What's Immersion Education?
Past Problems
Students who have passed four years of high school French have gone to Paris and been unable to talk to people on the street because they have not learned enough French through the traditional methods of foreign language teaching. This inability of students to speak the language that they were taught was somewhat understandable when language teachers focused on teaching grammar and having students do translations. However, when tape recorders became common and students spent hours in language labs listening to taped conversations with the audiolingual approach in the 1960s, students were still often able to carry on only dialogs they had memorized.
In the 1970s various communicative methods were introduced to better effect. However, in moving from an extreme emphasis on grammar to no emphasis on grammar so that students could learn to carry on a conversation, students "fossilized" various pronunciation and grammar errors because they did not receive correction. They could now talk to native speakers of their new language, but their speech was full of errors.
The Benefits of Immersion
Learning a language takes times and the more time students are exposed to comprehensible input in the language they are learning the better they will do. Modern immersion approaches to teaching second languages maximize the time students get to practice the language they are learning without being slowed down by having to translate what they hear and speak. The central characteristic of immersion is the teaching of language, content, and culture in combination without the use of the students' first language. Since students must talk about something when they are learning a language, why not talk about the things that are commonly taught in school so that the students are not held back academically as they learn their new language.
Students are taught a second language they initially don't understand through the use of a variety of context clues provided by the teacher, including gestures, visual aides, and objects. Learning a second language by any method takes long term commitment. Research indicates that it takes six to seven years of good instruction for students to know a new language well enough to take classes in that language without the special support of second language teaching methods.
Three hundred thousand students are in immersion classrooms today in the United States. Test scores show that immersion students learn the same academic content as students in English-Only classrooms along with a second language. Immersion students as they proceed together through the grades also develop a strong sense of camaraderie and often form a "values community" that reflects the positive aspects of the language and culture that they are learning.
Different Types of Immersion Programs
Immersion language teachers provide ideally at least a half-day partial immersion for students in the language they are targeted to learn and often students receive full-day or total immersion in the first two or three years. The less students are likely to be exposed to their new language outside of school the more they need to experience that language in school. The comparative dominance of languages in the larger community of the two languages is also a factor. The lesser the use of a language in the broader community the more it needs to be supported in the home and school. In fact, languages that are omnipresent in the community such as English will in all likelihood be learned even if they receive minimal support in school. For example in Hawaiian immersion schools, English is only taught for an hour a day from fifth grade on up.
In partial immersion programs, the students can alternate languages from one day to the next or one week to the next. If students do one language in the morning and the other in the afternoon, it is important either to put the language the students are learning in the morning or to alternate the languages between morning and afternoon because students tend to be more alert and learn better in the morning. Teachers need to be careful to not repeat lessons in two languages in such a way as their students ignore the lesson in their weaker language because they know they will hear the same lesson in the language they already know.
Early immersion programs are most common where students start learning a second language in preschool, kindergarten or first grade, often starting with total immersion. However there are also successful programs, especially in Canada, that are late immersion, and begin at the middle or high school levels.
Math and science are typical content subjects taught through immersion in the primary grades as they are best taught through the use of manipulatives and hands-on activities. In higher grades there is often less time spent in second language immersion and the subject taught is often social studies because of the difficulty of obtaining appropriate textbooks for higher level subjects.
Indigenous immersion and foreign language immersion differ in terms of the commitment to culturally transforming the student. Mother tongue indigenous immersion seeks to transmit the children's indigenous culture while second or foreign language immersion seeks to create an understanding and appreciation of the culture of the new language. The Maori and Hawaiian indigenous programs are well developed. The Maori began with total immersion preschools, their kohanga reo, in 1982. Under pressure from parents who wanted their children's Maori education continued in the public schools, the New Zealand government established Maori immersion schools. Three Maori immersion classes have graduated from high school, and there are now five total-immersion high schools. Timoti Karetu, now the Maori language commissioner helped move his university to offer Maori immersion teacher training. Immersion programs are almost always voluntary and require parent involvement. In the Hawaiian language immersion preschools, parents are required to help eight hours per month and to take classes in Hawaiian so they can support the instruction given in the preschools.
Historically in the United States, immersion programs have tended to be one-way programs for teaching a second language where all the students in the classroom shared English as their home language and were learning languages such as French or Japanese. Immersion programs that teach children who are descendants of immigrants the language of their ancestors are often called heritage language programs. Of increased popularity recently have been two-way or dual language programs that require approximately equal numbers of students with two different home languages. In the United States the two languages are most often Spanish and English. The teacher or teachers alternate the language of instruction the same as in one-way immersion programs and the students have the added advantage of peers who can provide language models in both languages.
Immersion vs. Submersion
During the administration of President Ronald Regan the U.S. Department of Education advocated immersion education for non-English speaking immigrants to the United States. English-as-a-second (ESL) language teachers were trained in a variety of immersion teaching techniques, but they usually did not speak the first language of the students they were teaching and there was no attempt to maintain or develop the students' first language. Thus these programs were not as bad as the old submersion situations where immigrant and indigenous children were put into regular classrooms where they could not speak the language of the classroom and had to "sink or swim" with no special support, however these new ESL programs remained subtractive programs and were seen as remedial, as the child's lack of English was viewed as a deficiency.
Immersion programs are additive programs in that they do not ask
the student to forget their first language and because the teachers are
bilingual, they are able to understand their students if they need to communicate
more complicated information to teachers than their second language skills
allow, which is especially important for very young students or students
just beginning to learn a new language. Also, by knowing two languages,
the teachers tend to be more empathetic to the difficulties students have
learning a second language.
Conclusion
Foreign and heritage language programs introduce children to the language and culture of another country. The languages the students learn usually have a rich literary heritage and a large population of speakers in their home countries. Indigenous language programs have no such reservoir of outside support to tap into. Often the very survival of the language is dependent upon these school-based programs to develop another generation of speakers.
The overarching goal of teaching second languages and their associated cultures is to reduce the ethnocentrism of students that tends to make them see the things their culture do as right and things all other cultures do that are different as somehow wrong. One immersion teacher commented that we need to "Get the notion you can only be smart in English." To date, immersion methods have proven the most effective method of getting children to learn a new language well enough to carry on a conversation with a native speaker of that language.
Note: Jon Reyhner developed this page from ideas expressed at the National Foreign Language Center's summer 1998 symposium and workshop on advancing language immersion education focusing on Pacific perspectives and international applications held at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. However, the thoughts expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of either the Center or other participants.