[mjkkbbr]

Hi all.

Anna has been home for almost 14 months. She was 8 at arrival. We put her in 2nd grade last fall (1 year behind age appropriate) which seemed appropriate. Her teacher thought she was the sweetest girl and was amazed at her progress. She in my opinion gave her too much help and did not have high enough expectations for her. I had her tested at Sylvan in January to see where she was. I just had her tested again and overall she has not progressed.

Expressive language seems very good. She is getting the sentence structure correct most of the time and sounds almost at grade appropriate. She really struggles in vocabulary and comprehension on the receptive side. She is not willing to say "I don't know" or "What is ____?" which makes most people think she understands. She is also very dilligent of mimicking and/or repeating the question without actually answering it or understanding what is being asked.

Is this normal? How quickly have your children caught up in this area? I fully expect the writing and academic vocabulary to take several years but what about normal conversations.

How do I get her to accept help when she wants everyone to think she is "normal" (her word not mine)?

Thanks in advance

[Waiting4Skip]

Wish I could help. Skip, at 20 months didn't speak a word. NOTHING. We used early intervention, then the school system. We sent him to preschool a few mornings a week after he was home a year only for the interaction and exposure to "kid talk". It took off very quickly. Now he doesn't keep quiet,even for a second, and is slightly above average verbally, according to his PS teachers.

[julianva]

I am a teacher, and although i don't teach esol, I know that the first year is the "quiet year" with lots of observation and listening. THe fact that sylvan tested her at a similar level, doesn't mean a lot. Educationally, I am not sure they are the right ones to assess her receptive abilities. I know that the special education coordinator cringes when a parent suggest sending one of our little ones there. (As well as our school pshycologist) I think it has a lot to do with their Drill and Practice style of reteaching. They don't tend to look for the appropriate learning style for a child,,,, No flames please, I am not sure of all of their reasons....
Anyway, I would give it time. They say it takes about 7 years for children to truly learn the language....

[leeinmemphis]

We have been home three years now and I would say that it was a good two or more years until I could talk to the boys like other parents do and have them understand 90% of what I said without 'dumbing it down' if you know what i mean.........

There are still times even now (not very often) that they dont understand something that someone says. It will come but it will take time. Dont be discouraged by folks on here who say that they have been home for a week and their kids are speaking english in full sentences

alli

[beckyww]

We also put Julia in school one year behind her age - we put her in Kinder when she was 6 1/2. She has progressed quite a bit, and I attribute that to lots of things, largely (1) desire to communicate at home w/her three sisters (get a word in at all!) and (2) desire to make friends at school. Her language exploded when she hit public school.

See this video clip taken almost exactly a year ago, when she'd been home a month and had lost her first tooth: YouTube - tell me all about it kiddo

Now see her last Sunday,describing a recent trip to Houston to be with her cousins: The Woodworth Family in Beautiful San Antonio TX

San Antonio has been hit with a cricket infestation lately. Tonight at Chick-Fil-A, she told me, "Mom, this is cricket city." Wow!

Is Anna around other kids a lot? I think desire to communicate really propels them.

[2Bulgarianbeauties]

I am going through the same comprehension issues with my 4.5 year old, home 1 year. Her speech therapist had me buy magazines with a lot of pictures in them. And then, you look at a picture, get her to name everything in it, and then go after the "wh" questions - who is that, what are they doing, where are they, why are they doing that when do you...

So, we were looking at a picture of a cat on a chair. I asked:

What is that,
What is the cat sitting on,
why is it sitting on the chair,
When do you sit on a chair,
Where is mommy's chair,
Who sits in our blue chair

And I do that picture after picture. Good luck.

Kay

[DET62]

I had similar issues when I adopted my 13 year old daughter. After a year, her conversation was very poor, and she did porrly in school. I finally had her tested, and found out she had a learning disability, an Auditory Processing Disorder. Once I got her therapy, she was much better. PM me if you'd like more info.
Dee

[momm2be]

I brought DD home at 6. She did well in kindergarten, horrible in first grade, and then well in 2nd grade.

We had to switch schools in 1st since school was going so badly. The newer school payed much more attention to her language skills, and her grades/test scores skyrocketed.

14 months home is a funny place with language. They have not even mastered the social language which takes about 2 years - cognitive/scholastic language development takes about 5 years. And by 14 months home the have probably forgotten most of their Russian. This leaves them with no way to express themselves. Unlike regular ESL kids that don't have the primary language from which they can "translate" from. The just don't have anything at this time.

I would not do anything to assess intelligence/abilities unless it is done by an adoptiong/bilingual specialist. The specialist should be well versed in subtractive bilingualism. Otherwise you will likely not get the right measurements of skill, nor the right resources to fix it.

This is the hardest fight since she probably speaks English quickly and with out much accent, so no one will believe she just won't catch up on her own.

[PollyG]

My DD came home on her 10th birthday. I also put her in a grade one year behind (3rd). At 3 months home she began understanding enough not to melt down at every frustration, at 6 months she could converse enough to let me know what she wanted and have short conversations.

Her 3rd grade teacher didn't expect anything from her workwise and this bothered me at first. I thought she should do spelling words or something! But I came to realize that she really wasn't able to do much those first 6 months except absorb what was going on around her. She also began to read pre-school books after the first 6months and advanced rapidly from there (she was a strong reader in Russia). Now at 20 months home she has tested out of ESL and reads at grade level in English. However, I asked her once to underline all of the words she didn't understand in a book and she underlined about every 5th word....so although she can "read" the story and gets the gist of it, she really doesn't comprehend it all - that will come in time. Her 4th grade year was good - the teacher said she improved dramatically - but she still was unable to get much out of the science and social studies units as they are language based. The words and concepts were just to hard for her to understand-so the school did not grade her in these areas.

