BALTIMORE INTERNATIONAL ACADEMY

As the way to accomplish our primary goal (that students will demonstrate progress toward greater academic achievement), for the full immersion classes, the BIA will use the existing materials, aligned with the VSC, that have been successfully used for many years in the Prince George’s County Public Schools French Immersion Programs.

Immersion programs must by necessity start at school entry (in pre-school, kindergarten or grade 1).  Beyond the early grades, the gap in knowledge of the immersion language is too great for students to be able to integrate into the program if they have no comparable knowledge of the language.  Thus, in the first year, only the kindergarten and grade 1 classes will be full immersion classes.

Grades 2 to 8 will use the Rosetta Stone Program, in French only.  The Rosetta Stone Program is an interactive multi-media language-learning set of software programs to replicate the environment in which learners naturally acquire new language.  It provides individualized learning to students of differing abilities, and is widely used in English as a Second Language teaching because, with no translation, students’ successes do not depend on literacy in their native languages.

Rosetta Stone programs have been successfully used by government agencies and corporations—including Deutsche Telekom, IBM, and Lockheed Martin—and by thousands of schools and universities around the world.

Further details about the Rosetta Stone Program are at http://www.rosettastone.com/en