If you don’t want to read further, you can stop at this: don’t expect your kids to be fluent after a few months.
Everyone I talked to said that if they went to a Spanish school for a semester they would be fluent. This seemed optimistic to me, but also- great!
Our kids spoke only Spanish at school for 2.5 months, 5 days a week, 5 hours a day. They wrote reports and did projects in Spanish. They played chess in Spanish after school and soccer with local kids. The only Wnglish they spoke was with each other. I mostly spoke to them in Spanish also. And yet…they still aren’t fluent. They’re definitely conversational and got over a huge hump of language learning. They can now understand most things in context and get their point across in common situations. They are still far from fluent, though. They mangle verb tenses and struggle with vocabulary when unfamiliar subjects come up.
Things that helped:
- Having some foundation. The kids had been doing Duolingo daily for at least a year. Although it isn’t perfect, alll that daily exposure adds up. They also had a Spanish tutor they know and like for about a year before we left and while they were in school
- Having friends their age. They had to speak Spanish to communicate with their friends at school. This was a huge help in forcing them to speak instead of hearing and understanding but refusing to speak.
- Writing papers and giving presentations in Spanish. They learned a lot of vocabulary outside the usual daily words from working on school projects
- Running errands around town. We made them buy groceries and go to the market, which increased their confidence that they could communicate in a variety of settings. Many thanks to the kind Spanish people who were so patient.
Things that didn’t help:
- Having a lot of siblings. I would guess that the whole experience was easier since they had the comfort of each other’s presence at school and home in an unfamiliar country. But it’s really hard to consistently speak another language to your sibling, and they spent several hours a day speaking English despite my bribes to try to go entire days without speaking English. My husband also doesn’t speak Spanish, so they had to speak some English to communicate with him.
- The short time. Having six months to a year would have been much better.