because my sister and her husband do not speak to them consistently in Spanish. My husband and I are fluent and native speakers of Italian and we chose to only speak Italian to our DC. DC is fluent in Italian and had little exposure/ interest in English until kindergarten, so he was an not an early English reader and  he had fewer English words initially. He has more than caught up now - even though we continue to speak to him in Italian and he had an Italian au pair. However, I will never have the bragging rights to say my kid was reading the New York Times at three or scored the highest on the English test for his grade in kindergarten. I'm OK with that - and perhaps that's a class-based analysis -because DC has grandparents and parents who are college professors and lawyers so we know that the kid will always be surrounded by high level English speakers who can support and enrich later on. I might feel differentially if this were not the case. [/quote]

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