We are using our language at home, which may not be much useful out of our country.
Add:we don’t have other option, though.
I know English is for sure. But it gets even more complicated if for example the mom is Italian haha.
Imo, it is better you pick up one language, mom picks up another, and maybe one more language can be taught at school.
In which case your situation is different. If you’re both non native English speakers living In Taiwan then IMO it’s probably best to speak your native language (whatever that is) at home.
However, judging by the level of your written English you could converse in English at home. It depends on what you want. Kids can absorb more than two languages before the age of 6 or so.
I await Ironlady’s correction.
Another thing I think about with teaching them Chinese is Chinese is really difficult to learn and I’m not really the person to teach them with just passable Chinese skills for daily stuff. It would probably be far easier to learn english and Italian.
i think so too. If you don’t want/need your kids learn Chinese or Korean, and English is your first language, it is very natural you use English.
it will never happen. It must be a disaster.
I know what you mean, but nobody learns a language as a child. Hearing a native speaker, or close to, is enough. If your Chinese is really only passable then they will naturally acquire passable Chinese. That could be improved upon over time.
But at the same time it would be such a shame if I have kids and they don’t speak any Chinese. I always thought it was rather sad some of my Taiwanese/Chinese American friends didn’t know any Chinese and are barely knowledgeable about their ethnic culture.
Send your, potential, kids to a Chinese only pre-school. Choose one that has Chinese students.
Assuming you spend a lot of time with your daughter, my experience has been that one on one time is enough to make your kids fluent in English. But I would watch the situation closely because I know this isn’t always the case. My daughter is culturally very American, by which I mean she watches American TV, prefers the music, prefers the clothes styles, etc. I have to push her to read, though. I have a friend and his daughter is really into reading (all English books). So I think in addition to the one on one time, your daughter will probably need to have some kind of exposure to English that comes naturally to her and is something she enjoys.
If you find that her English fluency isn’t coming along as fast as you would like, then you could always switch her to an international school sooner.
Edit: As for as the bilingual schools, I really can’t comment on this since I don’t know anything about them. For us it was a matter of convenience. The closest bilingual school to our house is the one affiliated with Academia Sinica and they had all kinds of hoops to go through if the parents weren’t working at AS. In the end, we chose the school right next to our house. Not as stressful as the Taipei schools which is fine for me since I like my kids to have time on the weekends to do things, like doing intervals on the track and in the pool with me (our six-year-old ran a 29:30 5k a few weeks ago and our daughter is working to get under 20 minutes for a 1000m swim)!
My experience is that lack of knowledge of ones ancestry is not confined to chinese and taiwanese.
I meet weekly us citizens who got like finnish or swedish surnames, but they dont know a word of finnish or swedish nor do they know that much about e.g swedish culture.
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Why don’t you consider online or digital schools that are providing American curriculum? In this way, your daughter can easily continue with her traditional schooling in Taiwan and simultaneously, complete american curriculum while learning in an online school and online school will not be troublesome for your daughter as she will be able to study at her own convenience according to her own schedule and It plays an important role in transferring credits between schools and colleges across the country.
Make sure that the online school you choose should be accredited by a leading educational organization as accreditation acts as a certificate of credibility for an educational institution which certifies that the institution meets the established global standards in terms of quality of education and academic performance. Some of the best online schools are: International Connections Academy, International Schooling and Florida Virtual School etc.
I hope this would be of some help to you @Amasashi
You’re suggesting for them to enroll their kid in two schools simultaneously and obtain two high school degrees at the same time from two different high schools on two different continents?
Sure, that might work if there are 48 hours in a day.
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Didn’t want to start a new thread since there are already many related to schooling.
I’m curious about expats who sent their kids to local schools. Has any English-speaking foreigner here sent their kids to local school, and then they ended up graduating high school without English fluency?
I’ve been having conversations with an expat couple lately who is afraid to send their future kids to local schools because they might not speak English well, even though they speak English at home. I think it’s bullocks.
Any real-life examples from anyone?
