Bilingual Education
Moderators: Dimitris, maneki neko2, Lorikeet, Enrico Palazzo, superpeach, cecil2, Mr. Kalgukshi2
Bilingual Education
From your experience, how long do you think it takes a bilingual student to become proficient in the second language?
Too many parameters not mentioned here...
What "proficiency" are we talking about - proficiency at communicating orally or in writing, and to what extent?
How to achieve it (consider the different age groups of learners and their learning techniques)?
To give you some ideas of what we are struggling with in classrooms:
In a Chinese kindergarten, my kids acquired in two years a solid grounding in English that enabled them to make statements both positive and negative, and to ask questions. On top of this, they were able to use different tenses depending on circumstances which they had to judge by themselves, something that their first language does not prepare them for doing (no tenses in Chinese verbs). So, how "proficient" were my students?
A lot more than many Chinese middle-school students who have the advantage of being able to read and write English words and texts.
Move up in the levels to adults that have had English for five to ten years - and who rarely can string together any complete and semantically unambiguous sentence.
Success - I found - depends largely on how we awaken their cognitive and analytical skills.
Or in simple words - whether we teach them to think what they are going to say rather than merely repeating well-rehearsed statements.
What "proficiency" are we talking about - proficiency at communicating orally or in writing, and to what extent?
How to achieve it (consider the different age groups of learners and their learning techniques)?
To give you some ideas of what we are struggling with in classrooms:
In a Chinese kindergarten, my kids acquired in two years a solid grounding in English that enabled them to make statements both positive and negative, and to ask questions. On top of this, they were able to use different tenses depending on circumstances which they had to judge by themselves, something that their first language does not prepare them for doing (no tenses in Chinese verbs). So, how "proficient" were my students?
A lot more than many Chinese middle-school students who have the advantage of being able to read and write English words and texts.
Move up in the levels to adults that have had English for five to ten years - and who rarely can string together any complete and semantically unambiguous sentence.
Success - I found - depends largely on how we awaken their cognitive and analytical skills.
Or in simple words - whether we teach them to think what they are going to say rather than merely repeating well-rehearsed statements.