Multi-lingual as early as age five, students at the Foreign Language Immersion and Cultur-al Studies School (FLICS) are uniquely pre-pared to compete for scholarships and job opportunities in the U.S. according to Stark Brooks, one of the nation’s leading executive search firms which tracks global job growth.As global companies continue to flourish, they demand the kind of multilingual skills FLICS students possess. From French, Span-ish, Japanese and Chinese, FLICS students are uniquely suited to say “yes” to growth op-portunities – and jobs — in many languages – Oui? ¡Sí? Hai? Shì de . – Editor
PriceThis year, Kaori Ohgata’s fourth grade class will study their words of the week: worm, hello, sticky rice snack, and eye. These words are not just any typical vocabulary words, and the students of the Foreign Language Im-mersion and Cultural Studies School (FLICS) won’t be using the American alphabet, No. 2 pencils or lined paper to practice them.
Instead students will deftly stretch out red clay and weave the strands into shapes that create lines of Japanese script on the blank paper in front of them. “Since the Japa-nese use a complete-ly different writing system, this method provides a more physical way to learn, and kids like that,” says Ohgata, a Japanese language teacher at FLICS. In this style of teaching, called kinesthet-ic learning, teachers create lessons in which students are engaged in physical activity to aid learning, rather than just listening to a teacher or doing work from a textbook.
The Japanese class is just one of the many unique offerings at FLICS, located adjacent to the Renaissance High School campus in north-west Detroit. FLICS, which houses grades K-8, is one of the only public immersion programs in the state, offering dual-language, partial im-mersion programs in French, Spanish, Japa-nese, or Chinese. The FLICS language program now also offers a seamless K-12 language program by creating direct pathways to advanced language cours-es at the high school, making the FLICS lan-guage program one of the only K-12 language programs in the country, said Principal Todd Losié.
“After 8th grade at FLICS, students have the potential to continue language study at their individual proficiency levels in high school and to continue that in college at the university level. So students can have a 13-year secondary language continuum in one of the foreign languages, along with a seamless K-16 language continuum, which make us very unique,” Losié said. In addition to providing a rigorous tradition-al academic curriculum, the FLICS K-8 program immerses its students in one of the four lan-guages beginning in kindergarten.
That means students as young as 5 begin conversing with their teachers in another language every day in their traditional classes. Most are taught in, or interwoven with, a foreign language. The Foreign Language Immersion and Cultural Studies School (FLICS) is located at 6501 West Outer Drive, Detroit 48235. For additional information call 313.651.2400
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