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.