French immersion

French immersion is a form of bilingual education in which students who do not speak French as a first language will receive instruction in French. In most French-immersion schools, students will learn to speak French and learn most subjects such as history, music, geography, art, physical education and science in French.

This type of education, in which most of the students are from the majority language community but are voluntarily immersed in the minority language is atypical of most language learning around the world, and was developed in Canada as a result of political and social changes in the 1960s, notably the Official Languages Act, 1969 which led many Anglophones (primarily urban or suburban and middle class) to put their children in to French programs to ensure they could succeed in the increasing number of jobs in the federal government and private sector that required personal bilingualism.

Most school boards in Canada offer French immersion starting in grade one and others start as early as kindergarten. At the primary level, students may receive instructions in French at or near a hundred percent of their instructional day, called "total immersion", or some smaller part of the day ("partial immersion"). In the case of total immersion, English instruction is introduced in perhaps grade three (Alberta) or grade four (Ontario), and the minutes of English instruction per day will increase throughout their educational career with up to fifty percent of English/French instruction daily.

As of 2020, 12% of Canadian students (excluding in Quebec) were enrolled in a French immersion program, compared to 34% who took conventional French classes in an otherwise-English school environment. As of 2021, 483,000 students were enrolled in French immersion programs only in public elementary and secondary schools in Canada outside Quebec and Nunavut.

In many countries around the world, students are educated in two or more languages: often all students learn at least one foreign language, perhaps the language of a former colonizer (e.g. French in West Africa, English in South Asia, etc.); commonly minorities learn the majority language, often this is required by law or is simply thought of as an economic necessity; and occasionally two or more language communities in the same country learn each other's languages. The Canadian model differs from most countries in that it is a wealthy and politically influential sub-set of the majority language community that has voluntarily decided to demand that local governments offer their children an intensive immersion in the language of a minority. This would have been unthinkable before the constitutional and societal consequences of the Quiet Revolution (circa 1960s) in Quebec, and the passage of the Official Languages Act, 1969 by the federal parliament and the Official Language Act (Bill 22) in Quebec in 1974, which together mandated that tens of thousands of jobs in government and industry including high-paying professional and managerial work now required French.

The idea of using immersion as a language-learning tool is not a new one globally. However, it needed influential English-Canadian champions who were able to convince others both that French was worth learning and that immersion was the correct method before it spread in Canada.

The University of Western Ontario began offering a language home-stay program for young adults in Trois-Pistoles 1933, for example, because of the advocacy of Western's president, Dr. William Sherwood Fox, who had learned French by traveling in Quebec in 1900.

The "founding mothers" of elementary school French immersion in Canada are generally cited as Olga Melikoff, Valerie Neale, and Murielle Parkes from Saint-Lambert, Quebec, three English-speaking housewives who wanted to see their children learn French to a higher standard than was usually achieved in the English schools in Quebec at the time. Unable to convince the school authorities, they hired a teacher and ran their own kindergarten on the principals of early immersion. The promising results of the experiment in Saint-Lambert were studied and endorsed by researchers at McGill University, Wallace E. Lambert and Wilder Penfield. After this endorsement, the school board adopted the program and it was quickly copied by other boards across Canada. As the number of French immersion schools grew, larger academic studies showed the students had very good, though not native-level French, and had no major delay in English.