Those with bilingual kids: are you keeping them at grade level in your native language?
Posted by beginswithanx@reddit | expats | View on Reddit | 54 comments
We’re Americans living in Japan and while our kid is a native English speaker (and we basically only speak English at home), she’s behind in terms of reading and writing (1st grade). She goes to local Japanese school and reads and writes in Japanese (which is honestly easier than English at this age due to phonetic alphabet). She’s essentially illiterate in English currently.
I’d like to get her up to speed in her native language, but I also don’t want her to feel English is a chore or grow to hate it. Are you keeping your kid at their appropriate grade level? If so, were their times when they were behind? Did it ebb and flow? How did you make time for it?
DramaFamous93@reddit
We ended up mixing both approaches tbh. School for immersion and home for maintaining the second language. We also added novakid for structured English so it wasn’t just casual exposure. That combo seemed to work better than relying on one enviroment alone.
jeffscience@reddit
beginswithanx@reddit (OP)
Oh yes, we read English books every day and night together, and have ever she was a baby.
I’m glad to hear you were able to “catch up.” I feel like the initial barrier to English is high, but hope that once we get over phonics she enjoys it.
jeffscience@reddit
English is not a phonetic language and takes a lot of work to learn. My son could read in Finnish trivially because it is a properly phonetic language. English, not so much.
JustEmmi@reddit
It’s not phonetic but we’re still taught English phonics in school. I distinctly remember hating that class.
JustEmmi@reddit
It’s not phonetic but we’re still taught English phonics in school. I distinctly remember hating that class.
Irgendwannabe@reddit
I'm American and my husband is Swiss. Our kids were born here. Switzerland has dozens of dialects, which are spoken, then starting in first grade they learn to read, write, and speak standard German.
Our daughter is 9 and prefers reading English. She likes speaking dialect and English equally. She's probably above her grade level.
Our son, age 7, barely uses past tense even while speaking! He translates everything directly from Swiss German to English, so the grammar is just a mess. He can read and write in English, but not super well.
I think it's so individual. Everyone has strengths, weaknesses, and preferences. I give them both 'challenges' with prizes for reading and writing in English, but I try not to be critical or compare them to each other or other expat kids.
Eska2020@reddit
It is very common in expat/ immigrant families for the younger children to be progressively less comfortable in the parents native language. Not completely sure why, but it isnt just a kid by kid thing, thats a trend.
SincerelyD90@reddit
It’s because they converse with their siblings in the local language
Unlucky_Control_4132@reddit
Yes, exactly that is what happened to us with the 3rd child (4 years younger than the second)
Unlucky_Control_4132@reddit
I agree, I think the siblings interfere in keeping the “foreign” language outside of the home. Especially bad when both parents speak different languages, none of them being the country of residence’s language.
beginswithanx@reddit (OP)
Thank you for this, it’s interesting to hear how different your kids are.
I guess I’ll have to just keep moving forward as best we can and see how things turn out…
TheeKB@reddit
Thank you for this perspective in the last paragraph. I needed that. 🙏
x3medude@reddit
Here's a short answer given your post: consider a tutor.
We teach our son (I'm a Kindle teacher, my wife works at an international school), and we tutor other kids as well. So usually my wife will teach him while I go tutor twice a week.
If you don't have time to do it personally, hire a tutor. I'm sure a native English speaker who happens to be studying in Japan would do it for a discounted rate and would die for the opportunity for extra cash.
Besides, my son listens 100x better to someone that isn't us, telling him the exact same thing.
x3medude@reddit
Here's a short answer given your post: consider a tutor.
We teach our son (I'm a Kindle teacher, my wife works at an international school), and we tutor other kids as well. So usually my wife will teach him while I go tutor twice a week.
If you don't have time to do it personally, hire a tutor. I'm sure a native English speaker who happens to be studying in Japan would do it for a discounted rate and would die for the opportunity for extra cash.
