I was part of the French immersion experimental program in Montreal in seventh grade in 1969. I can personally attest to what David just said.
We left verb conjugation and “Je m'appelle Suanne. Où est la gare?”, and we moved into a cross-curricular focus in which we were just talking in French. We were talking about art and music and drama. We spoke French on the playground. It fits more closely `with what I think is happening in most schools today. We don't just teach math, numbers, history, and geography. When we talk about math, we put in problem-solving about the percentage of Canadians who live in this territory, who do this. So we have cross-curricular approaches to it.
We started that with French immersion back in the late sixties.