English is a second language for one in seven school pupils in UK

[MmeLindt]

It is a Daily Mail article so slightly biased but it does raise some valid points.

I was particularly interested as we have recently moved to a French speaking area of Switzerland and put our children into local schools.

Particularly here around Geneva there is a high percentage of school children with French as a second language.

We have been offered extra French lessons to help the DC learn French faster. They are already speaking in sentences and are doing reasonably well in school.

I feel that this a lot of the "problem" in UK is that it is seen as a problem. Lots of people have said to us how fabulous it is for our children to be learning a third language (they are bilingual English/German). Ok, they speak 3 languages that are quite high up the hierarchy of desirable languages. I am sure we would not be congratulated on our children being bilingual croatian/polish/russian.

I feel that bilingualism is a great advantage for a child, and it should be seen as desirable and not stigmatised. There does need to be a nationwide system to help the children learn the local language as fast and as young as possible, perhaps even before schoolage is reached.

Any thoughts?

Well my dd is 5. We moved to Belgium when she was just 2, and just learning to talk in proper sentences. She has learnt french by immersion, by attending first a french speaking creche, then a french speaking school, though we mostly speak english at home. It hasn't caused her any problems at all.

I can see some issues that will need to be addressed as she gets older though.

1. I've read that non-mother tongue children at school can have problems later on as their vocabulary is more limited than their peers due to speaking their MT at home. I have already noticed that dd has gaps in her french vocab because some things just don't "come up" at school.

For example she doesn't/didn't know the word for Traffic Lights in French though she is very familiar with them. I will therefore need to ensure that she has lots of opportunity to socialise with other local kids and adults, and watch age appropriate TV/read books etc to maximise her exposure to the french language.

1. Helping her with homework is obviously going to be more difficult for us, particularly later on. So we need to decide how we will best be able to support her education.

1. It is very important to us that she learns to read and write fluently in English too, and that it doesn't become a "second language". We have already made a start on that at home.

She will also start to learn Dutch within the next few years. She's on her own with that one! But as most of the people I know here are AT LEAST trilingual, she's at least had a head start.

Some very good points here.

Perhaps some schools are guilty of trying to hard to integrate children from other countries. DD is not allowed to speak English in school. There are no translations. The immersion method is very effective.

Should then a school with a high proportion of non-English speakers ban other languages?

It is one of the most common misconception, that bilingual children are so lucky, that they just pick up the two or more languages. It is a lot of work, both for the child and for the parents.

I cannot say that I have spent a lot of money (yet) but I do know that there are plenty of English children in DD's school who go to English lessons to read and write in English. We are not doing any extra lessons at the moment as we want her to concentrate on French at the moment.

Surely support is the critical thing. DD is in Welsh medium education, and at her school, I think about 2 out of her year of 16 spoke any Welsh at all on entry. Now, in year 2, they are all totally fluent, despite the fact that a large proportion of the parents still speak no Welsh at all.
They nearly all start at age 3 in the nursery class, where they are spoken to 100% in Welsh, but the children aren't corrected for speaking English either then or in Reception. From year 1 they aren't supposed to speak any English in class at all.
I guess the differences from an 'inner city' type situation is that (a) most of the children speak the same mother tongue, (b) the teachers of course speak English so can help if necessary (although I don't think they do much) and of course can communicate with parents in English too, and (c) boringly but predictably we are in a rural community where most children are coming from stable if not always particularly prosperous homes.

I really don't know what would have happened if dd had started school here at say 5, or 6, or 7. No-one speaks any english at the school at all. In fact, I am often pounced on at the beginning of term to translate for Czech/Polish/Indian parents who's dcs are starting and don't speak French. The parents that is. The dcs seem to settle in very quickly.

I understand that there is new rule in the Dutch speaking system here, that children must have been at least in the last maternelle class (=reception) at a dutch school to enter into primary level. Presumably to put off french speakers who want to take advantage of the supposedly higher standards.....I guess they make an allowance for us foreigners though....

BonsoirAnna on Wed 18-Mar-09 12:48:52
"cory - I think money is critical, personally, when educating bilingual children. ...
We are a bilingual family and frankly it costs a FORTUNE."

But BonsoirAnna, we are a bilingual family and we don't have a fortune. When dd was little, we were actually quite hard up. So clearly we can't be spending one on education.

Noone has ever paid a penny to have my dcs tutored in Swedish.

Dd has taught herself to write in Swedish- all she has needed for that is some second-hand books and access to the internet. Her English books also tend to come from the charity shops, or the library, so don't exactly cost a fortune. I may have spent a fair amount of effort on teaching her to speak Swedish- none at all on teaching her to read and write it. (with a different alphabet that would of course have been different).

