Does Language Immersion Work?

But most of the kids that I've spoken to admit that they have trouble speaking.

Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here, and today I wanna talk to you about

immersion and language learning.

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So, we hear a lot about immersion.

The way to learn the language is to immerse yourself in the language.

The image is sort of jumping into a lake or a swimming pool and

covering yourself in the language.

And that way somehow you'll learn the language and, uh, immersion

can have different meanings.

And I wanna touch on some of these.

Particularly as it pertains to a, a learning strategy that we can use.

So as a young child, and I experienced this as a five year old coming to Canada

from Sweden, I started playing with kids.

I have no recollection of no longer speaking Swedish, speaking English.

We spoke English at home with my parents.

Very quickly, Swedish was gone.

I had been immersed in an environment where I had lots of input from my

friends, where I was totally uninhibited.

I was simply immersed in the language.

I learned it.

I think a, a similar form of immersion is what happens in those countries where

television programs and movies are in English or in the original language.

Kids watch cartoons and stuff in English, and when they go to school

they're already familiar with English.

So that's sort of the natural immersion approach to language learning.

Now, before going on to how we might use immersion, say as adults to learn

a language uh, I'd like to talk about another example of immersion, and that

is immersion, say, in the school systems.

For example, in the English speaking school system in Canada, the French

immersion program is very popular.

So we have, I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of English-speaking kids that

take all of their schooling in French.

So they sit in a classroom with other English speaking kids and the

teacher speaks to them in French.

The material they use is all in French, and they learn their

chemistry and their history and their mathematics all in French.

So it's called immersion.

And those kids end up with a much better level of comprehension in French

than kids that are in conventional French stream in the school system.

However, and I've had three grandchildren go to French immersion, they don't

end up speaking all that well.

They have quite good comprehension, but most of the kids that I've spoken

to admit that they have trouble speaking, which is not surprising

because they haven't spoken very much.

They speak English with their classmates or with their friends,

and once they get home, they speak English and everything around, in

fact, is in English, so it's only the classroom situation which is immersion.

Now on the positive side, with a good level of comprehension, if those kids

go off to a French speaking place, be it the province of Quebec or France

or Belgium, or maybe somewhere in Africa, they will very quickly see

their ability to produce the language.

You know, improve dramatically because they have good, good

comprehension and so they will quickly be able to speak quite well.

So it is a good program from that point of view.

It gives them a base, gives them vocabulary, it gives them comprehension

and the speaking, I mean to speak, well, you have to speak a lot.

They don't speak a lot, so they don't speak well.

So that's the sort of language immersion programs in our schools, and I think

it's not only French immersion.

I've heard of Spanish immersion, Chinese or Mandarin Immersion and other

immersion programs on the same model.

Now, how about as an independent adult learner?

You sometimes hear people say, Well, I'll just go to the country

and immerse myself in the language and I will learn it naturally.

That's not such a good strategy because what I have seen is when people move to a

country where another language is spoken.

If they don't make a deliberate effort to learn that language, they're not going

to learn it, and they will probably fit into a pattern of relying on English.

There are a number of reasons for this.

First of all, the locals there who speak Spanish or Chinese

or Czech, they're not teachers.

They simply wanna communicate, and if they sense that you don't communicate in their

languageas well as they communicate in English, they're gonna switch to English.

So whenever I've...

and I have used immersion as a strategy, but I always prepare for it.

So if we are going to say, I want to go to Mexico, I want to go to Italy, I

want to go to, uh, you know, wherever Poland, and, uh, so I, and I want to use

visiting the country and even staying in the country as a way to learn the

language, then I have to have a plan.

And that plan should consist of making sure that you hit the ground running.

In other words, that you are sufficiently well prepared so

that you can take advantage of being surrounded by the language.

And, uh, that's what I've done.

I've spent a year doing a lot of listening and reading in

Czech and then I went to Prague.

I set up with teachers so that I could have that opportunity to speak

to people, and then I supplemented that with whatever random, you know,

encounters I could have with Czech people.

But you can't rely on random people kind of humoring you in the language

that you are trying to learn.

The better you speak that language, the more likely they are to

respond to you in that language.

Uh, I often hear people complain they go to Germany, they go to a store,

they ask for something in German the answer comes back in English.

However, if your German is good enough, they won't reply in

English, they'll reply in German.

They just want to communicate.

So if your strategy is somehow to use immersion as a means of, of learning a

language, I would say use immersion as a means of improving in the language and

set yourself as sort of a plan of how you're going to get your comprehension.

Much like those kids in French immersion in the English school system

in Canada, they've got a level of comprehension, they've got a level

of vocabulary so that if they're put in a French speaking environment very

quickly they'll be able to speak well.

So you won't have the benefit of 10 years of French immersion in school,

but you can certainly expose yourself to a lot of listening and reading in the

language, building up your comprehension so that when you arrive in the country

fairly quickly, you can sort of start interacting with people at an adult level.

So I think with immersion, it sounds sort of like a magic.

I'll just go to Japan and once I'm there, uh, I'll just learn Japanese.

It, it's probably more difficult than that.

And there are so many things that you can do before you get to, say, Japan to

ensure that you hit the ground running.

So just a, a comment here on immersion.

It can be a good strategy, but I think it does take some planning, and if you do it

right, it can be a great way to develop a high level of proficiency in a language.

Thank you for listening.

Bye for now.