Language learning takes more than scattered classes

According to language learning experts quoted in a NYT article, "If It's Tuesday, It Must Be Spanish," kids need immersion to become fluent in a language--they need to be exposed to a language for at least 30% of their waking hours for the language to really sink in. Which means that sporadic classes may be of some help to get their little ears used to the language's sounds, but classes alone aren't enough. Kids need back-up activities at home. And they need fun and games, not flashcards and rote exercises.

I think this all applies very much to my experience teaching English here in Spain. I can see the most progress in kids who do their homework and study regularly at home, but by no means are any of them fluent in English. Nor will any of them become fluent without home-based support. I see the most hope for second-language acquisition for those kids who come from non-Spanish backgrounds...Romanian, Chinese, Moroccan, etc. They will hopefully retain their mother tongue and acquire Spanish as well. But whether they or any of their native Spaniard classmates will really learn English to a high degree depends on many factors outside the classroom. We are supposedly offering the children bilingual Spanish and English education but the reality is it is not an immersion environment. We still mostly approach their education as though it were a second language and we tackle it in less than 1-hour-at-a-time chunks.

In my personal experience, I have become nearly fluent in Spanish, but only after 10 years of studying it. At the end of high school, I still had halting speech and incomplete grammatical understandings. It was only with rigorous university-level classes--literature seminars especially--taught exclusively in Spanish by fluent and often native professors who demanded we always use Spanish in speech and writing, that I started to get closer to where I am today. Then, I did a 3.5 month study-abroad in Spain and then, I came back and married a native Spanish-speaker. Speaking Spanish and English on a daily basis together is the surest means by which we have both improved our respective second languages. Neither of us continues with formal classroom learning but we read, listen to and converse in both English and Spanish, organically.

We intend to raise our future children in Spanish and English and will follow the prevailing research to do that in the best way, with the goal of them being equally comfortable expressing themselves verbally and in writing in both the mother's and father's tongues. I hope that they will pick up a third language through schooling, but depending on when and how that third language is introduced, they will probably never become truly fluent, since they won't have back-up support in the home.