Dual language immersion program allowing students to receive college credit to be implemented in August 2016

By Ashley Springer

A new program that will allow high school students who have passed the advanced placement Spanish test the opportunity to take 3000-level college courses was presented Wednesday evening at Utah State University. The Dual Language Immersion Bridge Project, which will be put into place in August of 2016, was described in a presentation by USU graduate student Chemaris Ethington at the fifth annual Lackstrom Linguistics Symposium.

“The ideal is they take the AP test when they are in the ninth grade if they are in the dual language immersion program,” Ethington said. “But anyone that has taken the AP test and passed it, they can take the classes.”

The program is for students in grades 10 through 12.

“By the time that they finish high school they can be two to three courses shy of a minor in that target language,” Ethington said.

Students can take up to nine credits of upper division college courses. The classes taught will cover pop culture, Spanish in the global world, and Spanish surveys of the professions. Spanish will be the first program implemented in the Bridge Project, followed by Chinese and French.

Davis and Granite school districts will be the first to receive this program according to Maria Luisa Spicer-Escalante, an associate professor at Utah State University who also works with the Utah State Office of Education.

“They have identified at least two high schools,” Spicer-Escalante said, “but they don’t know how many students will make it to this level.”

Utah is the only state in the United States with this program.

“We are really the cutting edge in dual language immersion,” said Spicer-Escalante on Utah’s progress in dual language immersion education. “Everybody’s looking at what Utah is doing.”

Deans and other representatives from seven higher level institutions of Utah got together to discuss and put this program into place.

“We started the conversations a year ago,” Spicer-Escalante said. “To discuss the needs, the possibilities and to start exploring what would be the best way to deliver the best education for these students who will come with a very high level of proficiency.”

The program will not come into effect in Cache Valley for another six years, according to Spicer-Escalante, as students in the dual language immersion programs in the valley are in the third grade.

“We have a gap of six years to prepare our teachers to face the challenges and the demands and the opportunities that this will bring into the classroom,” Spicer-Escalante said.

Ali Adair, a graduate student at USU and a teacher at Willow Valley Middle School, was excited about the opportunity the program will give heritage speakers — students who speak both Spanish and English.

“A lot of them crave literacy and kind of validity in Spanish and so with this project it will not only give the DLI students… the opportunity to take the AP test and then to take the 3000 level courses, but it will also give the heritage speakers who already speak the language really well… those same opportunities,” Adair said. “And a lot of these kids might not be headed to college and so this might be like a spring board from which they jump into the academic world.”