Dear blog readers,
Taking a dip is fun; chewing through tough material is a chore. This is particularly true when children learn a foreign language. Young people flourish when surrounded by unfamiliar sounds and speech patterns on holiday. These sounds are puzzles that their curiosity prompts them to solve. Specialists call this kind of plunge into a second language “immersion”. When the same pupils sit in a classroom and are served snippets of a language in bite-sized portions, the magic is often lost. They are expected to learn English and, above all, explain when to use the past perfect and the present perfect continuous.
First-language immersion and second-language drilling
We would never ask a German-speaking toddler to cram German verb conjugations to stop them saying “sie magen” instead of “sie mögen”, or “er hat getut” instead of “getan”. Nor do we make them recite singular and plural nouns to eliminate mistakes such as “das Buch, die Buchen”. Parents and educators trust that attentive interaction with children will, without further intervention, help them develop generally comprehensible grammar. What matters is that a child has someone to communicate with and receives appropriate verbal input. They will unconsciously follow their language role model without anyone having to step in and correct them.
Yet older children in our school system are still often drilled in precisely these patterns. When English is on the timetable, pupils can expect long vocabulary lists to master in two or three days. They must know their irregular verb forms. Woe betide anyone who, unsure of the spelling or sounds, turns “think, thought, thought” into “think, thunk, thunken”! Their first essays are sprinkled with red marks, as focusing on errors forms a large part of the teaching approach.
Only certain specialist schools teach subjects in a language other than the first language. There are hardly any state secondary schools where maths, art or physics are taught in English or another foreign language. Yet this approach has a long tradition in other countries because of its benefits.
Successful school-based immersion abroad
Bilingualism research repeatedly mentions two countries with extensive experience of immersion: Canada and Sweden. In experiments in Canada, which aims for widespread bilingualism because of its two official languages, researchers discovered as early as 1965 how effectively a second language can be taught when teachers use it as a means of social interaction. Pupils initially received lessons only in the target language and later in both languages. For example, they studied biology in English and chemistry in French. This enabled them to reach near-native proficiency in their second language without any adverse effects on their first language or their knowledge of other subjects.
When studying the children of Finnish workers in Sweden in the 1970s, researchers also found that a secure command of the first language and a positive attitude towards it further support learning the target language. Immersion programmes cannot fully replicate natural language acquisition in a newborn. An older child will always draw on the strategies used to decode meaning and build grammatical structures when acquiring their first language. Children who want to learn English outside school can benefit from this.
An opportunity for immersion in Vienna
In Vienna and the surrounding area, we create situations similar to those in which a toddler grows up and learns. During shared activities and outings, the child builds a social relationship with a trusted person who speaks only English. This gives the learner an interest in communicating that can only be fulfilled in the foreign language, allowing them to learn playfully how to express themselves so they are understood. There is no need for laborious cramming of lists and grammatical patterns.
It is important to offer the target language in its natural form. This happens when your child experiences the world together with their second-language role model. Learning then takes place almost incidentally and, if you wish, even before English is introduced as a school subject.
Wikipedia offers further reading on language immersion.
About the author:
Andreas HANNY, MBA is the founder and owner of native4kids e.U.