Immersion Schools

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Immersion Schools

Immersion schools started for a number of reasons, but predominantly to include native language use in the education of language-minority students. This enabled children from other countries to learn English along with studying in their native language. Immersion integrated native English speakers and native speakers of another language (such as Spanish or French) for most of the day, with the goals of promoting academic achievement, language development and cultural understanding of other students.

Immersion schools keep their populations balanced, they hold around fifty percent native English speakers and fifty percent speakers of a non-English language. The academic instruction is held in both languages, with the non-English language being used from fifty to ninety percent of the time. This way the students can be the learners and the teachers at the same time. The two-way immersion creates a bilingual environment for all students; since the first language (for example English) is maintained while the second language (for example Spanish or French) is acquired.

Schools are set up to promote this bilingual language learning. Teachers are persuaded to use cooperative learning, hands-on material and visual and graphic displays to teach the content material. The schools are required to have classroom materials in both languages, and school wide materials such as library resources and computer software in both languages. They ask for support from families and the community. They make serious efforts to ensure that both languages and cultures are thought of equally, and the families are included in the school decisions.

Schools face some problems with beginning the immersion program. Not many of their teachers had ever experienced this kind of language immersion when they were in school, which makes it difficult to understand how to teach these children. The schools tend to try and create a program for the teachers to attend before coming into their own classroom, but there is only so much a program can prepare that teacher for. Traditional teaching and teaching at immersion schools are dramatically different. In Immersion schools language acquisition is important along with the basic teaching skills. Although teaching the second language is the most crucial part of immersion schools, teaching the basics and making sure that the children understand is still very important.

Teachers at the immersion schools have four specific teacher tasks: to make the input comprehensible, to provide opportunities for language output, to enhance the comprehensibility of readings and to develop a system for providing constructive feedback.

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