Not to understand why primary children aren't fluent in English after a year

[Claraetal]

I don't understand why primary school aged children, who arrive in reception not being able to speak English, are still considered as "English as Second Language" (ESL) for pretty much their whole time in primary school as far as I can tell. The teachers talk about them as if not being to speak, read, write English perfectly is a permanent state and I don't get it. Surely by year 1 they should be at the same level as everyone else. Let me try to explain why I am not insane... :)

I myself was moved to France with my parents as an 8 year old for a year. My parents are English and English speaking as were all of my friends before I moved. I was sent to an entirely French school at the start of the school year. It was a little tough but by Christmas I could speak French and some time between then and the end of the school year I was pretty much indistinguishable from the other kids.

As another and maybe better example, I spent some time in Denmark this year. There I spoke to English speaking families whose primary school aged kids had been sent to normal Danish language schools. They said the same thing. That is that after 6 months or so their children were pretty much fluent and after a year they couldn't really be told apart from their class mates. In these cases their parents couldn't speak a word of Danish on arrival and were still pretty terrible after a year.

I get it if the class or school doesn't have English as the majority language. In that case you are lacking the total immersion effect. But I am talking about our local schools where English is the only language commonly heard in the playground. I don't buy the story that it is because their parents don't speak English or that they don't speak English at home as that was exactly the same for me with French and also for all the ex-pat families in Denmark.

So what is going on?

by Christmas I could speak French and some time between then and the end of the school year I was pretty much indistinguishable from the other kid

You're absolutely kidding yourself. Your accent alone would have made you stand out like a sore thumb, no matter how good your language skills were.

ESL as a term is a little outdated yes for the reason you mention - I think it came about because it used to be EFL - English as a Foreign Language, but this was changed as it was seen as derogatory and not very accurate, e.g. in the case that a child has an English parent and a parent who speaks another language natively. English isn't foreign to them as it's part of their home language but they still may be classed as an English learner.

So came the terms ESOL - English for Speakers of Other Languages, and ESL - English as a Second Language. But again it was recognised this isn't especially accurate because it rests on an assumption that people have one mother tongue and couldn't possibly pick up more than one language.

The preferred term these days is EAL which means English as an Additional Language, which is probably the most descriptive, as it basically means English isn't the person's first/main language and is in addition to some other language which may be more dominant. People still use EFL/ESL as shorthand though. I used ESL in my posts because you did!

Autofill my dcs have NEVER been considered ESL despite always stating that they speak French at home.
Nor has it ever been the case for any of friends in a similar situation.
They’ve never got any support which dc2 could have done with) either.

I’ve actually been told that being born in the U.K. meant they were automatically English speaking.

But more to the point, the issue is more about HOW you define that a child is ESL. And the fact that I am pretty sure things aren’t set in stone. They certainly weren’t for my own dcs.

@Tambient

I’m also wondering what is supposed to be the first language of a child that is raised bilingual (as in two languages at home).
There is what is called a minority and majority languages this will be the way it is worked out what one is the main language. The main language is usually viewed the "first" language (I have issues with that word btw I personally prefer main language)
So the minority language can be the language spoken by one parent that is not spoken in the country they live in.. Or can be the language spoken in the country they live in where they do not speak this at home.. So basically the minority languages are the language that is used to the lesser extend. the majority the one that is used more.

Is the dominant language as they speak it when they start school?
The dominant language would the the language they speak the most. Can be the same as the school and can be different

Is it the language of the country, even if they don’t have as good handle on it?
It can be the language of the country they live in (if say 1 parent speaks this and it is most used in the home) but it can also not be that language " if the language is not spoken between the family but only when out with others.

Is the language spoken by the mother? It can be. It can also be the language spoken by the father (in the case of my children it became the language spoken by the father that was the main language)

Can it change? Yes it can change but its rare it does.. It s more likely a minority language becomes the majority but even this can be hard if it was just a spoken language and not a written one.. One difference there will be if minority language is say English to a couple who are french and speak French to their child. However child then goes to school in Britain and remains in Britain speaking and using English never learning to write French then the English language that was the minority language becomes the majority language and French becomes the minority. Despite originally having been the majority .