Besides, my son listens 100x better to someone that isn't us, telling him the exact same thing.
gdj11@reddit
Just wondering, do you let her watch cartoons? Specifically English language cartoons. My kids are American and Thai and going to Thai school. Some days we let our kids watch quality cartoons for a little bit (maybe 30 minutes up to 1 hour) and I feel like a lot of their English ability, aside from what I’ve taught them, comes from the cartoons. Then something I don’t agree with at all but is interesting is a Thai friend of mine lets his 11 year old boy watch YouTube basically all day. I hadn’t seen him since he was about 8 and when I did I was shocked at how well he spoke English. His Thai accent wasn’t very strong either. I even asked my friend if they sent him to an international school, which they didn’t.
WadeDRubicon@reddit
A Brazilian guy in my German class said he learned (seemingly perfect) English from watching Spongebob. (I was impressed and then envious -- I've yet to find German media that compelling.)
inrecovery4911@reddit
Upvote for the truth bomb on German media.
WadeDRubicon@reddit
It's really something. When I say, "Let's watch TV," and the kids say, "Why?" you know they've done something wrong/right.
Getrofo@reddit
There are many cartoons that are dubbed in German. Including SpongeBob.
beginswithanx@reddit (OP)
Yup! 99% of media consumed in our house is in English, and she’s watching English cartoons almost daily.
Listening and speaking isn’t so much of our issue. She speaks English at a native level (though she does slip in Japanese from time to time), and we only speak to her in English. It’s just that reading in English is hard as a kid, especially one that’s used to the phonetic Japanese writing system.
FIContractor@reddit
I wonder if turning on closed captions would help? She wouldn’t have to read, but the words would be there.
beginswithanx@reddit (OP)
Closed captions are always on (lol, it’s a habit of mine). Unfortunately, it doesn’t register with her at all.
blackkettle@reddit
My wife is Japanese, I’m American and we’ve been living in Switzerland the past 12 years. We have an almost 9 yr old who was born here in Zurich.
Our strategy is that we speak Japanese together as a family at home, and my wife and I communicate exclusively in Japanese (I lived in Tokyo and Osaka for 10 years before we came to Switzerland and I also speak Japanese). I speak English when I’m alone with my son. He watches some tv in English too.
He goes to the local school in Zurich and has spent probably 10+ hours per day in school / after school in High German and dialect since he was one.
We have a tight knit group of Japanese family friends through the Japanese school he also attends and we hang out with them a lot. He also has a Japanese piano teacher and goes to kumon in Japanese.
He reads a bit above grade level in German. We’ve never done much explicit practice reading in English but German is close enough that he’s able to read quite well in English too. I’d say his spoken English is close to grade level in terms of grammar and vocabulary but his sentence structure in all three is a bit more simple than one might otherwise expect.
He practices reading and writing in Japanese for about 20min every day plus 2hrs in class per week.
He’s 8 and knows maybe 100 kanji(?) plus the jabs alphabets. So he’s a bit behind grade level there but I don’t think it matters.
Our hope is that he’ll end up professionally competent on graduation in German, local dialect, English and Japanese. I think we’re on track now but who knows how it will go.
You might be interested in r/multilingualparenting where these topics are frequently discussed!
beginswithanx@reddit (OP)
Thanks for this! I’m thankful I don’t have to teach kanji to my kid— she’ll get all of that in school, haha.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure her native language is English, but that’s a fascinating idea! She was very verbal before moving to Japan at age 3, and we’re an English-only household. While she does insert Japanese into her English when she doesn’t know a word or expression, she is comfortable with English at home.
blackkettle@reddit
Sure I fully understand! My son is also completely comfortable in English and Japanese; I just mean that when I periodically ask him “which language feels like it is ‘yours’” or “do you prefer one in particular” his answer is invariably the local dialect he speaks with his friends and teachers and the local community.
His mom and I both grew up as monolingual speakers of Japanese and English respectively so the situation is really wild to me.
I don’t know what you plan for the future, but we have no intention to return to the US or Japan before he graduates, so for me the Japanese and English are a bonus and I’m generally more focused on his integration and grades in the local school.
As long as that’s going well I don’t worry too much about the other stuff; we just try to provide organic opportunities to use the other languages. Also here in Switzerland mandatory English lessons start from 3rd grade and they have 3 hrs per week immersion right out of the gate.
afurtherdoggo@reddit
Check out Adam Beck, fellow american living in JP, and author on many books about bilingual kids. He'll have the answers your looking for.
