About Immersion Programs

The goals of  PGCPS Immersion Programs are for students to become Bilingual, Biliterate, and Multicultural.  In PGCPS, we have 12 Immersion schools with 6 models of immersion education throughout the county.Our French Immersion program was started in 1985, and our Chinese and Spanish Immersion programs were started in 2014.  Many of our schools are internationally recognized by the governments of France and Spain as high quality bilingual education programs.

Immersion is a rigorous academic program where students learn Math, Science, Social Studies, and Immersion Language Arts in Chinese, French, or Spanish K-8.  In high school, Immersion students continue studying high levels of language proficiency in their Immersion language.

In our immersion schools, students have the same opportunities to participate in before and after school activities such as Music, STEM, and sports teams/clubs as they would in a boundary school.  Our schools are also designated as TAG (Talented and Gifted) in the Regular Classroom schools.

Immersion programs enable students to achieve proficiency in a target language while simultaneously mastering subject content from various disciplines. In these programs, language is not treated as a separate subject but serves as the medium through which core instruction is provided.

Students in PGCPS Immersion programs develop high levels of proficiency, which they put to use during local, overnight, and international field trips. Students take international and domestic proficiency tests such as the DELF, DELE, CCCC, TOCFL, and STAMP throughout their educational experiences in PGCPS with the ultimate objective of earning the Maryland State Seal of Biliteracy. For some students, this is a great opportunity to maintain their home language while building language and literacy in a second language.

Still not sure if Immersion Programs are right for your child?

In order to “survive” in the classroom and learn new material, your child learns to use context as well as the visuals and gestures they experience to make meaning of what they are hearing in the classroom.

Students in PGCPS Immersion Programs follow the same curriculum as their peers, use the same resources (when available) as their peers, take the same internal and standardized assessments as their peers, but they become proficient in another language while doing so.

Research shows that “Multilingual learners bring a wealth of resources and perspectives to their schools and classrooms that can strengthen learning for all students. They bring linguistic and cultural knowledge from experiences in their families and communities, home languages, variation in discourse practices, and, in some cases, with schooling in other countries that affords opportunities for sharing new ideas and new ways of thinking.”

Institute of Education Sciences. (2024). An asset-based approach to multilingual learner terminology. U.S. Department of Education.https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/rel/Products/Region/west/Resource/107986 

A 2017 study showed that PGCPS French Immersion students were more college and career-ready than their peers.

Research has shown that students that participate in Immersion Programs perform as well as, or better than, their peers on standardized tests.

Immersion Models in PGCPS