Archbishop Borders School located at historic Highlandtown is the first Catholic school in Baltimore to offer Dual Language Program.
Dual Language Program is an additive bilingual program where bilingualism, biliteracy and biculturalism are focused on the development of the learner.
In the Dual Language Program, the language majority students (in this case, English) and the language minority students (in this case, Spanish), are served in the same classroom.
Both groups of students share the same instructional strategies either in English or Spanish, to promote learning and cross-cultural cooperation.
By fifth grade, the expectations are that the English and Spanish speaker students have acquired an advanced level of proficiency in a second language and have fully developed their primary language.
Through the Dual Language Program, the students understand and appreciate the cultural differences and perform at high levels of academic knowledge.
In Middle School, the students “refine” the academic language through some content classes in Spanish or through Literature and Grammar.
By eighth grade, most of them are prepared to take the Advanced Placement test in Spanish and to obtain High School and College credits.
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