DifferentWindow1436@reddit
We have a child in G5 in Tokyo. I would say it depends on your goals and expectations. I've see a lot of approaches.
Ours is for our son to be absolutely native level in all aspects and to maintain grade level in both languages. It's not easy. My son's friend (half Turkish) doesn't speak any Turkish at all. Another friend of my son's is G5 in English at an international but is more like G2 in Japanese. I have a friend in China who says as long as he can communicate in English with his daughter (G4) he's fine with it. I would guess her Chinese is spot on, but when I speak with her in English, it's definitely a second language.
FWIW - here is what we have done:
Now, believe it or not, going to international doesn't fix everything. And demographics probably matter. There are very, very few native English speakers in this international. He's at grade level (actually a bit above) but he has sort of fossilized some bad grammar (working on this) and needs to continually practice more advanced grammar structures so that they become second nature. Things like subjunctive mood and past perfect tense.
Anyway, good luck! Every kid is a bit different. See what works.
conflictedolder@reddit
I will never understand "English" courses... never have I ever been called on to identify the verb or noun in a sentence .... only in school... put the emphasis on reading..make it enjoyable and the rest will follow
ultimomono@reddit
Once my son learned the mechanics of reading in Spanish, His English language reading took off naturally. Because of the better phonetic representation, it was much easier for him to learn Spanish first and then English
I'm a linguist, so I was ready to step in and teach him to read, but I didn't have to, we just read books together a lot and he picked it up. I did work on his writing during the summer, but not as much as I thought would be necessary. Never underestimate the power of bedtime stories.
He scored in the 99 percentile on the verbal part of the SAT without studying or ever going on school in English, so it all worked out!
AverageFamilyAbroad@reddit
Our kids are bilingual, and their school is exclusively Spanish. My younger kids write poorly in English; they spell everything phonetically as if it were Spanish. So during summer break I'm having them spend some time (maybe twenty minutes, not much) everyday working through an English language arts curriculum. They complain a bit, since they find Spanish much easier, but we figure it's important for them to be able to communicate fully in their native language. Most of what they read and consume move-wise is in English as well, so that helps.
JinxedKing@reddit
I’m a 1st grade teacher, who specializes in second language acquisition. This is super normal and expected for a child learning two languages while growing up. Normally around 3rd grade their L1 or home language will catch up to peers. Academic Vocab will be especially important, so keep trying to introduce your child to an expanding vocab at home and during family activities. But they will be fine.
beginswithanx@reddit (OP)
Thank you for the reassurance! Yes, it seems like the next few years will likely bring greater change in her language skills. I’ll try not to worry too much.
WadeDRubicon@reddit
I'm comfortable with spiky skillsets (we're all neurodiverse, so it doesn't bother me that their languages might not also follow in lockstep). Mine had started reading in English just before we moved to where that became the minority language, so they kept reading well (and enthusiastically, for pleasure), for which I'm thankful.
But if I want to nitpick, they aren't great at writing, conjugating irregular verbs is a total crapshoot, and they often mispronounce words they've read in their books (tbf, they're not hearing them anywhere else; but at the same time, they're wrong). (It doesn't help that my mother WAS an English teacher and I have a degree in it, so I do notice the shortcomings, even if I choose to ignore them.)
I used materials I found on Teachers Pay Teachers to help me with my German, when my assigned text was severely lacking, and it was really helpful. I'm going to see if there are some things for the kids next, since what they're doing in school for English is below what they need help with. I'm not a teacher, but knowing what they need is half the battle.
beginswithanx@reddit (OP)
Thanks for the recommendation on the sub! I hadn’t come across it!
Alostcord@reddit
Juku! It was all the rage when we lived in Japan.
Our friends with kids who wanted them to learn Korean and Chinese, sent them to school on the weekends.
But seriously, she’s likely not illiterate she just doesn’t use it as much in her day to day life.. atm
There is a pod cast called Kletzheads (English addition) it’s about bilingual kids. It’s fascinating.
