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.
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