Great News for El Hijo
I’ve been neglecting this blog lately as a result of work overload — preparing to teach a writing class at UPC, which entails putting together loads of English-language course materials. Last night I got only three hours of sleep, then staggered into a meeting with El Hijo’s teachers at school, where I received a wonderful surprise.
I was handed an official note informing me that my 10-year-old son has “graduated” from Language Support, after one and a half years of tutoring, and will be joining his classmates in all of their regularly scheduled classes.
This is a big moment for EH and our family.
It is challenging to bring an American kid to Peru and to have him fit in with the local culture, as any expat can tell you. It is even more challenging to immerse your kid in a school where they teach in Spanish, as we did, rather than have him attend an all-English-speaking school. But we wanted our child to become fully bilingual and so we enrolled El Hijo in a Peruvian-British school, where the curriculum is 50% Spanish, 50% English.
Educators speak of a window of opportunity, between ages 1 and 10, when children can learn easily learn a second language and speak it without an accent. That was what we were hoping for when sent our son into a school where he would be surrounded by Peruvian kids, as well as a few stray English-speaking expats. It wasn’t as easy a process as you might think, however, to get EH to accept Spanish as his second language.
El Hijo was angry for the first nine months. He spoke English to his bilingual classmates and was embarrassed to say much more than “hola” to his cousins. At the end of the school day, he’d race in the front door and plunk down in front of the television set to watch Cartoon Network, where some of his favorite cartoons showed in English.
“Cartoons sound dumb in Spanish,” he complained to his Peruvian school friends, who rolled their eyes at “El Americano.”
Gradually, EH stopped sniping about the dubbed Spanish dialog in “The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy.” About one year into our stay here, he began speaking mainly in Spanish to his friends. They taught him the Lima schoolyard slang and rude songs about dogs doing pedos. It wasn’t what he was being taught in Language Support, but somehow it fitted with the formal Spanish to form a working vocabulary for a 10-year-old.
His school papers in Spanish began to improve. He began to out-talk me. He began to be embarrassed by his gringa mother’s accent.
He was on his way.
A lump rose in my throat today when his Language Support teacher told me EH no longer needed her services. We had leaned on her so much, and now she was setting our son free.
Amazingly, our American kid is now a bilingual Peruvian.
Barbara
I am an American writer who lived in Lima for seven years (2007-2014), where I covered Andean traditions, melting glaciers and daily life in the capital for Miami Herald, MSNBC and Huffington Post. I now live and work in northern Florida where I champion climate change advocacy and compassionate, affordable eldercare.
6 Comments
Pico
Hello Barbara. Bilingualism is so awesome! I am raising my two children to speak English and Spanish.
What started as a personal requirement so that my children could retain some of their cultural heritage, became an eye opening experience. My daughter attended a bilingual pre-school in the city and the director showed us all these research papers about brain development differences between monolingual and bilingual children.
The most amazing fact was that 2 year old children would learn the language faster than 3 year olds, who would learn it faster than 4 year olds. It might take them a while to figure out the language, but once they do, they come out speaking in more complete sentences than other kids.
Many people have these misconceptions that little children will be confused with so many languages at such an early age, but they underestimate the brain capacity.
Once my kids are a little bit older I intend to send them to Peru for a few months at a time to do some a language immersion program so they do not forget the language.
Saludos
Barb
Pico, I now can appreciate what you are doing with your children in the United States, where only 9% of the population is bilingual. And, yes, in addition to strengthening your kids’ ties w/their dad’s culture, having them learn another language is good for their brain development.
This article from BBC supports that theory: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3739690.stm
I know there is some disagreement among experts as to how to teach young children two or more languages simultaneously. I have observed some parents who successfully are raising bilingual and trilingual kids, and in those households, there is one parent who focuses on one language and another who specializes in the other.
El Fotografo and I were never able to successfully do that with El Hijo in the U.S. El Fotografo liked speaking English with our son, so we needed to move to South America to do the immersion thing.
Great that you will have the kids visit Peru to reinforce the Spanish.
Pico
Barb (or should I call you Barbara),
The first recommendation we got from the school director (she is an early speech development specialist) was that each parent communicate with the children in one language only. That was key! So the children and I only communicate in Spanish, and with my wife in English, even though they are well aware that I can speak English too.
As per children learning more than one language at a time, there was this kid in the bilingual school that was a total euro-mutt. At age 4 he spoke English, Italian, Portuguese, French, and was learning Spanish too. And he switched from one to the other with no problem.
One tidbit, in the absence of a second spoken language at home, sign language is a valid alternative since it abides by the rules of all spoken languages.
Saludos
Ward Welvaert
Great job EH. It’s so much better to learn a new language when you’re a kid.
At least, that’s the excuse I use for my broken Spanglish after spending a year and a half in Peru 🙂
Carlos
You mention how challenging it is for a 10 year-old to adapt to a 50-50 Spanish-English school, in a foreign country, with foreign classmates, foreign teachers, etc? I agree with you 100%, but talk about challenging when you are 16 years-old, and placed in an American Private Catholic High School -in the U.S. by the way- where not even the janitors speak Spanish; after being uprooted from Lima by your family the week before school starts in the U.S., and your English “repertoire” is as vast as the word “HELLO”. Not to take anything away from El Hijo’s huge accomplishments, but man, that WAS challenging!!
Cheers
Hop Skip Jump Peru
It can be tough on the kids to start with, but you are giving them a huge gift by giving them the opportunity to become bilingual. My son hates it when I speak Spanish even though my Spanish is ok. We came to Peru when he was only three so he now speaks Spanish perfectly and is truly bilingual.