My eldest did French immersion for a number of years, starting at 4. I agree that immersion can be a great option for a HG+ kid who will be underchallenged when studying at grade level in his native language.
One concern I have about the program you described is that it's 100% Spanish for two years. DS's school was 80% French/20% English for the first two years (more English later). The English component was mostly reading and spelling (but they had to do math, too). I'm not sure I'd be too happy about zero instruction in English in an English-speaking country. Could you work with him at home?
A point in Bostonian's article reflects our experience, which is that DS definitely had a smaller English vocabulary when he stepped into a full-time English-speaking school. But he is HG or more, and it wasn't a big deal. He caught up without any problems.
“Bilingualism carries a cost, and the cost is rapid access to words,” Ms. Bialystok said. In other words, children have to work harder to access the right word in the right language, which can slow them down — by milliseconds, but slower nonetheless.
This may be true in general (and often more than milliseconds), but it may not be true for everyone. I've noticed a difference in the way my DH and I operate when moving from one language to another. He's bilingual and he does hesitate at times when he's translating a story from German. I don't, even though he's way, way better than I am at German. I describe him as having a box in his mind for English and a box for German, whereas I have thousands of boxes for different words. He has to root around a big box of English to find, say
Waage (scales). I don't, because
Waage and scales are sitting right next to each other in the same mental box. Okay, this is really oversimplified, but you get the idea. The only occasions where I hesitate are when a term is idiomatic and doesn't have an equivalent in the other language.
George P. Davison, head of school at Grace Church School, a competitive downtown school, said that bilingualism tended to suppress verbal and reading comprehension test scores by 20 to 30 percent for children younger than 12. “If anything, it can have a negative effect on admissions,” he said.'
That is deeply pathetic.
