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?

OK, so I've only read page one.

I have worked in UK schools with high level ESL and overseas in International Schools and also now work with families who move form country to country and advise on education.

The statistics don't agree with your OP I'm afraid.

The stats show that it takes a child joining in reception 2 years to reach the same fluency as their peers.
A child joining after age 11 is unlikely to achieve total native speaker level. Anecdotally, I find that hard to believe as I know adults who manage it, but it shows that it is hard.

In the East End where I used to work, it was common to find kids, especially girls, who, at age 16, didn't have a really great deep and wide grasp of English, even though they were born here, and crucially, they didn't have that deep and wide grasp of their mother tongue either. It was an issue recognised in schools as needing addressing. The reasons are complex, and are to do with how educated the family is, what value they put on education and if they read etc at home.
Generally speaking, you will learn your second language to the width and depth of your first.

Also, vocabulary is learnt at home as much as at school, and if you don't learn it in English at school, there is a gap that has to be addressed at school.

I currently tutor 11+ kids, and every year I have a couple of ESL kids who have been here since birth and their biggest hurdle for 11+ is vocab.

mousefunky I highly doubt that's true, there's many children in my DS school who read and write Arabic but are perfectly on level with English too and everyone's parents turn up at his school for parents evening, polish Arab or whatever their background.
My DS spoke one language at home and English at school and he's always been in the higher set for everything, my DD only spoke English and due to her having a different father wasn't around another language and she is at the same level as her brother was at her age.

@A4710Rider

The truth? I'm not sure you can handle it.

OP "In terms of what my point is, I really don't have one"

I'm so glad you said that because I thought I needed another coffee.

If I have understood you correctly, you are allocating far too much responsibility for this to teachers. A primary child being raised among people who don't speak English as a first language is not going to get to the standard of English as a first language....quite possibly forever?

My parents came to England from another country and we only ever spoke English at home till I was about 12 in order to avoid this problem. Also, I have no aptitude for languages whatsoever - if we had been speaking both or just their language, I would have been stuffed in later life. At 12 I decided I had no interest in learning their language because school was bad enough - and they don't even have the same alphabet.

Also, in the first and second year of secondary school, we had to learn French and Latin.

Anyway, going back to the task - you can't be asking teachers to do better? They've got more than enough to do as it is - x 100!

I'm not sure you can handle it

The plain and whole truth is that UK Education standards are falling dramatically. Try and liberalise that away. You can't.

Making huge assumptions here now but I would think that your family op is middle class and well educated, you had the resources and home support to learn effectively. You were learning European languages with similar roots. Children coming from families with a home language that is very different to English, different alphabet etc. will have to assimilate a very new structure/ letter sounds/ word order in a short period of time and some may be from poorer backgrounds, may face significant challenges to their learning and may need support. I don't think your experience is universal enough to provide useful insight.

The EAL measure is arbitrary and in my experience it ranges from people who sound as British as people with only English to those who have been learning school for a week.
Some families do need help and schools should try their best to aid their integration into school and society. One that I have helped with is explaining school letters. You can't ask a Reception child to read and translate a letter targeted at adult parents.

IMO, Non English speaking families, should be made, by law (totally unenforceable) to give their children extra English language tuition at home.
It's seems of little importance to most people that our kids education is being harmed.

I need it to see it, as I was giving you the benefit of the doubt. No chance that you'd be happy with extra tuition at school, then?

If the children who have trouble with English are from families with low resources or poor knowledge of English, how would they give extra support at home?

Liberals would probably be happy with extra tuition at school.

The plain and whole truth is that UK Education standards are falling dramatically. Try and liberalise that away. You can't.

What does that even mean?

Convince me you can indeed handle the truth with decent arguments, not platitudes.

steppemum - I agree with everything you say. I would add that, while measuring vocabulary is a relatively straightforward way to look at and compare language development, measuring vocabulary is also a proxy for measuring syntax since the development of vocabulary and of syntax are highly correlated and interdependent.

Convince me you can indeed handle the truth

What does that even mean?

I asked you first, Rider.

OP, since we're using anecdata based on personal experience, here's mine.

