New Technique

[Griselda]

Nice article, I have been thinking this was necessary for a while! Woohoo! =)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6906884/?GT1=6190
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Sounds interesting, but it's hardly a new program, even for the US. Language immersion programs have been around for a while now, and, in general, have been shown to be effective. The two most common types of immersion seem to be the type where all students speak a main language (in this case, English), and are immersed for part of the time in a second language.

The other type of immersion is called two-way immersion, and that's where two groups of children, each of whom speak one of two primary languages. Ffor example, 10 Spanish speakers and 10 English speakers might be put into a class of 20 Kindergertners. The children are then immersed in one language for part of the time, and in the other the rest of the time.

Two-way immersion programs are trendy enough that people are doing all kinds of different things and calling it two-way immersion at the moment, so parents and teachers would do well to look at their programs with a critical eye.

I personally think that learning *in* a language is much more effective than trying to learn a language in isolation. As an adult, I get a lot out of the grammar classes that I take, but I still think I learn more when I'm on the job and need to use the language to communicate something to somebody.

My daughter is in her second year of a two-way immersion program, and I'm quite happy with it. I've also done a fair amount of research into two-way immersion programs in my work as a teacher. I don't have any strict bilingual model in my classroom (my class is *not* any kind of immersion model, officially), but I have seen children start to learn each other's language, and that's been a great experience. :)