WHAT IS DUAL LANGUAGE IMMERSION?

Dual Language Immersion is a general education program designed to help students become biliterate and culturally competent in a global community.

The Utah State Dual Language Immersion Elementary Model follows a 50:50 model design where the instructional day in grades K-6 is divided between two high-quality classrooms, each for fifty percent of the instructional time. In this fifty-fifty model, students spend half of their school day in the immersion language and the other half-day in English. All state-sponsored programs are required to use two teachers, one who instructs exclusively in the immersion language for half of the day and a second teacher who teaches exclusively in English the other half of the day. In the elementary school it is a full-day comprehensive program.

 
The Utah Dual Language Immersion Program consists of both one-way and two-way programs:

One-way Immersion programs serve one group:

This program serves a student population comprised of a predominant majority of native English language speakers with limited to no proficiency in the L2 (e.g. Chinese, French, German, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish, etc.).

Two-way Immersion programs serve two groups:

This program serves English speakers and L2 speakers. A 1:1 ratio is the ideal ratio to be maintained for these two language groups, but a minimum requirement is a 2:1 ratio, or at least one-third of students being native speakers of the L2. Two-way Immersion programs are sometimes called two-way bilingual or Dual Language.

The elementary program is cohesively articulated into the middle and high school levels, providing students with a K-12th grade immersion experience that already has connections to a university language pathway through the high school Bridge program.