Language delay in bilingual child.

[pinkhousesarebest]

My 7 year old d.s is in a french school,and we saw the speech therapist today because he mixes up some sounds. She found that he had a vocabulary that was almost three years behind his peers.He was born in France,but we speak English at home.We are going to have some intensive s.t now,but I was just wondering if we are ever going to catch up,and if this is part of raising a bilingual child. He did talk very late,just before his third birthday. She thought that was significant.

he is still very young , isn't he? Really just starting out reading and writing and the whole business of learning to read can be quite a struggle in itself initially.

I always wished I could speak Welsh. Not go through the work of learning it tbh but be able to speak it. Lovely language. Your school must have considerable experience with this type of thing though which was not at all the case in the German schools I mentioned below although things are very much in a state of flux in Germany education-wise at the moment and I wouldn't be at all surprised if when they are done they have the most amazing school system altogether. However too late for us.

Yes it does seem a shame. I suppose I am just not feeling very comfortable with it. I also want DS to attend the excellent local comp which is English speaking (although we have equally excellent Welsh speaking comps). I just feel it is the nuances of the language that I will not be able to help DS with and I loved creative writing at school, I will not be able to read his work if it is in Welsh.

I know where you're coming from izyboy but i can't beleive its already time to introduce some english next term,and from yr 3 is about half and half.

by then you may well be reading Welsh! It is hard to make these decisions when you have a choice. If you had no choice, you would just make the best of what you have and it would probably be fine, wouldn't it?

My dp didn't really read my classwork tbh or get very involved with it at all. I suppose even if he went through the Welsh medium school, you could still try and do some creative writing work with him at home in English. It might spill over into his Welsh writing

I expect that your DS' French will overtake his English in the end, as others have pointed out! It really doesn't sound - now that you have given lots of context and additional information on thread - as if your DS has anything more than a reduced vocabularly vs. his monolingual French peers as a result of coming from an English speaking home. Think of the long haul, and try to find some way of working a bit on domestic vocabulary in French. My French DP, who could speak pretty good English when I met him, says that a whole new world has opened up to him in English now that he lives in a partially English speaking home. He certainly wouldn't have known how to say sieve!

Oh I am so torn (sorry to take over OP wont be long) the Welsh Unit class is so much larger which on one hand is good (lots of friends) but not so good because the teachers dont have the time to help the ones who are struggling.

I just envisage him going to the English language comp and then why will we have bothered iyswim. Also Welsh is such phoenetic language I envisage that all the special 'rules' with English must be quite hard to take on board because the kids are not using them constantly.

oops believe

Lots of interesting points here. Morningsun yes you are right. He is not the only one finding difficulty with some of the sounds, and actually it was me who suggested SALT as I realised that his vocabulary had gaps in it. I know that SALT here is a valuable resource, and might be able to give me a structure too in which we can work at home. But the vocabulary thing knocked me a bit for six. Zzzen, you are spot on. Interaction in the yard is not that likely to expand his vocabulary, especially little boys with a football. Girls are a little more exacting company, with their little role plays etc. So unless they have a cooking class in school,not blooming likely from where I am standing,how can he learn hat a sieve is,or foal,or whatever. So Izyboy, you are right when you say it is high maintenance, and I suppose it also depends on the aptitude of the child. I teach 10 yr olds, and every year have pupils who have never spoken English before. All will be able to express themselves by the end of the year, but some will catch up and indeed outperform children who have been schooled in English since nursery.

Actually OP are you going to return to the UK at any point during your DS's school years?

No,unless something untoward happens,we are here forever. Anna, I have just shown d.d a sieve and she knows the word in French but not in English. Now I am going to tidy my unruly home. Thank you everyone.

May I remind you that bilingualism is the norm.It is not particularly special or different.Monolinguals are in the minority on the world. There is really no such thing as a monolingual community.If you can be bothered to find out, you will find that most people in the world speak another language.

Growing up in Papua New Guinea (most linguistically diverse country in the world) the fact that we were bilingual was no big deal.Most people spoke three or four different languages.

Only middle class people can afford the indulgence of reflecting and agonising over it.

I was talking to four guys on a food stall in my town last w/end.They said they were Turkish, but I knew they weren't.( Lived there for 3 years.) They eventually told me they were Iranian. They spoke Turkish, Kurdish, English and Farsi (and Turkish is an incredibly complex language syntactically and morphologically. Vast body of research to suggest that Turkish speaking kids have superiour meta-linguistc skills to most other nationalities.)

A lot of importance placed on 'high value' and 'low value' languages which is crap really as French and Spanish a piece of piss compared to Turkish or Eastern European languages.

Fair enough. I don't,however, consider my concern for my d.s to be a luxury.

