The Daily Tar Heel – Rachel Herzog
“On a Wednesday morning, 17 students in Pedro Ortiz’s fourth-grade class sit in a circle on a rug displaying a world map, reading from composition notebooks. They’re talking about spaceships. A girl raises her hand to contribute, then pauses, trying to think of how to say “taking off” in Spanish. This scene is commonplace at Carrboro Elementary School, where students can spend half the day learning about everything from rockets to writing skills completely in Spanish…Experiences like this have proved beneficial for young students. In March, VIF International Education, a Chapel Hill-based nonprofit that develops global education programs, released results from an evaluation by UNC’s Education Policy Initiative at Carolina. The study found that students participating in VIF’s foreign language immersion program scored higher on state End-of-Grade tests than students not in the program, regardless of economic status, English proficiency or ethnicity.”(more)