Reply to Immersion school parents

Forum Index » DC Public and Public Charter Schools

Reply to "Immersion school parents "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Being an immersion parent in DC requires a lot of supplementing in early grades at minimum if the goal is bilingualism. If the goal is exposure, that’s a different set of expectations. There’s also a huge incentive for schools and polite neighbors to over-inflate your kid’s language abilities. Anyone who is telling you that your kid is native level or “on grade level” for their peers “in-country” has a bridge to sell you in Baltimore. Our kids have only every been spoken to in the target language at home and have been assessed by the school as being fluent or native level - and they simply have fewer hours of reading and writing practice and less instinctive grammar constructions than their cousins. Will they be bilingual adults - that’s the goal but it’s taken thousands of hours and dollars OUTSIDE school to make that happen. And we get our kids independently evaluated annually to control for the bias in testing since we hope they will go to college outside the U.S. [/quote]

Are you a native speaker of the target language? How are you spending thousands of hours and dollar outside of school? In our household both parents are native speakers and the only $ we are spending outside of school is the flight tickets to visit the grandparents who only speak the target language. Oh, I forgot the day care $, who was also bilingual. [/quote]

Yes, we are. We spend additional time reinforcing writing and reading with kids every day. They have a weekly reading and writing tutor. They go to weekend language schools. We import books, games, and pay for streaming content. We have an au pair. We spend two months every summer in-country putting kids in local camps, renting an apartment. We spend holidays in-country putting kids in local camps. They went to immersion preschools. They take music lessons in target language. Adding all of that up, for two kids is thousands of hours annually and thousands of dollars. Again, if the goal is bilingualism (including high level reading and writing) the expectation and effort is different. If the goal is exposure and expecting them to develop adult-level reading and writing skills in college - the expectations are different. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics