Yasmine Mohammed ياسمين محمد  🦋

In Belgium the problem is that some children only hear a foreign language at home so by the time they go to school they have a severe disadvantage. I think kids in school should speak the national language & that it’s the responsibility of the parents to make sure they speak it.

Ah yes. This is definitely an issue in Canada. Quite often the parents themselves don’t know English-so they can’t prepare their kids for school. Luckily kids learn languages pretty quickly-so even w the disadvantage, they eventually catch up.

I think the danger of letting them speak another language (language they speak at home) is that there will be groups. A group of Arabic speaking kids, a group of French speaking kids, a group of...

Yes. That happens. It’s unfortunate to see the pods by identity, I agree. It also stunts their learning because it limits how often they speak the common language of the country-but really, there’s no way to control that. I wouldn’t advocate for restricting ppls language choices.

It depends on one thing though. In some French schools in Quebec you can only speak French and in some English schools if you are in the French immersion program you are encouraged to speak only French. This might have changed but it was like that until the early 90s

Yes, this is true. My daughter is in French immersion—but this only applies in the classroom, not the playground. When I teach ESL I ask the students to speak only English in the classroom too. It’s an academic thing-not a restriction on their native languages.