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SALT LAKE CITY -- Utah soon could have up to 30,000 students enrolled in a foreign language immersion program. Officials have big goals and they are getting a lot of attention.
Other states and even other countries are contacting and visiting Utah to look at the dual-language immersion program. Students are taught half the day with one teacher exclusively in French, Spanish or Chinese, and the other half of the day with another teacher in English.
"This is not about replacing English. English is still taught 50 percent of the day. These students will perform on par with their monolingual peers in all academic subjects in English," says Gregg Roberts, the world language specialist for the Utah State Office of Education.
In the fall there will be 14 more programs, making a total of 51 programs and 7,000 students enrolled. Roberts says they hope to make that 100 programs and 30,000 students by 2014.
"We are a small state in Utah. We really want to be economically competitive, and for the national security of our country, we must educate students with a 21st century education. This means they need to be multi-lingual and multi-cultural," he says.
Roberts says the dual-language immersion programs start as early as kindergarten. He says it's all about providing parents a choice in education.
Utah was the first state to develop a state-sponsored, standardized immersion curriculum. The Deseret News reports in June, representatives from Arizona, California, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland and North Carolina and South Carolina dropped in to take a peek at the state's program.
E-mail: mrichards@ksl.com