And I have been working part-time since they were born, but their Swedish has clearly still had "a hope in hell".

Admittedly, we have splashed out on cheap air tickets twice a year, but with ryanair that doesn't exactly cost a fortune these days (ryanair)- and if you belonged to a community where several people spoke your language, you wouldn't even need to do this to provide access to other native speakers.

slng: "libraries with Chinese books, and online bookshops where you can get 32 books + CDs delivered for 50 pounds".

Can I CAT you to find out more about this?

I am in UK and finding it difficult to supplement my dd's Mandarin lessons.

BTW, I send my dd to a Chinese community school in London that prepares students for GCSE Mandarin. It costs me £15 a year for 2.5 hourly lessons every Sunday during term time - no doubt they get grants from the local council. But it has not cost me much so far.

Oh, and I don't think £50 a year is a lot of money considering that it is giving my dd (and ds) the ability to access their heritage in a language that is practically impossible to pick up from scratch in adulthood.

Blueshoes: This bookshop: www.168books.com.tw/

Books yet to arrive - supposed to come in the next couple of weeks. Can keep you posted if you want.

Plenty more of other online bookshops - don't have time to post now but I think links are in previous posts either in bilingual threads or multicultural threads.

Libraries: Charing Cross library - anyone can be member, apparently. Don't have to live in Westminster. Ealing central library also has some Chinese books, mostly bilingual ones. Whereabouts are you?

"practically impossible to pick up from scratch in adulthood." - not sure about this though. Know a few grown-ups who have. Not sure if it's all that much more difficult than other languages.

Thanks, slng, will check those out. I am in South East London, but it is very easy for me to get to Charing Cross.

Interesting that you know adults who pick it up in adulthood. Were they able to reach a decent level of fluency, use the right intonations and able to read and write? And if so, did it involve a lot of effort and immersion?

If you come from an English-speaking background, I would have thought it would be easier to pick up a European language than a a language like Mandarin or Arabic.

Most public libraries in London carry, at a minimum, a particular range of bilingual children's books in a range of languages, which includes Chinese and Simplified Chinese.

My partner learnt Mandarin as an adult and, as far as I can tell, is very proficient (she says she isn't, but then she says her French is rubbish too, and it's better than at least some of the first year undergraduates I used to teach ...)

Where are you, Blueshoes? Peckham and Brixton both have the range I'm talking about.

blueshoes - if you can get subsidised Chinese lessons for your children, that's fabulous. But it is still costing someone (the taxpayer?) money somewhere.

I just don't buy the idea that language learning comes for nearly free - it doesn't. Which is the whole problem as identified in the article in the OP. Bilingualism is not a problem per se (in fact quite the contrary) but the costs associated with bilingualism are potentially a big problem.

Agree with Cory, I don't think raising a bilingual child need cost much at all. My DD has books in English, mainly Xmas and birthday presents, or bought cheap as batches from ebay. Ditto DVDs of Cbeebies stuff, plus most DVDs have English as a language option anyway, also a lot of English speaking stuff can be accessed free of charge from the internet. Then there are also the trips to the UK to visit family and practise the language, but I'd have been paying for those even if there had not been a language issue.

The biliterate aspect sometimes worries me, but then I learnt how to write/spell/use correct grammar in one of my languages entirely from reading trashy novels and sleb magazines, so I don't see why a decent level of literacy cannot be achieved through reading books in the minority language from an early age.

To answer the OP, I never got why having English as a second language should be seen as a disadvantage. I was schooled in Asia and at one point was one of only 2 native English speakers in my class. My classmates got on fine and academically were hard to beat, despite the advantage I had in the language stakes (in fact, when I arrived in a UK school I found the pupils there to be way behind, but that's an aside). I'm still in touch with a couple of my classmates from way back then and neither of them had any issues with either of their languages and can express themselves equally well in both.

Anna

I may be naif - and, significantly perhaps, my daughter is only 1 - but I am not seeing these enormous costs of bilingualism.

My daughter has one French teacher - me - and one English teacher - her mum. Neither of us charge. We just talk to her in our respective languages.

The plan is to take her to France at least once a year. Some years (like last) that will be our family holiday - other years, it will be extra, but that does not necessarily imply massive extra costs - it will be just me and her and we're more likely to spend our time in Normandy than on the Riviera.

I buy her a lot of French books and DVDs, it's true - but I buy them out of the money I would spend buying her English DVDs and books and, in any case, a DVD or a book here and there don't break the bank in our family. We also use the public library which, though poorly equipped, does help to vary the diet a bit.

