Anonymous wrote:Our school has Chinese FLES classes. Students hate it. They aren't learning the language. Teacher gives answers for all exams because students are lost and haven't learned anything. Waste of time and money.

Interesting. My son has Chinese at his school and he loves it. There aren't many classes he gets excited about, but he really does get excited on days he has Chinese. He used to go to a different school where they had Spanish and he didn't care for it too much. My guess is that the teacher he has for Chinese is very good and the Spanish teacher he had wasn't.

FLES in our school is time for the teacher to do planning. What do schools do if they don't have FLES? Do kids have more specials in other areas? I can't imagine the teachers work longer.

If the school district was truly concerned about the kids learning a second language, there would be much more time and effort devoted to it.

+1 If something can't be done right, don't do it at all.

And as for "exposure", there is plenty of "exposure" going on given the number of "other language" students in FCPS. The students mix with students from all over the world constantly. Other languages are being spoken constantly and a half hour of FLES is going to do little compared to the kind of exposure they get from their classmates.