L2agebericht / L2 situation report 1

Here is a brief narrative of the current L2 situation with my son in the last eight months since my last post.

Basically everything is still on track and developing as I had hoped. Jamie and I continue to speak only German together when we are alone. He shows no sign of defaulting to English with me. In fact, I'm the one who occasionally tends to default to English with him, whereupon he calls me out right away! 

Jamie's L2 reading is also going very well. At this point he has made, in English, the important transition to fully independent, daily, sustained reading of full-length, non-illustrated chapter books at an age-appropriate reading level. Currently he is reading the Percy Jackson series (appropriate for kids beginning age 9-10) in English for about 1/2 hour per day (his assigned time), sometimes going longer (out of enjoyment). 

He is lagging just a bit behind that in German. Every morning he reads about 1-1.5 pages of the German translation of Percy Jackson out loud to me. However, he reads what he has already read in English, so he already knows the story. What he doesn't yet do is pick up a German chapter book at that level and read for a sustained period on his own. 

Getting him to this point even in English has been a bit of a challenge. Up until about two months ago he would not sit down with a chapter book at an appropriate reading level and read on his own for any length of time. He would read either 1) lower-level chapter books, often with illustrations; 2) comic books (mostly Calvin and Hobbes in English and Asterix und Obelix in German); or non-fiction books with illustrations. So, beginning in December 2018, my wife and I made Jamie sit down with Percy Jackson and read 1/2 hour per day. It took him a couple of weeks to do it without resistance, then a couple more weeks before we felt he was really enjoying it. At this point, he reads very regularly and sometimes continues beyond his assigned time. Still, he has never yet sat down under his own initiative with a novel and read out of pure enjoyment for an extended period of time. At this point he only does this with Calvin and Hobbes and Asterix, and some other graphic novels. 

I'll be continuing this update in the next few days. 

L2 Writing 9 (typing, corrections, improvements)

Today J started typing his World of Warcraft journal onto a Googledoc: 

I had him correct his errors (in blue) and together we worked to vary vocabulary and make stylistic improvements (purple): 

L2 writing 8 (short/long vowels)

Yesterday and today we worked on short/long vowel pairs, starting with a:

wann / Wahn
kann / Kahn
Mann / mahnen
Bann / Bahn
sann / Sahne
Lamm / lahm
an / ahnen
     / Hahn
     / Zahn
     / nahm

Yesterday I drew up the list above, explained the double n/m as marker of the short (except with an) and -h- as marker of the long vowel, then had J pronouce as I pointed to the individual words. This morning we did a dictation: 

He got all of them right! 

Dauerselbstberieselung 2

J is home from camps for the rest of the summer, and has spent most of this week drawing space-pictures and listening on his ipod to Frauke Scheunemann's Winston series:

That's something like 15 hours of audiobook listening in three days. The last time he did this with such intensity was about a year ago.

By the way, Frauke Scheunemann's literary style is fantastic, filled with witticism and wordplay. And the narrator Oliver Kalkofe is quite brilliant as well. 

L2 writing 7 (WoW-Tagebuch)

Here is the entry for today:

Not pretty, but progress is slowly being made. And he wrote two sentences more than I asked! I suggested umbringen, dabei, Umhang, Tram nehmen; he came up with erringen, sich begeben (zu)/nach, Lärm machen, and von da aus.

Classic sci-fi 2

Here's my first classic sci-fi post. In the last few weeks I've been reading Arthur C. Clarke stories to/with J, available in German via inexpensive Kindle editions. Right now we're in the middle of this collection:

These stories are great for where J is right now, both language-wise and conceptually. Clarke's style is very lucid, with fairly short sentences and not a lot of technical vocabulary. The plots are concrete and people-centered, mostly set in the near future, when humans have recently made the jump to living in space and in the process of colonizing the solar system. And, with some exceptions, the tone is optimistic about the future. That is important to me. At the moment, young adult sci-fi seems very pessimistic by and large, oriented towards dystopian scenarios. It echoes adult sensibilities. I don't think that's a good thing for children, at least not unmitigated. I personally feel gloomy about the future in many ways, but I do my best to spare my son these fears and do my damndest to communicate to him a positive vision of the future. 

Right now he's on fire about space travel and, after watching a documentary about Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, wants to build "space hotels." He has also been obsessed with the panet Saturn all year. Well, lo and behold, Clarke wrote a short story about a space hotelier building a hotel with a view of Saturn:

Awesome!

Erwachsenensachhörbücher! / Nonfiction audiobooks for grownups!

Another significant L2 milestone this weekend: J and I started listening to real grownup German audiobooks on our drives: 

He's doing just fine with them. After all, we've been watching grownup German documentaries for some time now. 

By the way, even though I don't post on them anymore, we've never stopped taking our regular audiobook listening drives, usually three or four weekday early mornings for 20 minutes, and once per weekend for a little longer. Here's my original post on the importance of these drives for J's initial L2 learning.

At this point, we often interrupt the audiobook for longer periods and converse, sometimes discussing the story or material, sometimes using that as a springboard into other conversations, sometimes not even getting around to much listening and just talking.