| I am an early ES parent considering lottery for immersion next year for a student already fairly fluent with the target language. In doing research to see where the students have the potential to end up at the end of it all, I noticed some middle schools now have what appears to be a combined "Language Immersion 1-2" in 7th grade, and then "Language immersion 3" for 8th grade, rather than Language Immersion 1 in 7th grade and Language Immersion 2 in 8th grade, Language 3 in 9th grade and so on that has previously been the course progression. How does this change the course progression? Would they now take Spanish 4 in 9th grade, then one of the Heritage Speakers classes in 10th grade before moving to AP Lit/Lang in 11th and 12th grade? |
AP Lit/Lang is English only. It isn’t part of foreign language education. |
Which middle schools are these? |
| Interesting. The school where I teach still puts kids from Spanish immersion elementaries into Spanish 1 (vs 1a for non immersion kids) in 7th grade. What school are you looking at? |
| My understanding is that all schools in FCPS put immersion students going from elementary into middle school into a streamlined two year sequence that covers three years of high school credits, resulting in them going to high school ready for Japanese/French/Spanish 4. This is a relatively recent change; beforehand they took the equivalent of Language Year1 in 7th and Language Year2 in 8th. |
Well this would make no sense at an IB school. My immersion kid had no choice but to take Spanish 4 at Robinson even though it was a total waste, because they can only take the IB exam as a senior. So if they were to take 4 as a freshman, they would have no language to take in 10th. |
DS is in Japanese Immersion. He will have the opportunity to take Japanese as a high school class in MS. That would be Japanese 1 and 2. He will need Japanese 3 and 4 at HS. No one has told us that the kids in the JI program end up in Japanese 4 as Freshmen, if that is happening it is a huge change in the program. Also, we have been told that the kids who are not able to handle the HS level Japanese in MS are guided to the beginning Japanese classes at the MS level and will end up starting HS having completed Japanese 1 instead of Japanese 2. The anecdotal evidence from our ES is that about 1/3 of the kids end up moving into the regular MS Japanese program. I am not sure how South Lakes handles the kids from JI taking the IB exam, if they make the kids wait until their Senior year or not. I do know neighborhood kids who were in JI who talked about taking some Japanese DE classes in their Junior and Senior year but they may not have been attempting the IB diploma. |
Uh, yes, there is AP Spanish Language and Culture or AP Spanish Literature and Culture. |