I've lived in France for over 20 years.
Some of my colleagues, also British, have been here for 30 or 40 years.
I'm the only one who doesn't have an obviously British accent when I speak French and who is regularly taken for a native speaker.
When I spoke a smattering of Italian and Spanish, and quite good German, my accent was always excellent even when my grammar and vocab were not.
My sister speaks Slovak to native level, German and Russian to near native levels.
My brother spends lots of time in France and can barely construct a correct sentence in French.
We have the same parents and the same childhood experiences, in linguistic terms.

Maybe your personal experience is linked to your being fortunate as regards foreign language acquisition, like my sister and I, rather than it being a damning indictment of whatever it is you're trying to criticise?

I was an expat with my children in Germany (I'm from the UK) They were fluent verbally but I can not help them with grammar, writing and understanding the cultural references as I am a foreigner. If I lived somewhere with a completely different alphabet say China, I'd be able to help less since I can sometimes guess a German word based on English and I can have a stab at the pronunciation.

You’re not an expat. You’re an immigrant.
Also massively arrogant and entitled.

From the other direction - my English speaking kids go to International schools, with kids from everywhere - native English speaking, and ESL and, yes, the kids can communicate, but they're not speaking English at home, and they lack the idiom and breadth that my kids have (although admittedly, a lot of that comes from the youtubers they watch rather than me!)

I think it is an important thing to note - that when my kid gets his pronouns confused, or mis-pronounces a word, he'll be corrected at home and school, but the ESL kids will just be getting it at school - it's not a bad thing, it's just more knowledge about the kid to help the teachers to individualise their education

Random EAL issue. Friend from school - moved to UK age 9 with no English. Got Scholarship to selective private school starting at 11...

Definitely indistinguishable but had issues in maths with probability involving playing cards because unlike the rest of us she had no idea of 4 suits, 13 cards/suit etc which we all knew (probably from early maths at school as much as games)... cultural references pervade everything.

One of my most surreal moments was reading Bridget Jones' diary in French. The footnotes were hilarious as a native Brit with fluent French!

I dunno, maybe the school then get more funding if they have lots of ESL children? Is that what you are implying, OP?

I asked you first, Rider

Do you have any point to make? I've made mine clearly.

The plain and whole truth is that UK Education standards are falling dramatically. Try and liberalise that away. You can't.

So this has nothing to do with a decade of austerity which has seen massive cuts in police force (and increase in crime), massive cuts to education, massive cuts to the health service? No must be the immigrants. Let's just get rid of them eh? Who cares that we can't find enough nurses, doctors, teachers, carers and labourers to cover the countries demands. A random troll on the internet has decided that everything bad in this country is due to immigrants (without any evidence but never mind) so lets make things more difficult for them!

I do think it is perfectly fair enough.
For a start of English as the second language is a factual statement. Even if they stop speaking the other language entirely then they still spoke English as a second language.
But more likely if it's their second language, then they don't speak it at home, and parents may struggle to help with homework etc.

Then I'm thinking of my French teacher at school. English was her third language, which she learnt at school. French was her fourth. She didn't actually speak any more her first, and rarely her second. In fact she said she wasn't fluent any more in them.
If you met her you'd say her English was fluent. No accent, no pause for word etc. If she hadn't told us we wouldn't have known it wasn't her first language. She would have been late 30s/early 40s at a guess from her children's ages.
But there were a couple of times in lessons where she got two normal words mixed up. Literally twice over 5 years worth of lessons.
One of the pair was something like spade and sofa. Other was something similar. She made a comment about getting them confused because they were similar in her first language and she'd always struggled to remember which was which since then.

IQ has been fallling steadily in many so called developed economies since the mid 1970s. Recent austerity measures are not the cause:
edition.cnn.com/2018/06/13/health/falling-iq-scores-study-intl/index.html

As a general point I literally can't understand why people don't realise that their anecdotal experience doesn't trump huge swathes of statistics. I really don't see why it's so difficult to understand that your experience may not have been typical and that in any case you have nothing to compare it to. Perhaps you've done very well as an immigrant but if you'd been a native speaker you'd have done even better.

A4710Rider Oh I see you're just causing trouble. I'll ignore you from now on.