Batesville Community School Corporation began Indiana’s first Chinese Dual Language Immersion (DLI) Program during the 2016-17 school year. The DLI program began with kindergarten students in 2016 and expands to the succeeding grade level each year.
What is a Dual Language Immersion program?
In a Dual Language Immersion program, students are taught Indiana standards in two languages, both their native language (English) and the target language (Chinese). Students learn the same standards-based curriculum in all content areas that non-immersion students follow in any other classroom.
Batesville Community School Corporation will continue with a full immersion model with increased Mandarin Literacy for Kindergarten students during the 2025-2026 school year. Second grade will transition to the full immersion model during the 2025-2026 school year finalizing the full transition K-2 at Batesville Primary School from a 50/50 model to a full immersion model with increased Mandarin Literacy. In this model, students have one Mandarin Chinese teacher who is responsible for the delivery of all instruction within all content areas. In 3rd grade and above, models adjust slightly to meet the needs of the students in the DLI program.
Why begin a second language in kindergarten?
Kindergarten aged students are developmentally ready to learn languages. A child has twice as many synapses (connections) in the brain as an adult. Young students must use these connections or lose them. There is a window of opportunity in which a child learns languages easily. After this period, the brain becomes slowly less receptive. With the typical model of waiting until students are in middle school or high school to learn a second language, it is more difficult to acquire a foreign language. In a Dual Language Immersion program, students not only learn to speak Chinese, but they will be reading and writing in a second language.