Kindergarten students are always busy learning new letters, sounds, words, addition facts, places and much more. With so much information being thrown their way, it's easy for students to become overwhelmed. The situation is exacerbated in a dual-language classroom where the student can only understand a portion of the instruction. As the students struggle to understand the foreign language, they can grow increasingly frustrated, and this frustration can lead to a hatred for school and learning in general. The first few months for a kindergartner in a dual-language classroom is extremely difficult and trying.
In many ways, dual-language learning is more time-consuming than regular schoolwork. For starters, in the classroom, the language arts lesson is often taught twice (once in each language). This means the length of the standard language arts lesson is doubled. Additionally, both classwork and homework take longer because students struggle to decipher the instructions that are written in a foreign language and to answer questions in that language. Research also has shown that core subjects suffer initially in a dual-language kindergarten. For the first several months, so much time is spent on learning and understanding the languages that there's little time left for really digging into the core subjects like phonics, reading and math.
Educational experts claim that it takes four years in a dual-language environment to gain the full benefits of the program. Students who enter a dual-language kindergarten in the middle of the year have great difficulty catching up to their peers. Not only that, but if a student drops out of the dual-language program early, he's likely to fall behind and benefit little from the time spent in the program. For the process to work effectively, a student must begin at the start of kindergarten and continue until the end of the program.
Every school will tell you that a vital part of a successful dual-language program is parent participation. This, however, is made difficult for the parents who don't speak or read the additional language. In many cases, the child becomes the mediator and translator between the parent and teacher, instead of the other way around.