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.