Canadian Immigrants Not Learning English (or French)

[Taualumna]

Originally Posted by UGAalum94

You don't think you'd learn English best through immersion anyway? Sure, it's going to be hard to actually learn the academic content in English until you speak it, but for learning a foreign language isn't having to use it and speak it one of the best ways?

They often can't. Many of these kids go to schools where the majority of the students come from communities that speak the same language, so the kids would not be speaking English in school. Even if the schools were more diverse, there usually will be other kids who come from the same ethnicity and speak the same language, so the kids will only hang out with each other. Things have changed a great deal in the last 15-25 years in cities like Toronto and Vancouver.

[UGAalum94]

Originally Posted by Taualumna

They often can't. Many of these kids go to schools where the majority of the students come from communities that speak the same language, so the kids would not be speaking English in school. Even if the schools were more diverse, there usually will be other kids who come from the same ethnicity and speak the same language, so the kids will only hang out with each other. Things have changed a great deal in the last 15-25 years in cities like Toronto and Vancouver.

Well, I was assuming that their teachers would give instruction in either English or French and expect the kids to communicate in English or French in class, so at least while they were in class, they'd be immersed.

But I guess not.

ETA: my mom grew up in the Southwest, and speaking of un-PC, what they did in her hometown, since many of the kids who started school were US born but only spoke Spanish until they entered school, was to make each Spanish speaking kid essential do 1st grade twice. The first time you learned the language; the second time you learned the 1st grade curriculum. Obviously, in addition to being pretty politically incorrect, that's not going to work when you have ESOL students entering at every grade particularly without any kind of academic foundation in the 1st language, but sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't work better just to do the language for a year before schools tried to teach someone Chemistry at the same time.