Is dual immersion worth it if it means transferring to another school district?

[shanaling]

My daughter was accepted to dual immersion program in another school district for kindergarten. Her residence school and this school are comparable in quality. She would be transferring back to her residence school in 4th grade. Is DI worth it to go through this transition?

[ixtap]

How many languages are spoken at home?

Whether or not it is worth it will depend on drive times and other ways it affects the family, but there does tend to be a small advantage to being bilingual from a young age.

[Freedomin5]

My daughter has benefited from being fully bilingual in English and Chinese. The transition is not too much of a concern. Kids are resilient, and moving between schools allows kids to learn to make new friends and to explore new opportunities without fear or anxiety. But then, I'm an expat, and DD is in 2nd grade and in her third school, so we're kind of used to it and we know that learning to adapt to new environments comfortably and quickly is a strength/skill that can only benefit DD in the future.

[shanaling]

How many languages are spoken at home?

Whether or not it is worth it will depend on drive times and other ways it affects the family, but there does tend to be a small advantage to being bilingual from a young age.

Thanks for reply. She speaks Mandarin at home and it’s a mandarin immersion program.

[ixtap]

How many languages are spoken at home?

Whether or not it is worth it will depend on drive times and other ways it affects the family, but there does tend to be a small advantage to being bilingual from a young age.

Thanks for reply. She speaks Mandarin at home and it’s a mandarin immersion program.

Some kids rebel against a second language at home once they start having friends in a different language. The immersion program might help smooth that home/school transition.

But again, in your case, logistics are probably going to be an important factor, you already understand the benefits of bilingualism.

[waltworks]

If it's like DI programs here, she won't learn any Mandarin, since she already knows (presumably) a lot of it and the programs are geared toward kids with zero knowledge of the language.

I'd say it would be roughly equivalent to putting her in remedial math classes part of the day when she does calculus at home. There's really no point.

-W

[shanaling]

I don’t teach her reading and writing at home. I know how to read and write but I prefer it to be taught to her by professionals.

[waltworks]

As someone who at once point was fluent (ish) in Mandarin and could at least slowly work my way through a newspaper, IMO your daughter will not retain the ability to read and write Mandarin regardless if she does not do it in her day to day life.

And again, the program is geared toward kids with zero knowledge of the language. You would be better off hiring a tutor for her a few hours a week to work on reading/writing, IMO.

-W

[FLBiker]

We're in a somewhat different situation, but we recently moved (Florida to Nova Scotia) and a large part of our motivation was thinking about where we wanted our daughter to grow up and go to school.  She's doing French immersion here, which was certainly attractive to us.  They do like 80-90% French in the early grades, tapering to like 50/50 by grade 8.  I speak bad French, and my wife doesn't speak any, so she went in knowing nothing and now (in Grade 1) has learned a lot.  She really loves it.  A big plus, too, is that I think kindergarten and grade one would have been incredibly boring for her in English.  She's a really bright kid, and her English reading and math is already a couple of grade levels above where she is.  If she were doing English kindergarten and grade 1, I don't think she'd have learned anything (aside from the social / emotional stuff, which is certainly important).

So, we moved for access to an immersion program (among other things).  I do suspect, though, that as others have said -- if your child already is pretty good in Mandarin, they might not learn a lot.  My daughter's French pronunciation is excellent, and her fluency (in terms of being able to string sentences together) is really good, but her vocabulary is still pretty limited.  I can still understand her books, for the most part (I took 5 years of French in middle and high school).  They have a different program here for kids that grow up in French speaking households (although they do put those kids in French immersion if the true French program isn't locally available).

[Freedomin5]

Even if you don't use it in daily life, it comes back really quickly if you're ever put in a situation where you need to use Mandarin. I grew up in Canada learning Mandarin and Cantonese in extracurricular classes. Could barely speak a word of Chinese while in Canada. Then I moved to China and it's amazing how quickly those skills come back to the forefront. Having that background provided a good base on which to build on.

[mavendrill]

We speak 95% English and 5% Spanish at home.  My eldest is 1 year into a dual English /Spanish education. No regrets.  She loves knowing both English and Spanish, and loves that she understands grandparents all the time.

School is the "worst" school in the area. She's still doing great and we couldn't be happier.

[RetiredAt63]

DD did French immersion in elementary school.  There was a lot less French in her future High School, so she went to a (private) French High School.  She is fully bilingual.  It helped her find jobs all through University and after.

I think learning 2 languages is a good idea both socially and for the individual.  I admire people I meet who speak 3 and 4 languages. 

