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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My family is moving to Arlington next year and am curious about bilingual education.  My DD is 2 and am pregnant as well.  What do people who live in the area do if they would like for their kids to learn two languages but are only English speakers at home?  I'd like my kids to be fluent in Spanish and from my experience just learning it in middle school is not enough to foster fluency.  Are there any schools (preferably public) that are bilingual? [/quote]

I'm a huge supporter of bilingual education and it definitely has benefits, but it's important to be realistic too. Even a dual immersion school isn't going to be enough to foster fluency, and then it's a big commitment to maintain that fluency once they're in middle and high school.

Here's a snippet from one of the leading organizations on bilingual education in the US (Google CARLA, or for a more local resource the one in DC is CAL):

[i]Finally, outcome-oriented research reveals that immersion students, especially those who begin the program as native English speakers, don't quite achieve native-like levels of speaking and writing skills. Studies consistently find that English-speaking immersion students' oral language lacks grammatical accuracy, lexical specificity, native pronunciation, and is less complex and sociolinguistically appropriate when compared with the language native speakers of the second language produce.[xxxix] Further, students' use of the immersion language appears to become increasingly anglicized over time,[xl] and can be marked by a more formal academic discourse style.[xli] Even in high-performing immersion programs, advancing students' second language proficiency beyond the intermediate levels remains a much sought after end goal. [/i]

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