The honest answer from nearly 10 years of preschool ESL classrooms — it's usually not your child.
Because the timeline was never realistic. A child raised entirely in English still takes years to speak at a native level — and your child is doing something harder: learning two languages at once. When your child gets an hour and a half of English twice a week, you can't expect the same result as a child who has spent their whole life inside the language. That's not your child falling behind; that's arithmetic. What those hours can do is build the correct baseline — phonics, core vocabulary, simple patterns — that makes everything after easier.
It's enough to build a foundation, and not enough for fluency — and any program that promises otherwise is overselling. As a teacher, my job in those hours is to create a small piece of what native children get all day from their family: hearing the language wrapped around real life. Short, consistent, well-structured lessons beat long cramming sessions at this age, but keep your expectations tied to what the hours actually are.
If your child doesn't understand the concept in their own language yet, then yes — and this is the biggest problem I've seen in nine years. Schools and centers teach children things in English that they don't even understand in their native language. A three-year-old doing grammar drills isn't learning grammar; they're bored, they stop listening, and the parents get angry that the child can't write. The fix is teaching in parallel with life: cover in English the same things your child is learning at that age in their own language, not concepts years ahead of them.
Because most programs teach labeling — "it's a ball, it's a cup, it's red" — and stop there. Isolated words don't connect to anything. What you want is for your child to describe the world: "a dog is running," "a family is having a picnic." That's nouns, verbs, and adjectives working together, which is exactly how native children absorb language from their families. If your child's program never moves past flashcard labels into simple scenes and sentences, single words are all it will ever produce.
Very possible, and more common than parents think. I've been required to teach lessons that were simply too hard for the class — the children don't understand, so they get bored, stop listening, play with their fingers. A bored child in a too-hard lesson isn't misbehaving and isn't slow; the material is wrong for their age. Ask the school what the children are expected to already know, and compare it with what your child knows in their own language. If the English class is ahead of their native-language understanding, that's the problem.
Three things, in my experience. First, realistic goals: a baseline of phonics, vocabulary and simple patterns — not native fluency in a semester. Second, parallel to life: teaching in English what your child is already learning about the world at that age. Third, whole scenes instead of isolated labels, so words connect — a park, a farm, a family — the way children actually experience the world. Not all children are the same, and not all will move at the same speed, but with the right baseline every child can build on it.
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