To completely confuse the matter. You can have more than 1 minority language. with no obvious majority language to begin with. So for example I have acquaintances where the guy is Spanish the woman French and they live here in the UK.. The dad speaks Spanish to their children the woman French and when they are out and about they all speak English When the children were younger it was not possible to work out what language they had as their main language (additionally so as they really do split their parenting equally so both spend time with the children when they were really young) However when they started school the decision was made to send them to English schools. The children can write a bit in French and Spanish but fully in English... so for them over the years the main language that came through was English with 2 minority languages.

We have moved apart and I haven't seen them for 4 years now (facebook friends these days) so I can't as the children how they view themselves I know they didn't have British passports when I last spoke to them about this.

I hope this explained a bit?

It just illustrates how you can't put people into boxes really. Multilingualism and multiculturalism doesn't lend itself naturally to compartmentalising.

Perhaps it would help more to have the school category simply as "Children needing additional support with English". This could be for many reasons whether absence of English support at home which is replaced with good support in another language or total absence of language support at all or children with dyslexia, auditory processing or other language based learning support needs.

@Claraetal
I think that it is very different moving at 20 and 5. You learn languages quite differently as a small child and also the total immersion is.. well.. more total.
IF a child moves to another country with their family they are unlikely to have total immersion.. My point was more that if a language is taught after another language it will always remain the 2nd language. So you will always have ESL. Even if you reach bilingual level you still have the 2nd language 2nd to the first you were taught.

You are right that after 6 months the children were not full fluent in Denmark, although the ones I met were certainly "playground fluent". But after 12 months I was told they weren't held back at all academically compared to their peers.
This will also be due to the Danish education system when DD was in DK they ensured that she got age appropriate work and would explain it to her in English if it was Math etc so she was not held back developmentally..

Danish is a very hard language to learn and it takes many years before you do not as a native Danish speaker can hear that the person is not native Danish speaking.. I have close friends who have just celebrated their silver wedding anniversary they live in DK and have done for 20 years now. He is a teacher.. I can still hear it in his voice he is not a native speaker. His command is great dont get me wrong he is really good. However he slips up with stuff that has no rules.. like is it " en" or "et" (in English we use " a" for both)

Playground fluent is very different to fluent. it means your good at talking the written part of a language is the hard bit. So I do fully understand why they are still ESL even years later.

@Tambien

my dcs have NEVER been considered ESL despite always stating that they speak French at home.
I find that interesting as mine have through their primary school years always had down that English is their mothers 2nd language so teachers were aware that there was a 2nd language in play at home.. I know the same was true for 2 set of friends with a similar set up as ours.
In the case of my children they are not bilingual.. 1 set of friends are same as us the other they speak Vietnamese at home and English everywhere else (Dad Speaks Vietnamese as his 2nd language English is his first) All of the children had this noted as something that might be needed support around.. In practice little was needed for any of these 8 children I am speaking off. However it was there as an awareness. So I find it interesting yours did not receive that

French might be easier to become fluent in as it has a strict grammar structure. English doesn’t and you can make yourself understood without being anywhere near fluent. Also, France tends to attract migrants (and refugees) who speak linguistically similar languages - Arabic, most Indian languages, even Mandarin shares similarities with French that they don’t with English

I speak nine line which is now, and can safely say that I had to work a very very very hard in all of them to get to where I am. It took six years to learn Vietnamese fluently, even though I'm "Good at languages. Our year is really quick, not that much time at all to pick up something as difficult as English. And yes, English is a difficult second language. Some children may be able to get the hang of it quicker than others.

However, one of the things I've discovered as a secondary teacher is that many pupils cannot write in their own language. Lots of our students speak, say, Polish at home and are fluent in it - it is their mother tongue. Their English is good and they write fine. But ask them to write down the phrase in Polish and they can't - because all of their writing is in English (doing homework) they don't ever read or write anything in Polish.