[expatartist]

Even if you don't use it in daily life, it comes back really quickly if you're ever put in a situation where you need to use Mandarin. I grew up in Canada learning Mandarin and Cantonese in extracurricular classes. Could barely speak a word of Chinese while in Canada. Then I moved to China and it's amazing how quickly those skills come back to the forefront. Having that background provided a good base on which to build on.

+1 My childhood French was lost but came back within months as an adult once living in France. There's also a lot more to learning a language than the language itself: the social context will form important memories during early years. I work in a bilingual English-Chinese education foundation where, unlike most international schools in my city, Chinese in all its forms is seen as just as important as English. This is invaluable in terms of worldview and respect for languages outside the dominant language (English I assume) of the society one's growing up in.

[Hula Hoop]

My kids are bilingual Italian-English as they're growing up in Italy and we speak English at home (I'm a native speaker of English and my husband is fluent).  Obviously, each language (with the exception of English of course as it's the world's lingua franca) is only useful if the child lives in a place where that language is spoken as an adult or uses it in some other way.  But even if my kids leave Italy, IMO their brains are more flexible language wise than monolingual kids.  They also have a huge advantage with other Romance languages like Spanish, French, Portuguese and Romanian. 

The one disadvantage though is that I notice that monolingual kids often have much richer vocabularies and an earlier grasp of the language than my bilingual kids.  I'm always amazed when monolingual kids come over for playdates - they just have so many words that my kids don't have.  So I guess bilingualism has it's good and bad points.

[ysette9]

My kids are bilingual Italian-English as they're growing up in Italy and we speak English at home (I'm a native speaker of English and my husband is fluent).  Obviously, each language (with the exception of English of course as it's the world's lingua franca) is only useful if the child lives in a place where that language is spoken as an adult or uses it in some other way.  But even if my kids leave Italy, IMO their brains are more flexible language wise than monolingual kids.  They also have a huge advantage with other Romance languages like Spanish, French, Portuguese and Romanian. 

The one disadvantage though is that I notice that monolingual kids often have much richer vocabularies and an earlier grasp of the language than my bilingual kids.  I'm always amazed when monolingual kids come over for playdates - they just have so many words that my kids don't have.  So I guess bilingualism has it's good and bad points.

I wonder if that might be specific to your kids, or maybe just slower in coming? My kids spoke later as well, but in the order of months, as compared to monolingual kids. But they definitely caught up. They have different abilities in different languages, and more vocabulary in the stronger language. Reading helps a lot for my oldest with her vocabulary, and she loves to read, so I am not concerned there.

As for dual immersion, we are doing it with our kids even though my husband speaks it with the kids at home. It gives her a structured place to learn reading and writing as he hasn’t found much time to work on that at home. It is true that she really learned her English at school that first year even though it was a 90/10 mandarin/English program the first year. That just comes from being surrounded by kids who speak English at home. The mandarin isn’t nearly as advanced, obviously, as someone in a mandarin speaking country, but it is something.

I’m surprised it just stops at 4th grade. Is there nothing beyond, even if it is a class or two? I’d look for ways to supplement then after school. Mandarin after school, weekend school, watching television exclusively in mandarin, etc. There is plenty of stuff out there.

[MaybeBabyMustache]

Dual immersion aside, I would not be a fan of sending my kids to an out of district school, unless it was truly the only option. The drive time, logistics, commute, etc + potential for a separate school calendar for other kids would be a challenge. But, the aspect of not having friends in the neighborhood, needing to drive (vs bike or walk) to all friend get togethers, etc would be a challenge. I say this as someone who went to a high school out of my district for four years.

[ysette9]

Dual immersion aside, I would not be a fan of sending my kids to an out of district school, unless it was truly the only option. The drive time, logistics, commute, etc + potential for a separate school calendar for other kids would be a challenge. But, the aspect of not having friends in the neighborhood, needing to drive (vs bike or walk) to all friend get togethers, etc would be a challenge. I say this as someone who went to a high school out of my district for four years.

All good points. We can walk to our immersion school and it is delightful to have such small footprint for our lives.

[MaybeBabyMustache]

Dual immersion aside, I would not be a fan of sending my kids to an out of district school, unless it was truly the only option. The drive time, logistics, commute, etc + potential for a separate school calendar for other kids would be a challenge. But, the aspect of not having friends in the neighborhood, needing to drive (vs bike or walk) to all friend get togethers, etc would be a challenge. I say this as someone who went to a high school out of my district for four years.

All good points. We can walk to our immersion school and it is delightful to have such small footprint for our lives.

That is an awesome experience. Even for the school we are zoned for, it's still not close at the high school level.

[malacca]

I think you mean Language Immersion.

