L3 at school, L1 in community, L2 at home?
Jan 3, 2019 11:26:46 GMT 9
Post by David T. on Jan 3, 2019 11:26:46 GMT 9
Hi everyone.
I'd really like some advice on our situation. Is it crazy to send our son to a school that teaches in a language that is not the community language and that neither Mum or Dad speak?
Our son is now 19 months old. Our community language is Mandarin Chinese. His Mum is a native speaker of Mandarin and also speaks pretty fluent English. I am a native speaker of English. We are considering sending him to a Korean international school in this city. The language of instruction at this school is Korean. The student population at this school is made up of kids from a Korean-Korean parent background, Korean-Chinese background, Korean-Russian, and Korean-Japanese. In addition to a regular Korean curriculum, students also have lessons in Mandarin and English.
Currently his Mum is his primary caregiver. She currently speaks Mandarin with him in the morning, and mainly English with him in the afternoon and evenings when I get home from work. Our family language is English. He also attends an English speaking playgroup a couple of hours a week.
We have the opportunity to send our son to the Korean language school for free. Our other schooling options are bilingual English-Chinese schools. We also have been strongly considering introducing a third language to him in the hopes he can become trilingual. My main concerns are that he would know no Korean when he arrives in kindergarten and all the other kids would be native speakers of it. Could this have a negative impact on him? And what impact could this have on his Chinese and English? Our goal would be for him to be pretty solidly trilingual in speaking, reading, and writing at the end of elementary school.
Thanks for any help you can give us on this problem.
David