| Immersion Education What is it? Immersion Education, also called ESL/Immersion Education, is a way of educating second language learners where the students are taught only in English without receiving any significant special help in their own first language. Usually the teacher can only speak English themselves, and both the student and teacher must use English to communicate. There are three main types of immersion education, they are: ESL: Students in an English as a Second Language (ESL) class are put into special education programs where they are taught only how to speak, read, write and communicate in English. These programs may be full time or part time, depending on the age of the children, although normally they will start as full-time as the system tries to "immerse" the children completely in an English-speaking environment. Content-Based ESL/Structured Immersion: In this type of program the students are being taught English, but the exercises they are doing for practice are based around the curriculum the school wants the students to learn. For example, to practice reading skills, the students are also reading articles from the grade-level history book which the teacher has changed to make them simpler and easier for the students to read. Sheltered Immersion: Students in this kind of program are taught school subjects at the same time they are learning English, with the intent being that they are getting practice in English at the same time they are learning about their subjects. This is similar to Structured Immersion, but the emphasis here is on the subjects, not learning English, which teachers hope the students will naturally learn with practice. The subjects are presented to the students at a level of English they can understand, but the content itself is still the core grade-level content that other English-speaking children of that grade are learning. Why Immersion Education? Immersion education is based on the idea that everyone learned their first language naturally, one piece at a time, and that all human languages are similar to each other in structure. Most languages have verbs, nouns, adjectives, and other common structures, and so the idea is that by teaching someone who speaks one language the pieces of another language they can "build" another language in their head based on already knowing the first language. There is clearly truth to this, as researchers have found that a student's ability in their own first language and level of education in that language will determine their ability in their second language as well. The better educated the person was in their home language the better chance they have of being able to understand the new language and convert the information they knew in that home language into their new language. Understanding one language clearly helps a person understand how to learn a new language when it's presented to them. Also, we know that if a person lives in a country where a language is spoken they will learn that language faster because they are surrounded by people who speak that language and forced to use it on a regular basis. The more a person uses a language, the better they get at it because the language will slowly become natural to them, and they will be able to use what they know to learn even more. Also, by being surrounded by people who speak the language, they will be able to hear the language spoken, and pick up new words and ideas from the people who speak it as their home language. ESL/Immersion education is based on these two ways of thinking about learning a language, that if we both teach a person a language from the ground up and surround them with people speaking that language, they will quickly be able to learn it. In theory it is fast, direct, and gets the students speaking the language as quickly as possible so that they can participate in the regular American classroom. Benefits of Immersion Education The key benefits of ESL/Immersion education are that the students get a large amount of practice speaking English, which they definitely need, and that it is easy for the school board or district to set up. No special expensive bilingual teachers are needed, only teachers with a small amount of extra training in English as a Second Language teaching techniques and some ESL textbooks and the class is ready to go. Thanks to the intensive nature of ESL/Immersion education the students will also be able to speak English faster, and be able to participate more quickly in the in normal education system. Since all students are currently required to participate in standardized tests under the No Child Left Behind Act the need for children to quickly be able to understand English is very important. They also need to be able to learn the language fast in order to catch up with their classmates, who learned other core subjects while the LEP students were busy learning English. Problems with Immersion Education There is a belief that if children are surrounded by people speaking a new language, that they will automatically and naturally learn that language because children learn languages faster than adults. This is partially true, children do learn spoken language faster than adults for many reasons, the main one being that they are more willing to experiment and practice with a new language. Children don't have the self-conscious feelings that adults have, and they don't feel the need to worry about whether they are getting it wrong as long as their point is being made. The problem comes with the research which shows that while children do learn to use the simple parts of language much faster than adults, their actual ability to use the harder, deeper parts of a new language is very limited. The more a person knows in their first language, the more they can use in their second language, and children have a very limited understanding of knowledge and language itself. It's the difference between being able to drive a car and explain why a car works, a "child" can learn to drive a car faster if they're not afraid to try anything, but will take a long time to learn how the car works because they don't understand the physics or mechanics of a car. An "adult" might take longer to learn how to drive the car because they are more worried about making mistakes, but at the same time they can understand the way a car works more quickly than a child could, and will understand everything about the car before a child can. It takes 5 years on average for a person to be able to study in a second language at the same level as people who were born speaking that language. Immersion doesn't change this, although it can make it seem like children are learning the language quickly when in fact they are just learning the basics faster. Also, a child put into an immersion program is losing time from their general education to learn English; they are falling behind their English-speaking classmates and research has shown that they may in fact never recover this lost time. Another cost of Immersion is the chance that the students may in fact lose their original language to the new language they are learning. Children naturally want to be like their fellow students and they will focus on using the same language the other students speak without thinking about their home language. Often parents will also start to speak English at home both to help their children practice and because it's easier if everyone in the family speaks the same language. But, while the parents don't have to worry about losing their first language, the children can still very much lose that first language because they don't have the practice speaking it. Back to Main Page... |