Socks, that doesn't surprise me. I was tested and ESL at school since my mother his friends and I wasn't able to write anything at all in French. I still can't write it well, although everything else is pretty good. I can read nearly anything, speak and understand just as much as a native speaker. Because of my disabilities, my mother was encouraged not to speak French to me as a small child because I wasn't even picking up English. And I used to cry when she would speak French anyway. I have undiagnosed learning difficulties, it's more than likely that I have dyslexia and I actually really really dislike writing in any language. Even now, for this message, I'm using spoken dictation I'm not writing. I find it very very hard

I still tend to believe that almost all children who arrive at age 4 in a new country, should be able to speak it at a level where they suffer no academic disadvantage after 12 months. This is assuming that the main language in the school is English and the parents don't actively hide them from hearing and speaking English when they are out of school. Maybe these are too big assumptions and if there is research to show otherwise I will change my mind of course

so, despite everything that has been said, and the experience of many on this thread who work with or teach families like this you refuse to believe you might just be a bit wrong?!

classic.

Yes, you are making massive assumptions.
I lived in a country that was bilingual, half the population spoke Russian as a first language and half Kazakh. There were Russian schools and Kazakh schools.
When talking to older people who spoke Kazkah at home, but who had had to go to Russian schools (eg in Soviet times) one of the noticeable things was that they could not read and write well in their mother tongue (Kazakh) despite it being their more fluent language. So anything related to studying/schooling etc they had to switch to Russian (eg explaining grammar) and anything to do with emotions, feelings or family, they found it easier to say in Kazakh. These were people who had been bilingual since birth in a bilingual context.
Language is, as others say, situational. Vocab is learnt according to context and if you switch context you suddenly don't have enough vocab.

I am not going to “link to research” but you are very welcome to come and take a look at my personal library of many thousands of volumes. You are extrapolating from anecdata and superficial observation to draw conclusions about a subject that many university researchers have spent, and are still spending, millions of hours and millions of £££, investigating

quite. Go and do a google search on it, and read a book or two, it really is out there, lots and lots of information.

socks that’s normal to not be able to write in your home language. I’m one of those kids you are teaching. I am not native in either language because I can barely read and write in my first language and I am not a native speaker in English. It makes sense if you think about it.

Has probably been said before but speaking a language fluently is not the same as reading and writing or size of vocabulary.

Children where English is a second language aren't immersed in it night after night with English speaking adults. They've missed years of vocab,pronunciation and comprehension.

The children I've worked with in the past make incredible progress and often achieve incredibly well(often in the higher percentage of the class)but they are still at a disadvantage in some areas of the curriculum. I'd say reading comprehension is harder as a more detailed vocab can sometimes have gaps. Reading obviously impacts on many other areas of the curriculum. Obviously avid readers can and for bridge this gap but it will take longer than a year.

It should be acknowledged particularly when often such children are given no extra support and are just expected to get on with it.

Do

In my primary school most of the kids spoke Urdu at home which meant they also spoke it amongst themselves at school. There was therefore very little incentive for them to acquire good English skills and you could certainly tell the difference between those who did not speak English at home and those that did.

despite everything that has been said, and the experience of many on this thread who work with or teach families like this you refuse to believe you might just be a bit wrong?!

No. Very few on this thread have talked specifically about children arriving at 4, where the main language in the school is English and the parents don't actively hide them from hearing and speaking English when they are out of school. That is the children mix freely with other English speaking families socially. A lot of the figures that have been quoted from anonymous research haven't distinguished between the age of the children and the family or school situation. Other people have talked about moving to a foreign country as an adult, which is completely different in my view.

Very few on this thread have talked specifically about children arriving at 4, where the main language in the school is English and the parents don't actively hide them from hearing and speaking English when they are out of school.

That was NOT your OP.

