Academic Achievement through Japanese, Spanish, or French: The First Two Years of Partial Immersion

Abstract

a foreign or second language through academic content across the curriculum have generally received rave reviews from researchers, parents, and educators involved in implementing and evaluating these programs. As this school innovation has grown in the United States, it is being used as one of many possible models for school reform. The overall goal of immersion is to prepare students for life in an increasingly interdependent world that is ethnically and linguistically diverse. This article presents the evaluation results from the first two years of a new immersion program begun in the Fall of 1989 in Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS), Fairfax, Virginia. Three issues make this study unusual. First, the large size of the program, with 1007 immersion students in eight schools as of October 1991, provides a large enough sample to report interesting results. Only five other US immersion programs are of comparable size or larger (2). Second, the use of an Asian language, Japanese, as one of the languages of instruction in three of the immersion schools is an innovation