'they'll be fluent by Christmas...'

[lozzyblue]

Ok so this has been said to me countless times but I just wonder how it can actually be true?!

My dd (age 4) started at a local Belgian school in September and her teacher tells me she has started to speak some words to her in class but it's now approaching the end of November and I cannot imagine how any child could be fluent (or even close) in that short time?

I understand every child is different and will pick things up at a different pace but am interested to hear others experiences!

No it's not true. I've heard this said about children, that they will pick up a new language in a couple of months, but in my experience it will take a year or even two years.

I'm in belgium too.

Is your dd going to a french or flemish school? Is that language spoken at home at all? Does she go full time?

No way, never met a child fluent in 4 months. It took our then 3 and 6 year olds till Christmas before they had a sufficient amount of comprehension that they could talk a bit, not until Easter before they started talking in sentences, not for a year before they could really be in any way considered fluent. 2 years on, French became without doubt the more fluent than English for the then 5 year old, pretty much equal for the then 8 year old. They do have the advantage of having a bit of French at home and also now to all activities in French.

Not at all true. She may understand nearly everything but the process if language acquisition is complicated and productive skills lag way behind receptive skills.

It's a very positive sign that she's starting to communicate at school. Once she gets to grips with the basics you will see her gain proficiency very quickly but 4 months is unrealistic Full fluency will take upwards of a year.

We are in France; bilingual family (English mother, French father) but as I am a SAHM and for various other reasons (no French family, lots of contact with English family etc.) both our DC had English as their majority language and only really understood French until they started maternelle.

We heard the same thing: "Just wait until Petite Section ; the French will take off and you'll struggle to keep their English up!" and, endlessly, "by Christmas they wilk be babbling away in French".

Well, no, that's not what happened to Dd1 at all.

She improved steadily throughout PS, but her French was way behind her English and she never, ever spoke French at home, even with her Daddy. Teachers at school had no concerns, luckily, as the are lots of monolingual kids who start PS with not much spoken language. But it felt like slow progress, knowing as we did how good her English was.

In Moyenne Section she got better and better, but still not babbling away / fluent and certainly not better in French than English.

She is now in Grande Section and I would say that her French is pretty good. She had a supply teacher for a week last week and that teacher did not know she was bilingual and had not noticed any shortfall in her French versus her French school friends. She overheard me speaking in English to Dd at the school gate and asked me about it and was shocked as she said Dd's French is absolutely fine. This was certainly welcome news for me! So I would say it has taken nearly 2 and a half years of school to get to age appropriate fluency.

Funnily enough, I still don't think her French is as good as her English, but I now realise that hee English is really very good, not just by bilingual standards but by any standards :).

So, I think thise who bang on about fluent by Christmas either have exceptionally attuned to language children OR do not have bilingual children at all and don't knownwhat they are talking about.

You hear this all the time and it's just not true. It took both my DCs a year before they would even try to speak in sentences. I would say after about six months they were beginning to understand what was being said to them.

For both DCs their first words were c'est quoi?

After about two years they were both getting by well, DS1(9) has great French now, but every now and again he has to ask the teacher to explain some vocabulary. DS2 who is now CE1 speaks very well, but I don't think he has the confidence to ask if he doesn't understand.

What I found even more frustrating were the people who used to tell me their own children were fluent after a year, when in fact it's just their language skills are better than their parents.

Oh, I have a friend here in France and she is from Another Anglo Country. Her kids are passively bilingual only (fluent French, passive English) and she cannot get them to say a word in English. This makes her very sad.

Her latest plan is to go back to her home country with her 3 DCs for one term next year, to enroll them in school, and get them speaking English. Then she thinks she will not have to worry about their bilingualism for the rest of their lives. She keeps talking about "kick starting" their English and "giving them the declic they need."

I don't think she gets that afterwards, if they come back and revert to their current pattern (both parents speaking French at home, long holidays with French grandparents, only occasional trips to home country, etc) then her DC will not progress in English and possibly lose whatever Ebglish they managed to acquire during that one term overseas.

Great to hear all your opinions ladies and glad to hear I am not alone in thinking its a load of rubbish lol

Belgo dd is in a French school full time and no, we don't speak at home other than when she says bits n pieces or counts etc. I try not to really as altho I have a fair amount of vocab I'm sure my accent is nothing like native and I'm so rusty I've forgotten a lot of the basics

Hi lozzyblue, hope all's going well! It annoys me when people say this. For what it's worth my dcs are 22, 20 and 12 and I would say their spoken French has never equalled their spoken English (in terms of vocabulary rather than accent) and they also choose, and have always chosen, to speak to one another in English (was very surprised when I went to natation's house to hear her dds speaking to one another in French after only three years here!).

We moved ds1 to the British school system at the age of 16 and he managed a B in GCSE English language after six months in the school. That was better than he was doing in French in his Belgian secondary school and without doing that much written English previously (he always choose to read in English though). My French is pretty good but we always speak English at home and me choosing not to return to work when ds1 was born meant long periods of lots of English (quite a lot after school (though one of ds2's friends used to come after school 3 or 4 times a week until his parents picked him up around 18h30/19h00), weekends, all holidays except when they were with their friends and doing activities).

