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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]What I have heard, and what I observe with my kid and my kids' classmates at a dual language elementary, is that if you don't speak the target language at home, you have very little hope for long-term native fluency in the target language.  We have had Spanish-speaking nannies and au pairs and my kids speak passable Spanish and (having started at the school last year) are catching up to their grade level, but they are by no means fluent.  I lived in other and had fully bilingual friends with fully bilingual kids, and I'd hear their kids chattering back & forth in both English and the target language, shifting comfortably from one to another.  I NEVER hear this from the English-dominant kids at our elementary school.  The langua franca (sp?) on the playground is English, even amongst those who have been there since PS.

Am I bothered by this?  Not really.  My kids are well above their grade levels in English and Math, and I think they will come out of the elementary school fairly fluent in Spanish.  The dual language program offers a good challenge that keeps their mind busy, and I don't see their other skills suffering.  Will they be fully bilingual?  I doubt it.  Will they survive in a Spanish only country and further develop their language skills?  Absolutely.

But, IMHO, true bilingualism (sp?) starts at home with immersion at home.  It is then reinforced in a school setting.  My friend's daughter is very verbally fluent in French, and they started at Stokes last year.  Since she was in an English-only school to start with, her French reading and writing are behind but she's catching up.  Both pieces of the puzzle need to be there, and it takes a lot of effort.  I honestly don't think it's possible to achieve full bilingualism unless someone in the household speaks it exclusively[/quote]

This is really interesting!  My experience already completely and totally disagrees or is different from your experience.  I only have one kid, in 1st grade at YY.  To say that our household does not support him in learning Mandarin is a huge understatement! :)  We have no Mandarin experience in the home and no cultural connection to China.  That said, I had 2 recent interesting experiences that come to mind that show me that I disagree completely with you on the possibility of true bilingualism:

1. My DS was at a friend's house for a playdate recently.  The mom of the friend he was visiting sent me video she taped from the hallway because she was so amused of their play, which was some combo of legos/transformers/bey blades, and they didn't see her recording the audio, which was of them playing their games and acting out their characters in Mandarin!  This host kid has no prior Mandarin, parents speak none, and neither of our households have any extra supports (like nannies or summer camp in China, and definitely no relatives who speak it).  And yet, of their own accord, on their own, they were playing for quite awhile and speaking only in Mandarin, although the mom did pass by other times and they'd be going back and forth, but not in a sentence, it would be a period of Mandarin, then a period of English, then back to Mandarin, etc, all on their own.  Were they fluent?  Of course not.  But they were playing and conversing and understanding each other, at 6/7 yrs old, in Mandarin, on their own with no prompting.

2. We were at a playground playdate recently and an older YY sibling (5th grade at YY) was talking to a native Chinese parent of another YY student.  The mom started talking to the older child in Mandarin, and they went back and forth for awhile, and when the child walked away the parent said to the other parents "Wow, his Mandarin is amazing!  Vocabulary, tones, [some other descriptors I can't remember] are all excellent!"  Next time I saw that older kid's Dad I asked what supports they've used over the years at YY.  NONE!  No nannies, no tutors, no summer camp, and again this is a house with no Mandarin language supports or influences at all, no one understands Mandarin in that home.

I don't see any reason in the world why, if my kid and these other similar kids continue with their exploration of Mandarin through 12th grade, why they wouldn't achieve actual bilingualism.  There's no question that the immersion year of Mandarin (now 2 immersion years if someone gets their kid in in PS3) is key, but I'm pretty sure the 5th grader didn't have any immersion year, so however good his Mandarin is in 5th grade, someone starting immersion in PS or PK will be even better.

I'm not a linguistics expert, so maybe I'm wrong, but since some of your examples of why you don't think it's possible have been shown to me to be very possible (elementary school kids as young as 6 or 7 playing and conversing in Mandarin on their own) and students with excellent language skills in a complex language that several native speakers compliment them on or attest to as being excellent... I have no reason to think that with follow through through 12th grade and whatever immersion opportunities Yu Ying offers (currently the 5th grade trip to China where they students go to a local school in a smaller town and do home-stays with local families), that my child won't be fluent by 12th grade graduation.[/quote]

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