How Bilingual is Your Child's School?

By Ilana Benady, photos by Pedro Guzmán

If you’re a bi-cultural family living in a non-English-speaking country, the natural choice is to send your child to what is known as a bi-lingual school, where the main language of instruction is English, and the national language is the second language. This is our situation here in the Dominican Republic, where along with many local, bi-cultural and expatriate families, we decided to send our son to one such bi-lingual school.

The thing is, sometimes I worry about the standard of English that is being taught in these schools.

On the one hand, I can imagine how nerve-wracking it must be for local teachers, for whom English is a second language, to have to “perform” in front of children and parents whose first language is English. (Most of the teachers are local. There are some native English speakers, but the low salaries mean that these are in the minority, or concentrated in the top schools that pay relatively well.)

On the other hand, when teachers send us notes in English, I have to keep my inner grammar cop well in check, because I think it would not go down well if I were to correct the mistakes. Tempting as it might be to take a red pen to a teacher’s work, I have the feeling it might not do our relationship any favours.

Should 100% grammatical accuracy be that much of an issue when you’re dealing with six-year-olds? At secondary school level the student will get penalised for these sorts of mistakes, but is it really a problem at the age of six? Or is it important to avoid getting into bad habits - like my son’s Spanish-influenced sentence structure in English (e.g. “the brother of Fernando”; “How are you called?”) from an early age?

Up till this year, my son’s teachers have spoken reasonably good English, although with fairly pronounced Dominican accents, and their written English has not been that good. The present teacher speaks fluently and writes correctly, judging by what I’ve seen and heard so far, but has a particularly strong accent.

If my son had been in the 2nd grade class that did the 9/11 project that was displayed in the school corridor last month, I might have felt the need to say something. The teacher had got them to draw pictures of the World Trade Center being hit by planes and burning (something I wasn’t entirely sure was appropriate for seven-year olds, but that’s another issue altogether).
They’d clearly also had a brainstorm on the topic of how to prevent violence, and every child had listed the same ideas on their drawing: no guns, be nice to each other, love, peace, etc. Fair enough, I suppose.

One item on their lists, though, read: “no discuss”. Grammar aside, what was that supposed to mean? The teacher had confused the English word “discussion” (meaning debate, dialogue or conversation) with its Spanish false cognate “discusión” meaning argument. Shouldn’t she have known that “discussion” has positive connotations, whereas “discusión” implies conflict and confrontation?

Quite a big difference, especially in the context it was being used, because dialogue is one of the things that helps prevent violence.

Ilana Benady is a freelance writer and international development worker living in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic. Originally from Gibraltar, she is married to Dominican photographer Pedro Guzmán. Their son Lucas (6) is, as far as they know, the only Gibraltarian-Dominican in captivity. Ilana can be found blogging on: www.dr1.com/blogs/?u=Chiri

back to Multilingual Living Magazine Table Of Contents