At this point Julia can hold a conversation with anyone and no one would know she is foreign born except for her slight accent. She will ask me now what words mean and to explain something to her, but she only began doing that a few months ago. She also has retained about 80% of her Russian (we don't speak it at home) so I think she may just have a "brain" for languages. Her ESL teacher said she had learned English in half the normal time. I do get a kick out of her English slip-ups like when she told me about her "trip-field" they were taking at school - it reminds me how far she still has to go!

[mom2M&A]

Wondered if any of you parents w/ "older" kids noticed behavioral problems at the 14 month timepoint? we're home 13 months and my 6 year old (just turned) has stopped listening to anyone! He's getting a bad rep at preschool. I've got an appt to get him a referral to an OT because he just seems so distracted and can't keep quiet. But now that I've read this thread I'm wondering if maybe some of it is time home? He was very articulate and verbal in Russian and as I said never stops talking now in English. His vocabulary tests at about 4.5 years old and I figured that would keep advancing as he's home.
just want him to be successful...he goes into K in sept.

[momm2be]

Yes we had bad issues at 14 months. Its a complicated time, most likely he doesn't have a detectable accent. Most who see him will assume he is fluent, which he is not. Also they are really in between languages right now, can't express themselves in Russian anymore and not yet completely in English.

At 6 they start to understand loss. With the lack of fluency in either language it could be very problematic. We found that DD was an easy target of mean kids at this time and she didn't have the arsenal or years of secure attachment, language or cultural know-how to cope with it. She became very anxious and I found myself tiptoe-ing around her as she seemed ready to explode at any moment.

Don't get me wrong - she was still loving, adorable and fun alot of the time, but this was the time when her stress level peaked. I sought out a Russian social worker/child psych for a psych educational consult. We discovered that alot of her mis-behaviors were responses to events she could not understand - either language or culturally. that she appeared immature to the teachers when in fact she tested to be more mature than her peers. Non-verbally she was ontrack, verbally not so. She was internalizing everything and her self-esteem (what little there was) plummetted. I was advised to remove her from her school, place her in a small catholic school where the social learning would be more closely supervised and the day would be very structured. We had to keep things constant as she was already overwhelmed with the social learning and demands of 1st grade.

The amazing thing is this advice was spot-on for my DD. Her mood and behavior changed 180 degrees in the 1rst week at the new school, and she has just blosssomed into a very unique and precious individual. Her confidence and self-esteem are approaching average (a major advancement in our life). Something that was being stifled in our first school setting - and then carrying over to home.

I don't think everyone's problems relate to school environment - but ours were literally fixed by this change. Just something to keep in mind as you enter elementary schools. Though you may have a great school system, they usually don't work for everyone.

[GCS]

We've been home 2.5 years and I did not realize we were still simplifying a lot of our vocab for our son. When we watched him getting tested for auditory problems with SID we turned to each other and said, "we never talk to him like that".

I don't know how it happened. If we got into the habit at first because of the language barrier and then it stuck or if we just have first time parent syndrome and didnt realize we were not speaking at an age appropriate level with him.

He's in speech therapy now and we are working with him to speak in more complex sentences and not dumb things down for him.

I would suggest speech therapy for her and to work at home at expanding her vocabulary and sentence formation skills.

It takes time. But they catch up very fast once it clicks for them.

[mjkkbbr]

Thanks to everyone who has replied. I agree that this time is the hardest as she can no longer go back to her Russian to think through concepts. My biggest struggle is her unwillingness to accept that she needs to ask for help or to have things explained when she does not immediately understand.

She has difficulties with friends and siblings at times because she will not understand what they are saying and her feelings get hurt when the conversation was not in any way intended as negative.

Just last night I questioned some chalk writing that looked like an "arguement" and she would not talk about it and said she "forgot" who it was written to. We have tons of problems with her lying so this became the issue instead of talking about what the arguement was about. It turns out that she was writing a note to the neighbour girl asking if she wanted to play but it was written backwards with a double negative and the girl got mad and left. She had stomped up to her room and told her Dad she was tired.

[momraine]

My son, has only been home since November, and though many people think he is fluent he is not and he still has an accent, but he also refuses to ask for help or to admit he doesn't understand something. We will ask him in English and Polish if he understood something and he will say yes, even if he did not. He will also lie about things if he doesn't want to try to explain. He also has a problem using words he doesn't know. He will hear a word on TV or from his big brothers and start using it in places it doesn't fit, because he has no idea what it means, he just likes the sound of it. For a while it was dum dum (night at the meseum) he thought it as a friendly term and was calling everyone dum dum. Teachers, friends, siblings, etc. We had to talk about what it actually meant and he was totally surprised. Several times the same thing has happened with different words. And since he talks constantly and loudly it's led to some embarresing moments.

[doozer22boys]

First of all, that "dum dum" thing is cracking me up. I know exactly what you mean. Regina hears words on the radio and starts saying them over and over even though she has no idea what she's saying. Our girls have been home for a year. I thought our 5 year old was relatively fluent, but she scored the lowest possible score on the ESL evaluation a few months ago. She is pretty good at faking it and she's really good at reading face cues and hand gestures. But if it's just an auditory thing (like the Hulabaloo game from Cranium) she's totally lost and has no idea what to do. It was eye opening to see. Everyone thinks she understands everything but she doesn't. Our 3 year old is only saying about 10 words that are decipherable. Everything else sounds like babble. She qualified for special ed through our district next year so I really hope she can learn to talk. It's been very frustrating for all of us.