My daughter did dual immersion - Spanish and Chinese.

Anyway, Immersion is great. It builds the child's brain for languages.

My kids are unreal with languages now.

My kids took Mandarin Immersion in a very good school district. We moved to Taiwan for a year and they went to a local school. My son was by far top of his 2nd grade class (including Chinese). They also learned Hokkien and since their language learning skills were better they also were better at Hokkien than the locals (some who spoke it at home).

Keep in mind Chinese is really two different languages - one spoken, one written. If you get too far in writing, there is no way to catch up.

For me, the other selling point of Chinese Immersion is that it filters out a lot of the lazy parents. Kids are only as good as their parents. In my kids Chinese Immersion, there were very few troubled kids compared to the English side.

For my kids school district, 35% of the kids com from out of the school district as it is that popular because of the immersion.

[ysette9]

In our system they call it “dual immersion” but what they really mean is “half immersion”. Half mandarin, half English. I suppose for the English language learners who don’t speak mandarin either, it is dual immersion.

[El_Viajero]

Bilingual person here. I wouldn't go out of my way to get your child into one of these programs. They can be great, but I don't think you should upend your life for it. We have a dual language (Spanish) program at my kid's school. It's based on a lottery, so you get in if they draw your number in kindergarten or 1st grade. We didn't get drawn, and I'm fine with it.

My perspective is a little different because I actually learned Spanish as a young adult. I did the immersion thing on my own by moving to South America for a cumulative 2.5 years. Before that, I'd only taken the required (i.e. minimum) number of Spanish courses to graduate from college. Since I have the experience of learning Spanish as an older person, I don't buy into that whole "you've gotta get your kids in a dual language immersion program when they're really young" thing. More anecdote, but my wife's much younger half-siblings did go through a Spanish immersion program at their elementary school. They're in their 20s now and don't know much Spanish at all.

A friend of mine learned a much harder language, Japanese, the same way I learned Spanish. He was probably 21 when he started learning it and he was lecturing in Japanese at a Japanese university before he was 30. There's this myth that you can't learn a language or an instrument when you're older, but it's not true.

[ysette9]

I suppose I disagree someone. I learned French older as well, spending a year in French at 17-18. I learned it well and have a good accent now, but I also put in a ton of work. I still put in work every day to keep it up. It is really important for me that my kids learn starting young because I want them to learn easily and without all the heartache that I went through.

My husband came to the US at 10 and learned English then. He speaks perfectly now and you wouldn’t know he is an immigrant. But he has stories of feeling self conscious and out of place for years after arriving because of his English.

I agree that it is absolutely possible to learn later in life. It is just harder and will take longer. Little kids’ brains are wired for language so it comes to them like breathing.

[waltworks]

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181024-the-best-age-to-learn-a-foreign-language

TL;DR - it's more complicated than younger=better.

-W

[almost]

My kids are bilingual Italian-English as they're growing up in Italy and we speak English at home (I'm a native speaker of English and my husband is fluent).  Obviously, each language (with the exception of English of course as it's the world's lingua franca) is only useful if the child lives in a place where that language is spoken as an adult or uses it in some other way.  But even if my kids leave Italy, IMO their brains are more flexible language wise than monolingual kids.  They also have a huge advantage with other Romance languages like Spanish, French, Portuguese and Romanian. 

The one disadvantage though is that I notice that monolingual kids often have much richer vocabularies and an earlier grasp of the language than my bilingual kids.  I'm always amazed when monolingual kids come over for playdates - they just have so many words that my kids don't have.  So I guess bilingualism has it's good and bad points.

I have noticed similar vocab issues with my daughter.  Her native language is English and we also speak Japanese at home.  We enrolled her in a Spanish immersion program for 1st to 3rd grade.  The program was great, but we ended up moving far away.  She struggled a bit in English after that - grammar and vocab.

The immersion program went through 8th grade and I think it could have been fantastic if we'd have stuck it out.  But we didn't.  I think it added a lot of unnecessary stress to her childhood. 

[EverythingisNew]

The language progress is slower than I imagined. Our kids have done German immersion classes every weekend since kindergarten. My husband is a German immigrant and we speak German at home maybe 30 minutes a day. Our oldest is in third grade (4 years of German classes, plus years of home) and she is at the level I was after 3 semesters of college German… basic conversational (better accent, worse grammar and writing).

One of the biggest benefits of the language program for us is to connect to other Germans. We have made a lot of friends with the parents. If it wasn’t for the parent friendships and connecting to my husband’s home community, I don’t think we would keep it up. The language progress seems slower in kids than adults. My advice, think twice about elementary school language immersion if your family doesn’t have any ties to the language. If the parents aren’t getting something out of it, there won’t be enough motivation to keep it up for the years it takes to make it worthwhile.

