Why a Russian textbook can be difficult for a bilingual child

Why a "classroom" textbook may not work

Textbooks for the Russian school are written for children who live inside the Russian language every day. They hear it at school, read assignments, talk to friends, write dictations and constantly replenish the dictionary.

In a child abroad, Russian may be strong orally, but weaker in reading, writing, grammar or school vocabulary. Therefore, the textbook on age is sometimes too heavy and quickly causes resistance.

What exactly is overloading your child

Often the complexity is not in one topic, but in their overlap. In the task, you need to read a long instruction, understand unfamiliar words, remember the rule, write down the answer and not make a mistake in the letter.

For a bilingual child, this can be too much at once. He is tired not because he does not need Russian, but because the material is designed for a different language environment.

Why one book is not enough

Bilinguals often need different materials for different tasks: separately reading, separately speaking, separately writing, separately grammar and dictionary. One book rarely closes everything at the same time.

Sometimes it is better to take a simpler text, but leave the topic as an age. Or vice versa: explain grammar in easy words, and choose a more interesting teenage material for a conversation.

How to choose the right materials

First, it is important to understand the real level of your child: how he reads, how he understands the text, how he writes, what grammatical forms he already uses in speech and where he is lost.

A good bilingual program is usually assembled from several sources: textbooks, workbooks, books, play assignments, conversational topics, and author material. Then your child not only “passes the textbook”, but gradually closes his gaps. If the main question is not in the textbook, but in resistance to reading, start with the article. Russian Language Abroad: Should You Make Your Child Read?.