FrauAmarylis@reddit
My neighbor kids go to Saturday Chinese school to keep up with their mother’s native languages. They like it.
beginswithanx@reddit (OP)
I wish we had something like “Saturday English school” here, but everything seems to be for nonnative speakers and is basically just such a low level that it’s kind of useless for her.
ladybugcollie@reddit
maybe get with some other expats and form one? All of you could chip in to hire the teacher and plan other fun things for the kids to do like baking a box cake following english instructions sort of thing
Ipsey@reddit
I (American)speak English with my daughter and my husband (Dane) speaks Danish. Her teachers say she’s behind in Danish, but doesn’t want me specifically helping her with Danish because I’m not doing it right 🤷♀️.
She has a cousin who struggled with Danish, and both his parents are Danish. He said once that he was just better at reading and writing in English and I said “me too”.
He’s fine! My daughter will be fine too. She’s not missing out on anything. She was evaluated for a learning disability and they say it’s not a relevant issue, she just needs to read and write more in Danish. If she’s doing just fine in one language and behind in the other she’ll catch up eventually.
I grew up bilingual (English/Spanish) and learned Japanese in School, and was declared academically fluent in Danish. I went through the same thing as a kid. The school has their own standards they have to meet and it’s mostly their job to help the kids get there. You should encourage your child to meet them, but as you said you’re not a teacher and you can’t realistically teach an entire language by yourself.
Short-Jellyfish4389@reddit
It's good that she speaks English but it would be hard to force her to read/write in English. Looks like she has 0 motivation because everything is in Japanese.
I'm in the same boat with English/Russian, and my oldest one (starts 3rd grade this year) was able to read slowly but didn't want at all. He reads in English w/o any issues and to his age peers very fast. What did help, to visit Russia for about a month. So he was kind of forced to read what is around him in Russian and started reading much better. Alse he was motivated before with extra play time on Xbox, he should read several pages to get extra 30 minutes and It's better to enforce it every day.
It will be much harder to force my youngest (who starts K this year), because there is no a thing he likes so much and would do what ever he needs :)
ahnotme@reddit
My parents moved to the UK when I was 12 and my sister was 8. I stayed behind at a boarding school, but my sister went with them and went to a British school. My Mother found a correspondence course developed specially for kids like my sister. It matched year on year what she’d have been taught in school at home.
It wasn’t a 100% success, because when my parents returned with my sister 5 years later and she went to school in our own country they found she was a year behind, overall, not just language-wise.
But I’m sure you’ll be able to find an online course English for kids like yours. Think of it this way: it’s better than nothing. Once she starts to read, give her lots of age appropriate books.
beginswithanx@reddit (OP)
Yeah, the correspondence course or similar will be something to look into once she’s older. I need some sort of developed curriculum to keep her on track since I’m not an educator (well, for that grade level).
ahnotme@reddit
To clarify: the course is for you, not her. Or, at least, the one my Mom had for my sister. It provided her with both the materials and the guidance to teach my sister. This was in the 1960s. Today, it’ll be an online course and your daughter will be able to do most of it herself. It’ll be up to you to decide how much help and/or supervision your daughter needs.
AquaHills@reddit
No. We're behind where she would be in English at her current grade level in the US. She is just finishing second grade (at our local German school) and will be in third grade in the fall. She reads and writes in German but we haven't yet started reading and writing in English. She has a large English vocabulary and knows the names of the letters, but that's it. We waited to teach her to read and write in English because we didn't want to confuse her.
German is also phonetically accurate- what you see is how it's pronounced, always. It's simple to learn what letters make what sounds and apply it to words. We have friends who tried to teach their kid to read English when they were simultaneously learning to read German and it went badly. A few of the vowels between the languages are especially confusing. In German the letter 'a' is pronounced 'ah', 'e' is pronounced exactly like an 'a' in English (eh), and 'i' is pronounced like the English 'e' (ee). It gets confusing really quickly, especially when spelling.
Kids begin learning English at school here in third grade, so I plan to begin to teach my kid to read and write in English this summer. She's mastered the sounds of the letters in German so I feel that she won't be overwhelmed or confused by learning how the letter combinations are pronounced in English now. I'd also like her to have a good grasp on it before she's taught it by non-native speakers.
beginswithanx@reddit (OP)
Your situation sounds similar to ours. I didn’t want to add in another hurdle to learning how to read (in any language) when she started learning to read in school.
