Tweet

Language immersion: What is it?

Prefer to read?

Hola, bonjour bonjour known yourself. Konnichiwa. I hope you’re well this week. I wanted to answer the question. What is language immersion?

So basically language immersion is being completely immersed in the language. I know that’s obvious and that’s not a great explanation. But we’re going to go a little bit deeper than that about what that means for independent language learners. So essentially immersive language experience sallow you to learn language and content, ideally through that language

My background is somewhat in language immersion. I have a lot of experience as a student and both as a teacher. I was director of language immersion school at Sejong University in Seoul Korea, and I’m a certified Spanish language immersion teacher and in an academic context what that really means is that students attend school as they would regular school day and they do part if not all of their day learning academic subjects in another language. There’s dual language immersion programs and there’s all different sorts of setups possible setups for this we won’t get into that so much here. But essentially, what the teacher needs to do is present content, so math or science or some substantive subject to students in a way that they understand so through comp what we call comprehensible input and that’s crashing. That’s research-based. That’s how you learn languages- it’s by understanding, and you do that by things being comprehensible. 

So if you think about language immersion think about an elementary school setting the teacher might use lots of visuals. There might be lots of Hands-On things and students might stay in these programs for long periods of time and they come out feeling very confident and competent in that language because they’ve had so much exposure 

For example language immersion can also be something that you do as an adult and in my book the five-week linguist. I had this opportunity to interview the dean of Middlebury College. Middlebury College offers these amazing language immersion experiences on their campus.

Also, places in Minnesota- Concordia- does language villages. There’s lots of ways to do this. You could even go abroad and have your own create your own language immersion program where you’re learning through content. One of my very favorite language immersion experiences as a student is a private language school. So they tend to do a couple of hours of instruction in grammar in a couple of hours of communicative activities, and they’re all in the target language and then oftentimes in the afternoon.

They might offer lectures on films or art or tours around wherever you might be studying a really great experience. So I want to talk about if all these things have not been accessible to you.

People have lives, jobs and families. And so you can’t go back in time obviously and go back to elementary school and have learned Spanish or French or Mandarin because you were able to get into a language immersion program. There are some amazing ones out there and learn what you would learn in your own language in another language and then you come out knowing two languages, as well as all the content. 

You can’t necessarily go back to college and do a summer abroad or a summer in Middlebury or ...