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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Being an immersion parent in DC requires a lot of supplementing in early grades at minimum if the goal is bilingualism. If the goal is exposure, that’s a different set of expectations. There’s also a huge incentive for schools and polite neighbors to over-inflate your kid’s language abilities. Anyone who is telling you that your kid is native level or “on grade level” for their peers “in-country” has a bridge to sell you in Baltimore. Our kids have only every been spoken to in the target language at home and have been assessed by the school as being fluent or native level - and they simply have fewer hours of reading and writing practice and less instinctive grammar constructions than their cousins. Will they be bilingual adults - that’s the goal but it’s taken thousands of hours and dollars OUTSIDE school to make that happen. And we get our kids independently evaluated annually to control for the bias in testing since we hope they will go to college outside the U.S. [/quote]

This hits at the problem, gauging and defining “fluency”.  We are in an immersion school and I realize all of the assessments and grades for language are so subjective.  And I think true fluency is not possible without someone speaking the language at home or extreme supplementing. But I also think my bar is higher that other families because I know many who don’t supplement and believe their kids to be fluent. (This is lower elementary)[/quote]

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