[ysette9]

The language progress is slower than I imagined. Our kids have done German immersion classes every weekend since kindergarten. My husband is a German immigrant and we speak German at home maybe 30 minutes a day. Our oldest is in third grade (4 years of German classes, plus years of home) and she is at the level I was after 3 semesters of college German… basic conversational (better accent, worse grammar and writing).

One of the biggest benefits of the language program for us is to connect to other Germans. We have made a lot of friends with the parents. If it wasn’t for the parent friendships and connecting to my husband’s home community, I don’t think we would keep it up. The language progress seems slower in kids than adults. My advice, think twice about elementary school language immersion if your family doesn’t have any ties to the language. If the parents aren’t getting something out of it, there won’t be enough motivation to keep it up for the years it takes to make it worthwhile.

Is there a reason why you don’t speak more German at home? For our weekend French school it is required that a parent speaks at a native level with the kids. The weekend school is intended to reinforce and teach grammar and reading/writing, but it isn’t there to teach the language from scratch.

[EverythingisNew]

The language progress is slower than I imagined. Our kids have done German immersion classes every weekend since kindergarten. My husband is a German immigrant and we speak German at home maybe 30 minutes a day. Our oldest is in third grade (4 years of German classes, plus years of home) and she is at the level I was after 3 semesters of college German… basic conversational (better accent, worse grammar and writing).

One of the biggest benefits of the language program for us is to connect to other Germans. We have made a lot of friends with the parents. If it wasn’t for the parent friendships and connecting to my husband’s home community, I don’t think we would keep it up. The language progress seems slower in kids than adults. My advice, think twice about elementary school language immersion if your family doesn’t have any ties to the language. If the parents aren’t getting something out of it, there won’t be enough motivation to keep it up for the years it takes to make it worthwhile.

Is there a reason why you don’t speak more German at home? For our weekend French school it is required that a parent speaks at a native level with the kids. The weekend school is intended to reinforce and teach grammar and reading/writing, but it isn’t there to teach the language from scratch.

My husband is the native speaker and he works, so we don’t switch to German until he is off work and often we have activities with friends or my family and don’t switch. My husband thinks it’s hard to remember to switch, although we do try and speak often, I guess it’s not enough. We’ve also only been able to visit Germany once in the past 5 years because of Covid. It’s definitely more time consuming and more of a commitment than I imagined. I would say a college student could learn faster.

[Hula Hoop]

Bilingual person here. I wouldn't go out of my way to get your child into one of these programs. They can be great, but I don't think you should upend your life for it. We have a dual language (Spanish) program at my kid's school. It's based on a lottery, so you get in if they draw your number in kindergarten or 1st grade. We didn't get drawn, and I'm fine with it.

My perspective is a little different because I actually learned Spanish as a young adult. I did the immersion thing on my own by moving to South America for a cumulative 2.5 years. Before that, I'd only taken the required (i.e. minimum) number of Spanish courses to graduate from college. Since I have the experience of learning Spanish as an older person, I don't buy into that whole "you've gotta get your kids in a dual language immersion program when they're really young" thing. More anecdote, but my wife's much younger half-siblings did go through a Spanish immersion program at their elementary school. They're in their 20s now and don't know much Spanish at all.

A friend of mine learned a much harder language, Japanese, the same way I learned Spanish. He was probably 21 when he started learning it and he was lecturing in Japanese at a Japanese university before he was 30. There's this myth that you can't learn a language or an instrument when you're older, but it's not true.

Exactly.  I moved to Italy in my 30s and speak completely fluent Italian now after so many years here even though I often speak English at home with the kids (so that they're bilingual) and with my husband, who speaks great English.  Yes, I have an accent and I occasionally make a grammar mistake but really, who cares?  Before that, in my early 20s I lived in a foreign country for 1.5 years where I learned a an extremely difficult language (akin to Japanese in difficulty) because I loved that language.  I was pretty good after several years study plus living there a year and a half. However,  I've now almost completely forgotten that language as the 'foreign language' part of my brain is full of Italian, which is a much easier language.

In other words, language acquisition is something which isn't 'set it and forget it'.  If you learn a foreign language as a child and then never use it again, you'll forget it.  Same as an adult.  If you have a need to learn a certain foreign language (you move to the country where it is spoken for example), then you'll learn it if you try hard enough.

I do think that learning that first language in my 20s did help me a lot in my 30s when I had to learn Italian.  I knew how to go about learning a foreign language and what methods work for my brain.