Language difficulty in bilingual child : Any experience?

[Justmeandthekids]

I was wondering of someone has had experience of language issue with a bilingual child.

dc2 is nearly 6yo. He is raised bilingual french and english.
Until the beginning of this school year (he is in Y1) french was his strong language up to the point that he could not always understand what his teacher was saying. Lovely teacher has done a hell of work with him and I think he is getting better now.
He also doesn't speak clearly (his teacher says that now she is used to him she can understand him but a new TA in the class couldn't). Other children have problems too so he is not mixing well.
He has problems with recognizing sounds so learning to read is compromised. The sounds he is struggling with are mainly the ones that are specifically english (like the 'U').

He has been referred to a SALT for evaluation but it will take some time for the appointment to come through.

In the mean time, I am struggling to see if his 'problems' are just 'normal' but made more visible because he is bilingual (so will sort themselves out). If there are some real language issues there.
I am also struggling to see how he can have understanding issues in english when he has spent all his life in the UK, been to nursery/childminder/school all in english and dad is speaking english at home. But he doesn't seem to have any problem with understanding french??

Any experience on this would be welcome!

I'm bilingual. Oldest of 4. When we were struggling with similar problems my parents decided to speak the language of the country we were living in until we had grasped it enough. At the time I was 10, brother was 9, sister 4 and youngest brother 2. We did this for about 6 months. Then one day my younger two siblings were chattering away and my mum and dad couldn't understand them, they were so fluent! From then we went back to speaking English at home but that 6 months was very helpful. ?????????????

mummy, how long had you been living in that country?

A year I think ( i will double check with my mum). But the yougest two were speaking a mixture of both languages and were confused. Speaking only Swedish for a while solved it for us. But it took us 2-3 years to be that bilingual that no one knew we were English when we spoke Swedish.

Other bilingual kids that I know do waht you do - and eventualy it clicks for them. Sometimes it just takes longer because you do have TWO languages to process. He most prob will catch up himself in a couple of years especially if there are no problems with French. It's a grat advantage to have two languages!

Yes I see what you mean. I can see how arriving in a different country it could help a lot.

But dc2 was born in the UK and has never lived in france! The last thing I was expecting was him having problems with english!

Which raise another issue (already suggested by teacher) : to do what your parents did and for me to speak english with the dcs. My issue here is that I am taking the risk that they would both stop speaking french - something I have seen happening quite a bit with other bilingual children when just one of the parent is speaking the minority language.

Hi Justme, I don't have any answer about your problem in particular, but would like to point you to this site which is run by bilingual parents for bilingual parents. They know what they are talking about and if you contact them they might well be able to help you. Good luck!

My DC are 6yo and 8yo and were raised bilingual (German/English) in Germany. Up until till the day that she went to Kindergarten aged 3yo, DD spoke almost only English, although she understood German.

She had some problems to begin with but settled in ok. We were sent to a SALT as the paediatrician thought that there were some sounds that she was not pronouncing correctly. Tbh, it was a bit of a waste of time - not just my opinion, the kindergarten teacher said that she would probably grow out of the problems, which she did. The SALT was hopeless though, so a better SALT would likely help.

If you can, get a SALT who is experienced with bilingual children.

It could well be that he is only having problems with English because French was his dominant language and it will sort itself out. And that he would have had these issues even if he was brought up monolingual.

Don't stop speaking French with him.

My DD is now 8yo and we moved to French speaking Switzerland and she is now trilingual.