Language classes and bilingual pupils

[Chouchoubidou]

DD starts year 7 next September. She will have to choose between French and German. I'm French and I brought her up speaking French, so she's completely fluent. Hubby is Brazilian, and she's also fluent in Portuguese. None of us speaks any German.
We'd like her to do French and Portuguese GCSEs, as she'll definitely get good grades. Even if she's fluent in both, she'll still need to work hard on learning how to write. She's not keen on learning German.
As she already speaks 2 foreign languages, we think it's OK for her not start a 3rd one, one we can't even help her with at home.
That's why we would like her to do French at school instead of German. The time she'd spend studying it can be spent improving her litteracy in French and Portuguese.
I've once heard that some schools refuse to let bilingual children pick a language they already speak. I don't know where her new school stands on this matter, and I'm keen on maybe just choosing French for her, say nothing and see what happens.

What's your experience with secondary schools' policies on languages for bilingual pupils?

Yikes, it sounds terrible now in some schools. Growing up it was pretty much fine mostly, except some boys disturbing the class once in a while with jokes. DD is in an all girls schools and no issues at all. But like I said before its an academic school, so all area serious about achieving the best they can.

Are there any English classes for bilingual children in your area? This is what my DS will be doing to make sure he learns to read and write in English.

@MissScarletInTheBallroom - I don’t think so. We are fairly rural.

I mean if he needs it at secondary we will look into options and a tutor if needed, but it would be nice to have the option of English grammar at school and not just be auto excluded as he already knows the language. And I would rather he spent spare time at school on German, than being forced into a third language.
It might actually be fine here, so I hope we won’t have a problem.

Just mentioning why many might prefer to take an already known language.

@Chouchoubidou I am not yet familiar with the British school system, as my eldest child is about to start Secondary School this year. However, as a mother of bilingual children, I have already given my DC the opportunity to learn a third language. This ensures that when she starts Secondary School, she will have an advantage in languages.
Personally, I want my DC to choose her second and third languages to build a solid foundation in grammar, spelling, and essential language skills. This will not only give her an advantage when preparing for GCSEs but also prove valuable in life overall.

Nothing they will do in an Austrian secondary school will enable an English native speaker to learn skills in their own language, unfortunately. Many of the teachers, particularly the older ones, don’t have the skills themselves. Because of the Schulbuchaktion Austria is incredibly reliant on textbooks and they rarely depart from them.

@Zeitumschaltung interesting. We have a local gymnasium that gets a good reputation, and I think they also teach other subjects like maths in English a few times a week. But I haven’t looked yet as we aren’t at that point. For kindergarten language I have been really impressed with the support.

I used to teach translation between French and English, and many of the bilingual French speakers had absolutely appalling spelling. The most common one was spelling all imperfect tenses as past participles because they sound the same. This is stuff OP's DD won't really learn till she gets to GCSE though, so I agree there's no point doing French to start with.

But who's giving that individual work? And marking it? And teaching an individual lesson when the work isn't understood? And setting exams to evaluate progress? A tutor or private language teacher can certainly do all of that for you, but of course a school doesn't want to have a teacher teach an individual course for any student whose parent doesn't want them to study a new language in secondary like all of the other students are doing.

There is no reason for your child not to take a new language in Y7 and Y8 if one is available at the school. Y7 is far too early to narrow your child's academic experience to only what will make for the easiest and best GCSE marks. This is the time to cover a broad curriculum that isn't entirely dominated by standardized exam preparation and to try out new subject areas - like studying a language from scratch, or drama, or DT, or RE.

Talk to the school about options to join GCSE French at a future point.

DD is bilingual with a second language that is not taught in her school. She started French in y7, German in y8 and then chose German for GCSE. She also does Welsh as we’re in Wales. It’s been fine for her learning languages DH and I couldn’t help her with, her school (bog standard comp) helps with the practice, runs clubs after school etc. She is predicted good grades in both. She also chose to take her second language GCSE exams, she did it last year without having any formal learning at all, and got a B.

I’m not sure if my experience is typical or not, but if I had to do it again, the only thing I would change would be to get DD a tutor to help her with the reading and writing aspects of her second language. It’s been great for her trying new languages at school, she doesn’t love Welsh, but she is planning on doing German A level.

The school did not allow any bilingual students the first year to take their spoken language. First year they all had to do Mandarin and dd chose Spanish for the additional language. Second year they were allowed to drop one and pick up another. DD has now Spanish, French and Latin classes at school, so she is hardly losing out in her academic experience. We don't speak French ourselves (the parents) and I would far rather my dd progress and keep the second language she is fluent in and that means exposure, reading, writing etc. Silly to add another two languages in and the dc not learn them to a high level. I have experience with seeing how children cope and learn additional languages. Two of my dc still go to a bilingual school and the eldest went and graduated. She now goes to a British school. I see in the school there are many learning 3 languages (because parents are from different countries) and they do not know the 3 languages well....English is limited, one language they barely speak and usually the mother tongue is the best one. Of course there are some children that the parents get the correct balance to support 3 languages with an additional Sat language school, and an after-school nanny in the weakest language to help strengthen it.

