Ending the Neverending Story

Since last year, K and I have set aside Saturday and sometimes also Sunday early mornings for reading out loud to J, usually about an hour. We first read C.S. Lewis's Narnia series, in the original English. After we finished that last Spring, we started Michael Ende's Unendliche Geschichte, me reading in German, K in English. 

We finally finished it yesterday. 

As you can see, J plays while we read. Sometimes he would bang about with his toys and makes spaceship sound-effects and not seem to be paying attention, whereupon we would halt with a huff and threaten to stop reading. But then time after time, when K & I were scratching our heads trying to recall an earlier episode in this long story, J would cooly note exactly when it was and pretty much exactly what was said. D'oh!

Hörbuch-Selbstberieselung

Several months ago we bought J an Ipod player. Now he spends pretty much all of his alone playtime around the house listening to audiobooks while he plays, bathes, and when he eats on his own at breakfast on schooldays.

He listens to both his English and German audiobooks, but more the German, because he has more and is more familiar with them. Recently he has been listening to Frauke Scheunemann's Winston series, about a cat detective. He listens to the stories over and over and can quote whole scenes by heart. 

    

Hiatus

It has been nearly a year since I last posted. The demands of department headship have made it difficult to continue to find the time for all my L2 routines with J, much less for writing about them! But I'm going to make more of an effort again. 

Exactly one year ago, I wrote a post about how my major L2 acquisition goals had been met, as J was now reading German books independently. He has continued to do so. He is now reading German and English books at the same level. Here he is from yesterday reading a book in one of his favorite new series, Ute Krause's Muskeltiere:

This is a real chapter-book:

Using the very nice index of age-appropriateness at the Oetinger Verlag, this book seems to be at the 8-9 year old reading level. Which is perfect; J turns 8 in a month.

Now, over the past year, a decent amount of bedtime reading time with J has been him reading to me. About 5-10 minutes out of 20. And he had been making good progress. Up until about 2 months ago, however, I felt that his German reading level was still measurably behind his English, to judge by what I heard when he read to K. 

Since then, the gap has closed. That has a lot to do with a trip to Austria we took in September, about which more later. Since then, he has been doing a lot more independent reading in German. We bought a lot of books while we were in Vienna. 

Up until about a month ago, I was still a little skeptical about how much he was actually understanding of these longer, more complicated stories. I knew he was getting the main plot points and even a lot more. But I doubted he was understanding everything, or more or less everything. 

But he was. That has been borne in on me with the last Muskeltiere book. After he read it, we stared listening to the audiobook. To test him, I asked him on several occasions to describe what happened in an scene before we listened to it. Without exception, he described in considerable detail, and it was all exactly as he said.