Homeschool Spanish Academy Question

[NewIma]

My dd13 and dd9 started HSA today. They both seemed to like it, but I have a question/need some feedback. They had two different teachers. They both asked on a scale of 1-10 how much Spanish we want them to use when speaking to our child. I is completely English and 10 is completely Spanish. Dd13 is doing Spanish 1 for high school. She went first and her teacher suggested to start at 2 and in 2 months go up to 4. Dd9 went later and her teacher was horrified at the idea of starting at 2 and said we should start at 5. I called customer service and they were friendly but unhelpful. So, which perspective is right? Neither child has any previous Spanish experience.

[Guest]

My DD has taken lessons with HLA for years and is probably at a 9-10 now. She already had a strong textbook Spanish background coming in and needed conversational fluency. 

 

Having said that,with a 9 yr old, I would expect the focus to be more immersive, and a high schooler is learning grammar tenses, concepts, etc. That might make the difference-the times they switch to English is when they are discussing grammar, even past level IV. 

[NewIma]

Thank you both! My older daughter's class did focus on more complicated concepts that would have been difficult to explain to her in Spanish since she is an absolute beginner. so maybe that is where the teacher was coming from. I will talk to the teacher at the next class though and ask about bumping up the Spanish component. What a strange thing....

[73349]

You can always increase it as you go.

When DS tried to have too much conversation in English, his teacher joked [in English], "You have to say it to me in Spanish, because I don't speak any English."  😋

[ByGrace3]

As a high school Spanish teacher, true "immersion" at the middle/high school level cannot be replicated once a week. If you go to a 9/10 from the beginning your student will learn very little and be very frustrated. If you were in a true immersion experience -- hours and hours a day-- Sure! All Spanish is amazing! an 1-3 hours a week? No. Younger kids looking for more of an "experience" and being submersed into the language, yes, they can go slower and use more of the language -- different approach than  2 years for "high school credit." In my high school classes, Spanish 1 probably does start at about 10-15% moving to 20% within a few months ending probably around 40/50%. I teach in English and then we practice in Spanish. Spanish 2 starts around 40/50% and then you are at 100% by Spanish 3. There needs to be plenty of "In Spanish" conversation and practice, and vocabulary lessons can be taught in Spanish, but grammar needs to be taught in English at least at first. 

I am not super familiar with HSA, but can you teach some of the concepts outside of the HSA class and then use HSA for practice primarily? I feel like you would get more out of your experience that way . . . .

[NewIma]

ByGrace3, that is very interesting! Thank you so much for responding! So maybe I will leave it then. I looked at her homework and it did involve ideas that it would be useless to explain to her in Spanish since she doesn't know any Spanish yet, so it seems clear that it would have to be at least a little more English than Spanish to start.

With HSA you can have as many lessons as you want to pay for. They suggest 2x a week which is what we are doing, but ramping it up is always an option. I took 3 years of college Spanish, but don't feel able to help or supplement at all other than find videos etc. online that reinforce what they are learning in the class.

[Guest]

5 hours ago, NewIma said:

ByGrace3, that is very interesting! Thank you so much for responding! So maybe I will leave it then. I looked at her homework and it did involve ideas that it would be useless to explain to her in Spanish since she doesn't know any Spanish yet, so it seems clear that it would have to be at least a little more English than Spanish to start.

With HSA you can have as many lessons as you want to pay for. They suggest 2x a week which is what we are doing, but ramping it up is always an option. I took 3 years of college Spanish, but don't feel able to help or supplement at all other than find videos etc. online that reinforce what they are learning in the class.

FWIW, my DD has usually done 2 a week, but this summer, requested more-pretty much any time slot I could get. She is now very fluent at complaining about COVID in Spanish. Her instructor has started sending DD news articles, etc from local (to her) media, to read so they can discuss them, which I suspect is really helping DD's vocabulary, too. 

[Terabith]

I have no experience with Homeschool Spanish Academy, although man, I wish I'd known about this last year.  It would have been really good for my oldest.  In college, my German class was all immersion from day 1.  My professor was amazing, and he was great at using body language and drawing pictures, but from day one we were probably at about a 9.  It worked great for a lot of people, but I learned very quickly that I cannot learn via immersion.  I was starting from zero, and I learned that I am incapable of learning via immersion.  It took me weeks to realize that the word Deutsch on the cover of the textbook  meant German.  I had to go to office hours every single day, where he would explain the concepts to me in English.  

Weirdly, I was pretty good at learning both Latin in high school and Biblical Greek in seminary, both of which were at about a 0-1 on the immersion scale, not being spoken languages really.  

[ByGrace3]

On 8/27/2020 at 1:09 PM, dmmetler said:

FWIW, my DD has usually done 2 a week, but this summer, requested more-pretty much any time slot I could get. She is now very fluent at complaining about COVID in Spanish. Her instructor has started sending DD news articles, etc from local (to her) media, to read so they can discuss them, which I suspect is really helping DD's vocabulary, too. 

To add to the discussion -- a highly motivated student will thrive more in an immersion situation because they will leave feeling lost, but instead of getting discouraged, they will double down the study outside of those sessions to increase vocabulary learning which will in turn make those immersion sessions more effective sooner..."normal" students will feel so overwhelmed they will shut down and very little learning usually happens . . .  It has taken to Spanish 3 to have my average/above average dd get comfortable with almost 100% of that learning being in Spanish -- but while she is highly motivated in some areas of academics-- Spanish is not one of them. 😉

[Jackie]

They have never asked me this; I assume it is a newer question. When DD started about four years ago, many of the teachers simply didn’t have much English fluency. She therefore started with her teachers speaking Spanish 98% of the time. They would sometimes use English when she was struggling with a word. Maybe because that is what we have always expected from them, that is still what her teachers do - full Spanish, and we know they speak English because DD sometimes goes “um, uh, darn it, well, a plant... how am I supposed to say plant?”