The Foreign Service Journal - December 2017

72 DECEMBER 2017 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL EDUCATION SUPPLEMENT be motivated to keep up an acquired language once they move to a new country with a different language. “The major challenge for us is knowing we’re going to move every two or three years. Our youngest is cur- rently in a German/Spanish nursery, but we only speak English at home,” says Molly McHarg, raising three children between 3 and 10. “We don’t have the resources to main- tain two additional languages forever, but we’re hoping maybe she can continue with one at the next post. We figure the longer she has exposure to at least one, the better off she will be.” Joanna Parys, a Foreign Service parent with a background in language educa- tion, suggests that parents consider the availability and resources of a minority language or foreign school system to ensure consistency from post to post. Leah Moorefield Evans, a Foreign Service mother of four, points out that the French school system can be a good option for FS families, because there are French schools in 130 countries. “Transitions are rel- atively seamless,” Evans says, because “each grade teaches the same concepts, teachers are trained in the same way and the schools send all the records—you just leave school A and show up in school B.” What Do the Experts Say? Raising children in more than one language is seldom straightforward and can leave parents second-guessing their approach. We turned to Nancy Rhodes, a world language education consultant at the Center for Applied Linguistics, and Marjorie Myers, Ed.D., principal of the Parents whose children spend significant time away from English-speaking schools and countries may worry about their child’s English proficiency.