She will get some English in grade school, but honestly the quality of that education is so low, so I feel like you that I need to introduce it before they begin at school.
Thanks for sharing your experience!
IvanThePohBear@reddit
I'm Singaporean Chinese but living in Taiwan now
my kids speak English well but their mandarin is ridiculously substandard 😂
everyone is different I guess
YetAnotherGuy2@reddit
Bilingual myself with trilingual children (wife has a different language than the one we live in). The basic is always "1 person, 1 language" but I'm guessing in your case you already have that straight.
Thanks to modern streaming you can watch movies in English and listen to books in English (or you read it to and with them as good night story). YouTube also does wonders in that regard. They'll pick up the words and the context in which they are used and that's the most important right now.
I was weak in English myself, but they started teaching it at school in 5th grade, so I had some formal English education. They'll teach English at some point in Japan, too - no? Until then don't sweat if your child is a bit behind, they catch up eventually. I still have a weird word structure at times but nothing too bad. If you should go back to the US at some point, they'll pick it up in no time, you'll see.
Don't worry too much - you'll just make your child insecure.
brokenpipe@reddit
I have two kids, ages 9 and 7. I’m Dutch, my wife is American. We live in Amsterdam.
We fully speak English at home. I lived in the US for nearly two decades so while I am a native Dutch speaker, I am more comfortable with English. It is also the language I use at work, etc.
My kids attend a Dutch public school where out of the 350 or so kids, roughly 30% are from international origin. Countries include the US, UK, France, Russia, Ukraine, Israel and Iran. So what do these kids speak when they play with each other: Dutch (exception is when the American enclave find one another and English is used; a developing problem in the classroom).
My 9 year old is at the place they should be developmentally for Dutch. They have excellent reading, writing and word comprehension. They still favors English though but learning Dutch has been easy for them. They read a Donald Duck (very popular here) weekly and generally can converse with Dutch people just fine.
My 7 year old is struggling. They are behind in the classroom and attend a program the school offers to bolster their Dutch. They are one of those kids that have found two other American kids that speak English as well. Except those kids aren’t struggling in Dutch. We have asked their American relatives to stop sending English books so we can make them more successful with Dutch. I also speak more Dutch with them now.
Some else has already mentioned it: it is quite personal. Each child is struggling in their own unique way. Now both will continue to attend a Dutch school and the 9 year old is going to start looking at middle schools next year. The Dutch education system places each child at age 11/12 into a few categories of which education system to follow. My 9 year old is tracking VWO (one of the higher tiers) whereas my 7 year, with only two years of data points, is tracking MBO-T (on the lower half).
Good luck!
smeeti@reddit
You could let her watch English language cartoons with subtitles on. My son learned to read English that way pretty effortlessly.
lluluna@reddit
I'm from a bilingual country. Language fluency is all about how frequent a person uses it.
I use English way more so it's much better than my other language.
HootieRocker59@reddit
Hong Kong. Our kids attended Cantonese medium of instruction primary schools where English was taught as a second language and Chinese language class was taught in Mansarin. They easily stayed at/above grade level in English due to us speaking to and reading with them in English. They always struggled with Chinese reading and writing although their spoken Cantonese is more or less native level.
HootieRocker59@reddit
There is also a big difference between the two. One ultimately embraced his identity as a non-Chinese Chinese-speaking person and really was interested in Classical Chinese once they started it in high school. The other always preferred English and only speaka Chinese when I need him to interpret for me. Now they both live in Canada and one always hangs out with the International students, who are mostly Chinese and Indian, using Mandarin regularly and Cantonese frequently, while the other hangs out with the local English speaking students.
BinkyArk@reddit
I never had this problem with my daughter but I think it's due to having the same alphabet between french and English. You might want to try looking for word games if you want to interest them more in written English. Reading to them and having them participate in the reading of simple books could help. So long as it's fun for them, and not a hassle they should pick it up.
I will say that my daughter's written English is still not as good as her French (she is now 22) but it's acceptable even if she makes mistakes, and that's okay! It's not easy to be perfectly fluent in multiple languages but just having the knowledge and exposure to it will be a huge benefit to them :)