I assume the teacher is giving them the individual work. I saw my daughter working on the worksheets for homework once at home. She also mentioned being given a French book to read. I think they mostly do their work independently. I will ask her more about it today. She is at a private school, so this might be the reason it is possible. But unfortunately, I think they only do this until they take the GCSE's...not sure what happens after. So basically, they are prepping early to take their GCSE's and only sit in the beginner French class. They are not involved in the beginner lessons.

Also, dd also does drama, design tech, philosophy and religion etc. And as mentioned previously, she is learning Spanish from scratch and during year 7, she was also learning Mandarin from scratch.

@SamPoodle123

That's lovely for your DD but I'm honestly not sure what the relevence is to OP's question and it's all consistent with what I said to begin with. Your DD's school didn't allow bilingual students to take the first year courses in that language and your DD tried out several new languages, some of which she's chosen to progress in. She joined a french class the following year and is sitting her GCSE early but she's doing that in addition to new languages, not instead of. This sounds like a typical approach in most private schools I know of. Independent schools tend to be far better about in-lesson differentiation (the smaller class sizes, lower number of struggling or disinterested pupils, and increased access to specialist learning support make this far easier) and it sounds like your DD's school is supporting her given she is a keen, able languages student whom they presumably knew by Y8 would be able to work independently in an advanced group within a larger set. But none of it is comparable to a parent wanting their child to avoid any new languages in secondary entirely and instead be in an introductory set as a native speaker, and it isn't a counter argument to why most schools have general policies about bilingual students taking a different language than the one they're fluent in for at least the first year of secondary.

@GravyBoatWars it was in response to your questions. But the relevant thing, is I wish she could have just focused on the French from the start instead of taking one language she had no interest in and planned to drop the next year anyway (when she was allowed to). I get that it is not possible to support or allow bilingual or trilingual students to do their language...but do think it should be an option. In each school there are many kids fluent in the same language....they could just put them all in the same class (two years together at at a time). Anyway, there are many ways and ideas to make it work, but I get it, most schools do not want to complicate things so they don't do it. There were two private schools we were looking at that did do this and had special bilingual classes, but it is only for two sessions a week, so I did not want to select a school just because they offered two bilingual sessions a week.

Bilingual children don't necessarily get bored in classes for their language. DD is 14 and bilingual, we live abroad so English is the minority language which she started in school when she was 9. I had already taught her to read and write in English so she wasn't learning anything new but she enjoyed having an easy lesson that she could breeze through and help her friends and read a book when she finished everything before everyone else. She still enjoys that at 14, and hasn't told her teacher she's a native speaker in case her teacher starts expecting more of her (she works so hard in her other classes so I don't begrudge her wanting to take it easy in English even if it'd be better if she was given more extended work, like the high school level work)

Completely agree.

I am French myself and I also have a bilingual child. You seems to believe your child will learn French literacy. French lessons will be increbibly basic and there is more chance your child become like a "language assistant" and won't learn much.
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As a completely out there option, would she consider self-study in a language that appeals to her?
I love languages and am quite good at learning them and my school teachers thought it might be partly due to having parents with radically different accents (so I worked out very young there was more than one way to say something).
I loved doing Latin which might be something that she would find challenging (grammar is much more intense than either French or Portuguese) but have a head start due to vocabulary and already understanding grammatical gender.

Did they take another language to A-level, though? I think the point is that the universities want to know that their students can succeed with a language where they don't have that native advantage. That's partly so that they know that they are academic enough, and probably also partly because being taught a language covers some things that just learning by immersion does not - for instance the understanding of the grammatical construction.

I think I might be rather embarrassed if I were a language teacher who didn't realise I was teaching a native speaker. Maybe her teacher is aware, but is quite happy to pretend they're not, so that they don't have to start providing extension work!

Yeah I do think it's very possible her teacher knows, unless DD has been very careful not to pronounce things too correctly (she can put on a very convincing Rally English accent so she could pass as non-native if she tried). It's a new teacher this year, her primary school English teachers knew but she wanted to stand out less in upper school.
Though the teacher would just need to give her the high school text book (like her maths teacher tried to do but DD refused because she is not the type to push herself more than necessary!), not have to figure out extension work herself. I'm sure she would if DD gave any indication that she wanted to.