You’ve betrayed your argument. You posited that your experience is to be trusted because you know of three international adoptees all brought to the same environment (your home) who all reacted in one certain way regarding language acquisition. But in doing so, you show complete ignorance about the fact that this is a well-known and researched phenomenon for international adoptees which does not apply to immigrant children in intact families.
Well, my experience is a LOT better than a person who has absolutely NO experience with the subject. Be honest, how many people on BoingBoing are teachers, or have adopted children from another country? In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
And Heather (an ESL instructor) actually backed up what I was talking about! So, once again, what are YOUR credentials.
I think you will find that there are other adoptive parents on BB.
I also think it is good to step in now and ask for everyone to take a deep breath and go enjoy a quiet weekend.
4 Likes
Sorry. I just get annoyed when people attack me as an ignorant idiot for no reason. No, I am not an expert, but I do have SOME experience in this field – a small sample size (N=3), but certainly much better than N=0. I did not mean to imply that nobody here adopts, but I would be willing to bet that MOST people here have no experience. If somebody else has more experience than me in this matter (as Heather apparently does) I at least expect them to identify that fact (which Heather did). Otherwise, I can probably assume that they have little to no experience in the matter.
I also get annoyed when a person reads a post from an expert who, in general, confirmed what I was saying. Then some random person reads HER post, responds to it, and then attacks me for not knowing what I am talking about. Such a failure of logic baffles me.
My apologies if things got to heated.
My daughter is adopted. From Guatemala. We live in the USA
2 Likes
Not to disagree, but to expand, another important variable is level of CALP mastery in the primary language, which will obviously be more likely in older kids who had more years of formal education in their primary language.
Developing CALP in one’s primary language makes it easier to develop CALP in a second language (or third!), while failure to develop CALP in one’s primary language can make it more difficult / take longer to develop CALP in a secondary language.
good resource: http://www.nasponline.org/resources/culturalcompetence/ortiz.pdf
2 Likes
Hi. Glad to meet you. I have three adopted from Haiti. My wife and I started the process about 1-1/2 years before the earthquake to get our littlest. We got two more from another family who also adopted from Haiti (siblings, about two years ago). I also have two bio kids.
Good to see somebody else around here with a big heart!
My two youngest sons are from Peru, both acquired English quickly and had good grades. Both had some ESL help. A linguist friend suggested just letting the language wash over the kids. School, athletics and lots of rented movies seemed to help. Both boys make more sense than Perry.
1 Like
I was an ESL teacher in China for 4 years and adopted a 3 year old child from there (we had been fostering him for over two years by that point, so he already spoke English). It was incredibly difficult for us to get him into the US for a 3 month visit once the papers were finalised, as we couldn’t prove that he wouldn’t try to get a job and stay in the country (seriously, they actually said that and refused our application multiple times for that reason. Them’s the rules). At this point we were waiting for his UK passport and had to travel with his Chinese passport instead, which is why we had the trouble (my wife is a US citizen, but we adopted him under the UK system and had to get a UK passport before he could get a US one). The only way we actually managed to do it was by contacting a friend of a friend who works in the office of a congressman, who wrote a nice letter to the US consulate in our city telling them that we were good people and that they should give our son the visa.
We’ve been living in Germany for about six months now (he’s been in kindergarten for about 3 1/2 months), and his spoken German seems to be getting on pretty well even though we just speak English with him at home. It’s a bit early to judge his academic German, but he’s happy to speak German with his teachers and friends by now and seems to understand basic conversations quite well.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
