Children speaking their first language to eachother at primary school

[languageissues]

Does anyone have any experience of this? Where there is a handful of children whose first language is not English, who are young (say between 5 and 8) do teachers require them to speak English at school? If not, how do they supervise as they cannot understand what is being said? I am concerned about bullying and not appropriate language being used (my dc is one of the children affected) and I wondered how will the teachers react if we ask them to require that English is spoken while on school grounds? I would be really grateful for views.

I don't think playgrounds should be 'policed' in that sense. It's effectively free time and therefore it's up to the children what language they speak in or who they play with.

I think it's very important that there is a common language in the classroom. Otherwise you end up with one table speaking Sylhet, another Pashtun, one French, one Mandarin and another English. This just encourages segregation and ghettoisation and creates the sort of environment where young people are so detached from different members of their society that they're perfectly happy to get on tube trains and blow them up or plant nail bombs in the areas their community lives in because they don't think they have a right to be there.

It's a matter of cohesion.

The language isn't a Red herring through - as when ops child is insulted the teaching staff probably don't understand ? Of course Yanbu but agree the bullying is the primary issue to address

Couldn't speaking different languages mean more segregation on the playground, creating cliques of ethnic groups rather than everyone playing together?

blueturtle I think banning languages other than English in the playground sends a pretty powerful message of disapproval to all those kids whose first language is not English, and may well get in the way of their learning English, particularly when they're young. Little kids rock up at school not knowing it's a "problem" that their mother tongue is not the local one and will often go into their first language when they're annoyed or excited and by being sympathetic to this it's possible to keep language learning fun for them and not frightening or boring. I think it would be a shame to treat their bilingualism as something to be controlled rather than celebrated. It's not bloody easy, whatever anyone says.

(I'm also acutely aware that my bilingual kids (English/German) probably get an easy ride on this one - while their kindergarten teachers are very sympathetic and very good at dealing, it also helps that English is a desirable second language, and their little clleagues' parents want to practice their English on us.)

We once had a party for one of our children. I hadn't realised before but all the children were not fluent English speakers. It was indeed difficult to explain rules of games etc. I think it must be very difficult in some classrooms. I could see why my child had felt isolated. We moved away.

When DD1 started school she had three languages she could communicate in to varying degrees, none of which were the two used at school. It has been a real struggle for her, and certainly at the beginning the children she played with were largely those she could understand. I didn't have an issue with that, school must have been unsettling enough for her anyway. She was made to speak the language being used for each lesson in the classroom, and now does use those more. The best way for children to learn is by socialising, and yes, that can involve the other children being patient. I can see how it can be difficult when it's the majority of the class though.

There are some places where I live in Belgium where the parents are forbidden to use anything but Flemish around the environs of the school at drop off and pick up. There is one language in Flemish schools, apart from MFL teaching, and that's Flemish. It seems to work.

I agree strongly with presenting it as a matter of etiquette and inclusion, and coming down heavily against using language as a means of bullying. Absolutely right. And insisting on a classroom language could help with that.

But I would be very concerned about a situation where a child with limited English was very upset or developed a serious problem and was unable to explain to a friend or ask a friend to translate, because their first language was banned and they were too stressed to do it in English- or simply did not have the words. A medical problem for instance- or being bullied.

Schools also have a safeguarding role: how do you manage that if a child who is being abused at home cannot communicate with the teacher because her own language is not good enough and she is not allowed to tell a friend? Some of the foreign speakers in this country have come in as refugees; they may well be traumatised; how can they open up if they do not have the language? If we use interpreters for adults, how can we ban children from using a friend to interpret?

My own ds went through a period of selective mutism which was clearly related to bilingualism; not a massive problem in his case, but then he was a healthy non-traumatised child from a privileged language background with a relatively prestigious second language and a well functioning family with excellent double language skills who were able to help him out of it, so the fact that he didn't speak at nursery or for the first year or so of primary wasn't a massive problem: there were people there who could speak for him.

If rules are introduced re language use, I think they should be very carefully thought through and carefully worded, so that the children understand that this is not about your other language being less appreciated or wrong, it is about making the lessons work and not making other children feel excluded. And a special explanation about emergencies.