Being bi or multilingual in a monolingual country/community is not the norm, however. I think you are bit confused, Moondog!

Oh, and "high" and "low" value when applied to languages is about economic value of a language, not its inherent difficulty or ease . You really are very confused!

Anna, you are an amateur enthusiast and do quite well considering.

I would a little more cautious in your judgements re professionalism vs. amateurism Moondog. Not everyone is quite as keen as you are to talk on MN about what they are doing professionally!

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I was worried when ds was due to start school, as he was going through a phase of absolutely refusing to speak English at all. This despite the fact that all his friends were English-speaking. I knew he understood it, but he clearly felt more confident with Swedish.

He then went through a phase of maybe 3 years when English was very clearly dominant.

Now his Swedish is catching up again; I am deliberately making sure he gets a chance to expand his vocabulary by talking about more varied topics and choosing interesting books for him (he gets no formal schooling in Swedish but appears able to read it).

Nothing in our situation has changed; it seemed to be more about his need to work with the two languages in a rather uneven fashion.

I don't think a snapshot of a child's language use at one moment is safe grounds for predicting what the outcome is going to be. Or ds's future in the UK would have looked pretty grim.

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I read in bilingual literature that bilingual children only catch up with peers in both languages by age 10..

sachertorte Tue 31-Mar-09 17:45:40 Add a message | Report post | Contact poster

"I read in bilingual literature that bilingual children only catch up with peers in both languages by age 10.."

I think I'd want to know what bilingual literature this is first. Ime bilingual literature falls into two categories:

studies conducted by linguists

anecdotal evidence collected by parents of bilingual children (who may or may not also happen to be linguists)

An awful lot of older literature on bilingualism is based on studies on just one or two families, often that of the writer.

In reality all sorts of variations possible: obviously children are not all equally gifted, parents are not all equally good teachers or equally fond of talking to their children, not all children have equal exposure to both languages, exposure to languages is not necessarily a constant, not all children feel equally positive about both their languages. Etc etc etc.

Again, as to Pitchounette's question about the dominant language, it's going to vary with circumstances. I have been 16 years in the UK and certainly often think in English, but I do also think in Swedish a lot of the time, I read a lot of Swedish, I talk a lot of Swedish at home, I don't think I'm going to lose my grammar any time soon. I may be less au fait with Swedish teenage jargon (as my dd keeps pointing out), but then my parents who lived all their lives in Sweden never learnt the teenage jargon I used as a teenager, why should they, they were not teenagers. I am a middle-aged woman, so I'd prefer to sound like a middle-aged woman.

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Cory, I accept that lots of literature available is anecdotal, haven´t got time to look through my sources. I do believe learning in the respective languages happens in waves, with one improving faster than the other at certain times. My message to pinkhouse is to keep working on her ds language skills, all is very far from being lost!

Think you're right about the waves, Sachertorte.

Pinkhouse, just reading through thread properly? re your reference to Rachida Dati.. I would be very careful here.. Girls of N. African origin in France do succeed reasonably well at school, but boys DO NOT, there is a clear gender difference. And in any case Dati is very much the exception proving the rule isn´t she? How many other outstanding women of her origin do you see in French public life, or in business world, come to that? (Sorry to labour this, but I do think people tend to see one success story and presume EVERYBODY of that background can succeed, but this is not the case imo.

Are you aware that it is common for French children to ?fail? a school year and have to repeat it? This may work to the benefit of your child in the long term. There is no great stigma attached, it seems relatively common. Having said this, as your ds is doing so well generally, this may not be something for you to concern yourself with! But it is a security blanket.

ZZZen, I feel incredibly worried by what you said about failure rates among immigrant children in German school system. How much of this might be down to racism? My DD will be educated in another language not spoken (much) at home and not spoken AT ALL in the local community. Class sizes are tiny however, will this make a big difference to outcome in your opinion? (5-6 kids normally) We don´t speak the local language well (very minor language not learned by expats normally) and this is quite anxiety provoking to me. Also that my DD learns English just from me, (limited) books and TV.

Moondog, I think you´re quite wrong to criticise (us?) middle class parents for worrying about our dcs bilingualism.. In areas of the world where multilingualism is common then each language tends to have its own role ? they are not necessarily learned as ?equals? ? eg. there may be a family language and language of commerce ? and the language of commerce is limited to commerce only. So not really bilingual in the way I aspire for my dc.

Also it the ?difficulty? of a language is not strictly relevant is it? Eg.If you are born and brought up speaking Turkish then you do not perceive it as difficult as such and will learn other languages in that language group relatively easily. Whereas an English native may perceive those languages as incredibly difficult because we have a different point of reference.