That was NOT your OP. It was in part e.g "I don't understand why primary school aged children, who arrive in reception not being able to speak English[...]" and "[..] I am talking about our local schools where English is the only language commonly heard in the playground[...]" But also I have learned from the many interesting comments here so have changed my view slightly as a result.

In part?

You've just redefined your OP to a very specific set of circumstances that was not in the OP, to try to show you're right. Nice try.

One of the huge challenges in research into plurilingualism is accurate measurement of a child’s language input. Language input is the key driver of language output. If you get the input right, 99% of your problems are solved. But, short of researchers spending days p, weeks and months on end at a child’s side, it is immensely difficult to measure input and hence create neat, comparable groups of children for accurate statistical analysis.

Claraetal sorry to be pedantic (my intention is not to be deliberately mean I promise!) but much as I admire your fluency with languages, I don't think someone speaking English to native level would use the phrase "where parents don't actively hide them from hearing and speaking English out of school". They would probably use the verb "prevent". I think this kind of illustrates our point. Apologies though if that was just written in haste without much thought! (My posts on Mumsnet are generally full of grammatical and spelling errors!)

I work at an infant school where we have lots of new arrivals to the UK aged 4 with no English. (about 30% of our intake) We are located next to a large university and their parents are generally either doing Phds or are academics. Some are just doing a one year course and want their children to learn English for one year by immersion - others do 3 full years with us.

They aren't fluent by the end of the year. Most speak very little for the first term as they are taking it all in. Then they start with small sentences and get to play ground English by the end of the first year. They keep up with stuff like phonics and maths but we have to pre-teach vocab for things like topic work (but we also have to do this for some deprived children). They make huge progress - are better at English than if they had lessons in their home country. we encourage them to speak their other language at home and in particular still read books in their home language.

I think by the end of 3 years would class them as fluent but they still have to have some vocab explained.

The ideal time for a child to learn a new language is between 3 and 4 so you are correct in the fact that at this age the child is at a advantage if moved to a school that speaks a language they do not.

However like I have already stated in one of my responses. A child moved to a school that speaks a different language to them is very unlikely to be fully immersed in that language. They will speak it only at school and perhaps here and there when out and about in a shop/activity during the evening/weekend. However they will revert to their main language when at home or with people who speaks their main language.. It is suggested it takes 48 days to learn a new (Spoken) language if you are fully immersed that is 10 hours + a day in this language.. VERY few people are fully immersed so it is unlikely for any to do so. a Primary school aged child would only be immersed for 6 -7 hours a day. Additionally this would assume that there is no other child it that school who speaks the 1st language of the child as if that is the case the chances of them speaking together in their joint language is high and the child would not be fully immersed.

The IDEAL age to learn a new language is before 3.. It becomes harder for us after 8 and harder still after we have gone through puberty .

However in all of this we are speaking about spoken language. Written is a all together kettle of fish. I still after 27 years struggle with some English grammar (I have never worked out how the heck you lot use commas!) I get around it by using proof readers and now gramerley helps a lot. I have lost count of the amount of people who when hearing this insist on " explaining to me" (as that will help since no one ever tried to teach me before) and frankly its annoying it is not to do with my not having learnt the rules. It has to do with my not seeing how to apply it as I can see that in the Danish way. (where commas btw are fairly straight forward to apply) As I tend to blend the languages when it comes to written. (This is when you mix the languages together - when speaking with my niece we speak a perfect mixmatch of English/Danish only English/Danish people would get)

If we are talking about a child who does not write their 1st language yet then they are at an advantage to learn the written workings. However it will often (as we have heard in this thread by many people) come at a cost to the main language perhaps becoming the minority language or there will be a lot of blending if the 1st language written skills are also kept up to date..

THIS is why when you have a child in a school that speaks the language that is not their main language they remain down as ESL through out their time in schooling..

I hope that answers your question.

Written is a all together kettle of fish

Was meant to be " Written is a all together different kettle of fish