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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]We're raising our children bilingual in a language not taught in a DC immersion program.

One of us speaks no English to the kids, and we send them to a heritage language school on weekends during the school year as well as summer camp abroad (not a camp for expats, one for ordinary local children who speak little English).  We don't allow them to watch TV in English (they watch DVDs in the target language).  My in-laws, whose English isn't the best are very involved, and we host au pairs who speak the target language year after year.  Our kids don't need English to get through the day.  They attend a high-performing DCPS elementary school, where they score high in English.

Few of the parents we know who choose language immersion in DC seem very serious about the exercise to us.  The schools don't seem terribly serious about it either - some lack target-language speaking admins and fully bilingual children, policies and practices many parents in the school communities defend to the hilt.

I mention all this because I've become skeptical about how language immersion programs work in this city.  I'd be surprised if most of these kids speak the target language well as adults.  Things are different in the burbs and other US cities.

If I couldn't support target language learning at home consistently, I'd pass on having my kids learn a second (or 3rd) language until the upper elementary grades, at the earliest.  Little kids learn languages easily, and all but forget them just as easily if they aren't reinforced into the teen years.

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You know what though, it's not just the effort of the families you see, it's also their lack of another language.

We are a dual language family with kid in a school that offers immersion in the language. Plus, we do all the stuff you mention above. Without all of this at-home support, I wouldn't have much faith either. I see a lot of dual-gringo couples sending kids to bilingual schools and I think, this is very ambitious, unless you are going to really dive in, like the Suzuki method for music, and learn the language alongside your kid. Especially so for chinese (because I find that a surprising number of well-educated DC residents have at least basic spanish, but almost no-one speaks any chinese unless it is heritage).

The problem is that despite having sizable immigrant populations, the US only has English as the official language, and so the "immersion" public schools are never actually immersion. True immersion public schools would raise a lot of political protest in this country, screams of immigrants taking over, especially if they were Spanish-only schools. So the public immersion schools are always half-English which, when combined with living in the US and having English-only parents, is too much English for most kids to be able to become fluent in the target. In other countries with multiple official languages, you can send your kids to true immersion schools where only the target language is spoken. These are much more realistic chances for kids to learn a language that is not spoken by either parent, IMO.  
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