Friday, January 11, 2008

English vs. Chinese: balance progression

April was excluded from English(not 100%, but 90% of the time since the surrounding is still English speaking) until 2.5 years old. As I mentioned before, she started off speaking Chinese to her English speaking classmates. Then she liked to count in Spanish than in Chinese. Later on, English started to gain ground. She spoke more English phrases at home and basically stopped talking in Chinese. And Spanish is out, and is still out even the school resumed language class. My guess is the current Spanish teacher is not as good as the one before. But we don't care much about Spanish. We got mad at her refusing to speak Chinese at home. A few fights with her, obviously, she couldn't understand why she can't speak only English, it's the norm at school. Her resistance is especially strong when it comes to Chinese poems, she argued that none of her classmates know Chinese poem. We realized it's not a good trend going down the path, so we forced her to translate English to Chinese whenever we could, and for anything she want to do or take or play, she must do the translation before she was allowed to do so. And this method seems to work. This shaped a period of time, she would do auto translation for everything. It got a bit annoying after sometime, and I guess she got tired of it also. Then she started an era of Chinese-only, since we were so demanding on her speaking Chinese. She would also pick on us, if we started talking in English to each other, she would warn us "No English at home(in Chinese)!" She spoke no English at home for quite some time that I started to worry about her English. I checked with couple of her teachers, they all gave positive feedback that April is communicating fine in English at school. Now it's pretty much at a stabilized state that she will say Chinese majority of the time at home, anytime we switch context to English depends on topics or people we are dealing with, she will follow. We are happy with the current state, but expect more fluctuation in the future.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

kyle is the same way lah~~ I'd explain something in chinese and he couldn't understand, if i refused to say in English, he got mad at me.