Laguage & Alex....

I came across this article about older internationally adopted children and language. It was enlightening and discouraging at the same time.
In a nutshell it's saying that internationally adopted children are not necessarily bilingual. Which is true in our case. I would hardly call Alex bilingual. He can't remember basic words in Russian anymore. He can't read it and claims to not understand it spoken. Now, I had my doubts. Just weeks after he got here he told me he couldn't understand because "Me American boy." but lately I'm believing he's truly struggling. Then I read this:

Loss of the birth language occurs quickly after adoption even in older children. Russian children adopted at ages 4 to 8 lost expressive use of their language within 3-6 months of adoption and all functional use of the language within a year.

We have been home almost seven months. Now, I realize that Alex was ten almost eleven when we adopted him but I think socially and educationally he is more like and eight year old. The article also talks about how difficult it is for these children to learn English when they're not strong in their birth language.

Cummins studied second language learning in a large number of bilingual children.He determined that proficiency in the first language was the single best predictor of learning a second language to proficiency. It is important for parents to determine if the child had difficulty understanding or speaking the birth language. Children who spoke the birth language well should easily pick up English. In contrast, children who had difficulty speaking or understanding the birth language will likely need extra help to learn English.

Is Alex strong in his birthday language? I don't know. What was I told over and over with Alex at the orphanage? That he has a speech disorder-which has not manifest it's self in English-apparently the sound he struggled with is not a sound you need in English?-which is not an indication of language but the fact that he was labeled and told repeatedly that something was wrong with his speech makes me think he probably didn't feel comfortable talking too much. We were also told that he's a terrible student, won't study etc. His brother Ivan, has told me he reads English better than he ever read Ukraine. So I'm not thinking he was very strong in his birth language. Which makes me think back to that first day in the orphanage when he had to write a letter stating he wanted to be adopted. He was nervous and scared and had to leave the room to write his letter-which I know Oxana helped him write. I thought it was about being adopted, in hindsight I think it was the idea of writing a letter in his birth language with his limited skills. I showed him one of the beautiful penned letters he sent to me while he was in Ukraine and he told me his teacher wrote it. (And all this time I thought he had such lovely penmanship!)
So here's some more info:
Internationally adopted children are not bilingual. Prior to adoption they learn a first language, the birth language, which is prematurely stopped when the child is adopted because most adoptive parents do not speak the language. The child then begins learning a new adopted first language (or second first language). The process of prematurely halting language development in the birth language before it fully develops is known as "arrested language development"
And more info...

Although English as a Second Language Programs are better than nothing, they do not fit the internationally adopted child because the child is not truly bilingual. As stated before, bilingual children have a first language that can be used for instruction if a concept isn’t understood in English. In contrast, when internationally adopted children do not understand concepts in English, there is no other language to fall back on. A better classification for newly adopted school-age children is to consider them as having Limited English Proficiency (LEP).

That makes sense, so even if I or his teacher could speak Russian to explain, it wouldn't do any good as he can't understand it either.

The loss of the first language before the new adopted language develops leaves the internationally adopted child in a linguistic and educational limbo. Unlike the bilingual child who has a strong first language to fall back on, the internationally adopted child has no language until English develops. This lack of a functional language is not an issue for younger children who have several years to develop English before starting school. It is a significant issue for older adopted children who need to begin school right away. Because the children are not proficient in English, cognitive and linguistic development is often negatively affected.

So he's in limbo. A boy with no language. (That would make a good title for a book don't you think?) Now here's the part that left me overwhelmed:

Consider these facts. The typical 6 year old understands over 20,000 English words A 5 year old child adopted from another country would need to learn an average of 54 new words every day in order to fully catch up in language comprehension abilities by age 6. If the catch up time frame is stretched out to 2 years, the adopted 5 year old would still need to learn an average of 27 new words every day to fully catch up by age 7. However, while the adopted child has been playing catch-up, his 6 year old friends have also added an average of 5,000 words to their vocabulary. By age 7, the typical child understands 25,000 words. In order to fully catch up within a 2 year window, the adopted 5 year old needs to learn an average of 34 words per day. In summary, expecting older adopted children to develop proficient English language skills within 1 or 2 years of adoption is unrealistic.

Oh my heck! 25,000 words?? At six?? What about at eleven?? See what I mean about overwhelming? The article goes on about being an advocate for your child in the educational system and how the ESL (English as a Second Language) and having them tested for speech & language delayed programs and that I SHOULD have had him tested in his birth language before bringing him home or at the least in the first month or so of him arriving.
I just wanted to cry at the end of this article.
I guess all we can do is take it one day at a time. Alex is not learning 27-34 words a day, more like one or two and even then he doesn't always retain them. (He keeps calling floss-elastics-things like that.)
However, he is reading. In fact this weekend he's decided he's going to read Harry Potter-on his own! I still make him read out loud to me (or another fluent reader) for twenty minutes a day but he's spent a few hours this weekend reading Harry on his own. That's promising right?
He does try. He gave a talk in Primary yesterday. He forgot to tell me until Rylee reminded him Sunday morning then we quickly put something together and he did pretty well, all things considered. He told me "You best Mom." When I came up and demonstrated the talk I had hastily thrown together for him.
Anyway, I'm off the take Austin to get his braces OFF. Yes, that's right Alex got his on last week, Austin gets his off this week. Always an adventure at the Richhart home...
I'll post pictures later!