I take her to a Francophone Saturday playgroup. It works out at £3 a week for an hour and a half.

We may later consider a Francophone au pair or Francophone private schooling - but we probably won't (we aren't really comfortable with going private) and, if we do, it will be in place of the Anglophone equivalent so at no marginal cost.

Now I accept that France is not China and that the costs are lower and the availability of materials is wider and more competitive but I'm really not seeing where this "fortune" is going to be spent, apart from the "fortune" we would be spending anyway to bring up a monolingual child in the manner we see fit.

The argument that consists in saying "I would have paid for it anyway" doesn't alter the fact that those costs are associated with bilingualism.

If you were too poor to ever travel to the country of your other family language, your child would not get the language exposure that is a pre-requisite for gaining fluency in the language. That is why many children in the UK school system suffer - they speak one language at home that is never taken to a level beyond the oral/domestic because they don't have the DVDs and books and plane tickets to another country that could take them there; and English at school, and find it difficult to attain a level of competency in English equivalent to that of a native English speaker.

Cory and Brangelina - you are part of the educated middle-classes - and the educated middle-classes have resources that many immigrant families just do not have.

Listen - I don't "feel" the associated costs of bilingualism either. The truth is that we can easily afford the books, the trips, the DVDs, the language courses, the cinema.

But that doesn't mean that those things are affordable by all because they are not. And it is the people who cannot afford them who "create" (for want of a better word) the belief that bilingualism disadvantages some children.

"The argument that consists in saying "I would have paid for it anyway" doesn't alter the fact that those costs are associated with bilingualism." Yes it does! In any costing decision (I am an accountant) the first thing you do is to strip out any costs that would be the same in both options. Otherwise you might as well say that my feeding my daughter is a cost of bilingualism, because I do it exclusively in French, whereas when her mother feeds her in English, it's free!

"If you were too poor to ever travel to the country of your other family language, your child would not get the language exposure that is a pre-requisite for gaining fluency in the language." Most immigrants in this country live within striking distance of a community of fellow language speakers - residents of Vauxhall and Stockwell in london might as well be in Lisbon in some parts, as they are surrounded by fellow (working class) Portuguese speakers and the culture that goes with it.

"That is why many children in the UK school system suffer" - the reason many children in the UK school system suffer is, sadly, the UK school system. This is a system that undervalues and fears bilingualism and would rather strip native Bengali out of a child and replace it with appalling French or German ten years later than support and encourage pre-existing language abilities as a valuable resource. Is it any wonder these children do not appear to master English when their parents are not encouraged to give them their native language? They risk growing up in households where, in front of them at least, no one speaks anything fluently. How are they meant to develop effective communication strategies?

20 years from now, Eastern Europe, India and China are going to be key trading partners to the West - who is going to speak to them?

You cannot be a very good accountant then . Think again.

MILAW, you wrote just what I was going to say re the immigrant communities. Ditto the costs aspect. Of course there are ways of throwing money at the problem - I'd have loved to have been able to afford to send my DD to the international school for instance. However, being an educated middle class parent as Anna says I'm hoping that my culture will overcome most of the problems associated with educating my child in the community language only.

This is reminding me that I want my DD to start on French but have no idea as to how without compromising the little time I spend speaking to her in English. Sorry, just thinking aloud and going off on a tangent.

"20 years from now, Eastern Europe, India and China are going to be key trading partners to the West - who is going to speak to them?"

This HAS ALREADY HAPPENED.

Explain, please! I am not saying the costs disappear - they still need to be met, obviously - only that they are not relevant for making the decision. If I am comparing two options, then it is the costs arising specifically from those options that will affect the decision. Further, if specific costs (and their associated cashflows) are the same in each option, then, though technically they are included in the costing, they obviously cancel each other out and have no net effect on the outcome.

I don't want this to turn into an accountancy thread but I really don't see what you're getting at.

Brangelina - you also have the huge advantage of transmitting the world's most prestigious language to your DD. It helps. A lot. People around you will support your endeavours and approve of what you are doing.

Less prestigious languages get less support and approval from the wider community.

Yes, and the ones speaking to them are the very children for whom English was a second language all those years ago.

You know, I really wish I'd kept up my Bengali now and that I'd been forced to learn Cantonese when I was little in HK.

I have already explained but here goes again.

If you remove the DVDs, books, plane tickets, cinema, etc that you as a parent purchase for your child as a matter of course in your relatively affluent middle-class life, where is your child going to get support for his/her bilingualism from? Around the kitchen sink, that's all. That's why you need to think about those costs and ralise that many immigrant families aren't purchasing all that stuff - hence their children's language fluency suffers.