Sixth International Conference on Immersion and Dual Language Education: Connecting Research and Practice Across Contexts

Paper/Best Practice Session (1 hour)

French

One-Way Second/Foreign Language Immersion

Elementary (K-5)

During the past 40 years, our immersion program has experienced challenges such as recruiting teachers, developing teachers' professional skills, finding resources, and adapting to new curricula & testing. We have addressed these issues in various ways, utilizing the immersion professional learning community to strengthen our program and help with our progress.

Immersion programs across the US endure the same challenges. We often have to address issues with staffing, professional development, curriculum changes, and differing language learner needs. In our one-way elementary school French immersion program, providing a French language-rich environment comes with its set of requirements that are not always easy to fulfill. For example, finding teachers who are fluent in French and can teach at the elementary school level in an immersion classroom has been an on-going issue for the past 40 years.  Accordingly, our history with immersion education has enabled us to establish program protocols and guidelines, create language requirements and benchmarks for our students, build community ties, and create professional standards for our immersion teachers. While the process for creating many of these guidelines and standards has been challenging, it has also been instrumental in strengthening our program and helping us to adapt to changes in curriculum and testing. With the help of the immersion community, school leadership, and parent involvement, we have been successful in overcoming roadblocks such as position reductions, teacher recruitment, continuous immersion staff development, the maintenance of progress from lower to upper grades in the use of French, and the establishment of consistent reading benchmarks for the primary grades. The immersion professional learning community of our program continues to be a vital part of our progress.