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I have friends where one parent is a foreigner and the other Taiwanese. They have a good income but not enough to buy a place to live and send children to international schools. Now they face the issue that the cost of tertiary education in their home countries they also cannot afford. Also some kids just don’t make it to university either. It’s not the end of the world.
Most but not all of the expat kids from families where both parents are foreigners I find the English spoken is fluent but I could not say the writing was native level.
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Depends on how much language they’re exposed to. I could point you to plenty of peer reviewed studies on the matter but I don’t have access to a university library anymore and can’t remember who ran them. Basically, if one language is spoken at home and the other is spoken at school and in the community, the language of the school/community will be stronger in academics while the language spoken at home will be stronger regarding language used at home (think household supplies, chores, “GO TO BED!”, etc. things that may or may not come up in a school setting). Without any maintenance (explicit reading instruction, radio/music/TV/movies, focused content study like social studies) in the home language, there will be a HUGE divide between the language spoken in school (in your example, Chinese) and the language spoken at home.
Keep in mind also that all people talking about the “importance of exposing young children to lots of different languages” and how they “absorb the languages like sponges” and how “the language they learn before they turn five will stay with them forever” have not looked at any empirical studies on the matter. There are a total of ZERO empirical studies that support this idea. The brain is shockingly elastic.
But if you want kids who speak, read and write English like a native English speaking child of their age, they need to be exposed to the same level of academic content in English. If you put an American child through Taiwan’s senior high school, they might have the content knowledge they need to succeed in an American high school, but they will not have the vocabulary unless they are also following along with the content in English.
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Interesting. I speak English, Cantonese, and Mandarin fluently, but I can’t really pinpoint how I got fluent in each of them.
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Yes, but speaking and being able to read and write are very different skills. I can and have given presentations at academic conferences in Chinese. I would never be able to present such findings in written Chinese that didn’t appear to be composed by a ten year old. My actual reading skills in Chinese are a huge split of “texts for six year olds” and “very specific academic papers”. I can’t read a Taiwanese high school history textbook — its full of language I’ve never been exposed to and too many characters that i don’t know.
Spoken (and signed) language is naturally acquired by all neurotypical humans. It’s a process where, if placed in the language and given the opportunity to connect the sounds (or signs. I mean languages like ASL here) to meaning (this last step overlooked in most “language immersion” environments), and given sufficient exposure to the language, you’ll “pick up on it”. But you need to be able to make connections between the sounds (or signs) and the meaning.
In the grand scheme of human history, literacy is relatively new. We did not evolve to need written language. You can’t just “pick up on” written language. If you had explicit instruction on English and Chinese reading, you have the capacity to learn anything you want in those languages, but only if you can understand what you’re reading. You can’t hand a first grader a college biology textbook and expect them to understand it, no matter how much they can talk like a professor about plants and animals. Can you understand a college biology textbook in all three of your spoken languages? This is also why language classes are such a nightmare — people think speaking, reading, writing, and listening are all interchangeable when it comes to assessment. They aren’t the same skills. By a long shot.
When it comes to heritage speakers, literacy is often a huge problem. Depending on the heritage speaker (the definitions vary), they might be perfectly capable of forming complex sentence structures in that language, but if they haven’t been receiving reading and writing practice, they’re going to fall behind academically. Specific subjects have specific language. Not knowing a lot of the language makes it difficult or even impossible to read a text at the necessary level.
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Yes, I read and write fluently too. Didn’t think it needed to be said, but I guess you’re right. It’s not necessarily a given.
Interested to know why not. What language did you speak at home, learn in at school?
There are also different interpretations of fluency. One can be fluent but have limited vocabulary, especially active not passive vocabulary. I think most uni students really need a base of around 8- 10K words to have a chance,
One can also have different levels of fluency and vocabulary in certain areas, so a doctor might have the academic vocabulary to explain a complex medical procedure but wouldn’t be able to make small chit chat, likewise a football coach working in the premier league might know all the football lingo in English, but ask him to talk about politics in English and that’s completely different.
Competency in language is not limited to fluency, vocabulary, grammar, cultural knowledge and so on and on and on, but a combination of all of them.
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