Greythorne, I have heard so many people saying they are going to put their dcs into maternelle for a couple of years so that they will be bilingual forever!

To echo the other posts, I moved to a new country/language when I was five, and it took me about a year to become fluent in the second language. I seem to remember being baffled by it for a loooong time, and then everything coming together very suddenly.

I think it's fine for you all to continue speaking english at home, although it will be useful to improve your own french so you can help her with homework etc in a couple of years.

It's great that she is going to school full time, I know other parents who expect their child to become fluent going just a couple of mornings per week.

Give her time, try and organise play dates with french speaking children and maybe get her into a french speaking dance class for example at the weekend.

The only time my DCs ever speak to each other in French at home is when they're cooking up trouble and they don't want DH to hear as he doesn't speak any French at all. I'm quite impressed at English speaking DCs chatting to each other in French.

'What I found even more frustrating were the people who used to tell me their own children were fluent after a year, when in fact it's just their language skills are better than their parents.'

so true!

Greythorne - it may be quite hard for her to get her children enrolled in a British school for a term - I couldn't manage it for a couple of weeks!

My children have also been very slow in speaking English, despite me speaking English to them all the time. A couple of weeks with the english grandparents every few months and attending a Brownies when they are in England has made a huge difference and they are speaking english very well.

Yes, of course, it's different when one of the parents speak the school language with the children. It is then the minority language which ends up being the second language, I would presume in nearly all cases. Mind you, my sister-in-law's husband is Flemish and they speak to one another in a real mixture of English and Dutch. When the children were little her dh spoke to them mainly in English and now mixes. They go to a Flemish school. Their English is their primary language but I guess this is because more English has always been spoken at home than Dutch. It's sometimes very confusing to be around them though! My dsis-in-law switches mid-sentence with her dh!

My dd started a french nursery at 2 and I remember worrying when she started maternelle at 2.5 whether she would be able to communicate enough. She was fine but did not speak much at all at school for the first year. She is 7 now and from what I can tell her french is very good. She certainly reads much more fluently in French than in English. Her teacher has no concerns.

Mind you, she stays at the garderie til 5ish, plays with French speaking neighbours at the weekend and watches French tv. So I guess her English input in vastly in the minority though that's what we speak at home.....

While I agree entirely with all other posters who point out that fluency in a second language learned at school is generally slower to take off than most parents appreciate or imagine, there are some, exceptional, circumstances that really stand out for me and just illustrate how different children are when it comes to learning a foreign language.

DD's best friend is German. She had lived in China all her life until she was five, where she attended an Anglo-Chinese nursery and spoke English to her nanny. She was therefore trilingual when she arrived aged five and a half in Grande Section of DD's French-English bilingual school. This little girl was very fluent in French by the end of GS and proceeded to CP with no difficulty where she learned to read and write in French and was consistently near the top of the class all year.

Longtime - dh and I always stick to our own languages when speaking to the dc, and we speak in english when we speak together (although I have to admit with three children and various commitments, we don't get much of a chance to talk together!)

My children speak a wonderful mixture of flemish and english, mixing words up in the the middle of sentences. DD2 always says 'want' when she means 'because' and I have given up correcting her

Lozzyblue - it's important not to worry, but equally important not to be complacent. You sometimes need to take active measures to encourage your child to learn the second language, such as I needed to do with dd1. But I don't think you need to stress out about it

portofino - your dd is a great example of a child who is doing very well in the french school system. I'm sure you're very proud of her

Actually dd does and the ds's used to do that too belgo. All school words seem to be in French ("Where did I put my cartable?" "Can you pass me my stylo") and sometimes verbs are a mixture of the French stem and "ing" at the end! I guess I just don't notice after 20 odd years! The ds's don't do this anymore though as ds1 spent three years in England at uni and ds2 is there now.

Lozzy, the reading thing depends on the child too. I taught ds1 to read in English at the age of 7½ (end of second year primary - I wanted him to learn to read in French properly first) and he never read in French again unless he had to for school. Did the same with ds2 but he didn't take to reading in English until much, much older. Dd seems to mix much more but her French reading is better than her English.

DD is still confused by the days of the week in English. In French - no problem at all - she knows she has piscine lundi, gym mardi, morales vendredi etc. If you say we will do something on Wednesday, she'll ask when that it is exactly. Cartable, stylo, pochette, farde are words in normal usage. I am lazy about other ones because they are cute -eg are you accroched (belted up in the car)? Otherwise I just repeat the correct sentence or word.

Portofino - I bought DD one of those magnetic calendars with the days of the week, months of the year, seasons, weather etc in English, and hung it on the kitchen wall just next to her place at the table. She is surprisingly assiduous in updating it and has mastered the words and their spellings as a result!

My dd1 is hopeless with the days of the week as well, despite various calenders in the house.

That's what I forgot to say! The ds's used to say lundi, mardi, mercredi, jeudi, vendredi, Saturday, Sunday! Can't really remember with dd even though she's younger. That goes for a lot of things which makes me think I remember more about them because I was younger and hence my memory was better!! Don't worry, they'll eventually get them sorted out!

yes of course the weekend days are in english! I used to stress a lot more, but I am far more relaxed now.

That's a good idea Bonsoir! Actually she would quite like a diary - I will have a look in the UK over xmas.....