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.