There's no academic reason not to do it. —Jo Carmiol

















To that end, both schools have been equipped with high-tech language labs, where students use headsets to talk with each other and record spoken assignments that teachers can review and evaluate. The labs are a pilot program for the district, which officials hope to continue incorporating into immersion courses in the future.

Carmiol said without the technology, it would take an entire class period to speak one on one with the students and it would require the rest of the class to simply wait their turn. By using the lab's headset system, she said, students spend 60 percent to 70 percent of the class period speaking and Carmiol is able to listen in on their conversations to make sure they stay on task.

"It makes it more manageable to have them speak more," she said.

The students have also noticed the difference. Keith Brough, one of Carmiol's students, said the language lab uses a lot more discussion between students than his elementary immersion courses.

"We usually just listened to the teacher," he said. "Here we can use the headphones and talk to people across the room."

Davis' dual-immersion program began in 2005 and has seen incredible growth. In its first year, the program consisted of 114 Spanish students at two elementary schools, Eagle Bay and Sand Springs. Today, three languages are taught to a total of 2,408 students across nine elementary schools that will eventually feed into six high schools. At each participating elementary school, Flint said, there is a "huge" waiting list to enter the program. 

Flint said that from the earliest stages of the program, parents have been excited about having their children participate.

"I thought we would have to do more selling," she said. "In Davis County, our parents get it."

Dual-immersion courses garnered some controversy when they first began appearing in the U.S. Many parents felt there was insufficient evidence of their effect and were unconvinced of the programs' successes. But in time, the alternative teaching technique has grown in popularity nationwide and in Utah with more schools offering a growing list of languages.


Gregg Roberts, world language specialist for the office of education, said Utah is considered by many as a leader in immersion education in the U.S. Utah has the most immersion language programs in the country, according to the most recent data from the Center for Applied Linguistics, which does not include the 20 programs added this year. 

Proponents of immersion courses have long pointed to research that suggests children are better able to pick up a new language than adults. Flint also said that the courses are especially effective at attaining fluency because students use the language to learn other subjects, as opposed to merely studying the language itself.

In Carmiol's social studies class, students are not learning Spanish but are learning the standard seventh-grade curriculum, which includes Utah history, geography and science.

"We're talking about plateaus, we're taking about water cycles, but we're doing it in Spanish," Carmiol said.

The program has also resulted in academic success. Flint said Davis School District conducted extensive research on the pros and cons of dual immersion before offering the program. Schools around the nation had observed that immersion students typically lag behind their peers in third grade, catch back up in fifth grade and excel in eighth grade and beyond, she said. But that didn't happen in Davis.

"Our students have never lagged behind," Flint said. "They have always tested at or above their peer groups."

Carmiol said she's only known her students for three days and couldn't comment on their academic prowess. But she said there's no indication that the group requires any remedial or decelerated teaching.

"They are all on grade level," she said. "They're as good, if not better, than the students who didn't go through the program."

It was difficult in the beginning to attend class in a foreign language, but now that Bauco is proficient, she enjoys the program. She said she and most of her classmates began feeling truly comfortable with the language in the third grade or the beginning of fourth.

Students who stick with the program from elementary to high school are only one or two classes away from a foreign language minor when they enter college, according to Carmiol.

"There's no academic reason not to do it," she said.