D.L.I. My Bilingual School Life

Have you ever heard of Dual Language Immersion (DLI) programs? There are elementary school students in the United States that are learning to think, read, write and communicate naturally in two languages every day! Join Jamie on her first day as a fourth-grader at a DLI school to find out what happens! At this school, Jamie will have two teachers, one who teaches in English and one who teaches in Mandarin. Even though Jamie goes to Chinese school on the weekends and speaks Mandarin to her grandparents whenever they visit, she has never imagined that she would be speaking in Mandarin every day. Could she understand everything at this new school? Is her Mandarin good enough?

Throughout her first day, Jamie finds that there are certain things that are similar to her old school, and there are certain things that are different. Thankfully, with the help of her new DLI classmates, Jamie was able to assimilate into this new program better than she had imagined.