An expat family from Eastern Europe here. We are living in USA since 2014 and our twin sons were born here in 2016 Our twin sons are finishing 5th grade this year and getting ready for middle school. We speak our native language at home and we realized this is negatively impacting our kids.
Especially one of our kids is pretty behind in English. He has big holes in his vocabulary and his grammar needs a lot of attention.
I already reached out to our Public High School to find out if there were any high school volunteers to help my kids with English but so far no luck. Both my wife and I aren’t very good with English and we also have big holes in our vocabulary and grammar.
We are willing to spend the money to find a tutor if we have to but we are trying to save money for college so we want to handle this without tutor if possible. As very accomplished students in our own native country, we believe there are things we can do to help our kids. That said, we wanted to get some ideas from you parents before we finalize our action plan on helping them.
We are willing to answer any of your questions for you to understand the situation better.
At this point, what are some of the things you can suggest us so our kids don’t fall further behind in English?
If your child is in public school, they should be eligible for ESL services to help with their English. This would happen at their current school and they would continue in ESL until they became proficient (commanding) in the english language. There is federal title III funding for ESL, where if your children are in need of ESL, the school must provide it
School would have asked you your home language when you registered your children and tested them for english.
Get them involved with sports, scouts or other activities where they will have more opportunities to converse with other kids. Also, check in with your local library as many have volunteer based ESL programs.
“We are living in USA since 2014 and our twin sons were born here in 2016 Our twin sons are finishing 5th grade this year and getting ready for middle school.”
Your sons were born last year and are now in the 5th grade? Must be some kind of typo here.
Since our kids were born here in USA their accent is like typical American kids. The issue isn’t their communication per se. It is understanding the reading materials.
Both of them took ISEE for entering a private middle school. Unfortunately it was a wake up call for us. None of them were able to finish the Reading Section and Vocabulary section and their scores were pretty bad. After looking at this issue carefully, we realized their issue is due to my wife and I. We aren’t talking English at home so they aren’t exposed to certain vocabulary and their grammar is poor.
Don’t know if they still qualify for ESL in this situation.
They are in fifth grade. You have years to go before college. I saw your post ages ago, and I do not think you need tutors for English. I guarantee you that if they are in school here, they know more much more English than you realize, (unless they are in a private school with other Easten European kids and only play with those kids.) In the next five years they should be reading a lot. They should watch educational programs. They should read classics of English, such as Little Women, Adventures of Tom Sawyer, all the classic kids books like Harry Potter, A wrinkle in Time, etc… Go to your kids’ school librarian, ask what she recommends. Your American children know much more English than you realize. Please do NOT get them an unnecessary English tutor. Just let them be kids. Seriously, just let them have fun.
ETA: They will begin learning a lot more about grammar in middle school. There are literally hundreds of thousands of kids here who learn English outside the home. I grew up with thousands of them in California. Fluent English outside the home, Spanish only in the home. trust me, your kids are learning it. They will keep learning it.
My kid loved to listen to audio books during bath time and in the car. Sometimes after school too. Most libraries have audiobooks you can borrow or you can find audio versions on Amazon or iTunes.
During family reading time, have them read out loud to you.
Maybe we are getting worried too early. Things we didn’t like were their bad score on English on PARCC. They were below state average. Their ISEE reading scores weren’t good either. And their teachers told us to be involved with their English more in our meeting last week.
We just don’t want to see them fall behind their peers because of my wife and I. That’s really all.
It’s great you’re looking out for your kids, but I agree with the others -don’t push them and don’t make them feel bad for not scoring high. As others said, have them read, read, read. Maybe even come up with a reward system if they are not naturally avid readers. My husband was not much of a reader growing up, and it has really hurt him. He wishes his parents had encouraged him more.
Have them read read read is what we actually did so far. No we didn’t have family reading time to be honest. But we made sure they read an hour every day on top of homework etc. But after our meeting with teachers’ last week, we decided to talk to them in detail. Our son who is having hard time with English told me the problem is mostly vocabulary. When he reads a book there are many words he isn’t familiar with. So far, reading regularly didn’t help. Trying to understand what else we can do as parents.
It is good that you are being proactive and it is good that they are still young. Since the teacher said something, it seems fair to ask him/her for suggestions of how to help your children improve their English.
And reading pretty much anything is OK - it doesn’t always have to be something a meaningful or challenging. Sometimes reading something your kids find interesting or even funny does the trick.
A fun thing about Kindles or similar e-readers is they make it very easy to look up a word – you just tap the word and a definition pops up (if you’re connected to WiFi, or whatever). Or maybe you could get him a dictionary? Or make sure has access to something that will let him google definitions?
Could the entire family work on English-language-learning activities? Maybe you could ask your children to teach you and your spouse more English. They might enjoy getting to be the teachers and showing off what they know already.
It is not unusual to have a child who was born here
To have challenges with language acquisition. It can be if they learned your native language before they learned English or most of what they hear at home is not in English
In fact, they are already doing that. Their #1 joy in life is making fun of my English. My accent is a funny one for them. And when I hear a word on TV that I don’t recognize, I ask them and they explain to me. That made us think their English was OK but turns out academically they were behind their peers.
Yes, part of reading is looking up vocabulary you don’t know. Reading is the best way to pick up new words, much better than studying a dictionary by itself. And the more they read, the more words they’ll know. You could also try going down a level or two on the difficulty of the books, if they are getting too frustrated. They have plenty of time.
You are on point. Although they were born here in USA, they weren’t exposed to English except the TV. When they started Kindergarten, they knew almost zero English. Their kindergarten teacher thought one of our sons was Autistic. They made us test him and we did, it turned out he wasn’t autistic and the reason he showed those signs were not understanding what people around him was saying.