One Year of Immersion Enough to Learn English

Portland Oregonian (Letters)
Thursday, June 25, 1998

The recent passage of California Proposition 227 substitutes a one-year English immersion program for the current bilingual program.

We don't need to speculate as to the efficacy of English immersion programs for students. For the past 10 years or so, Mount Hood Community College, together with about 10 other community colleges in the United States, has been participating in a federally subsidized program, Cooperative Association of States for Scholarships, which brings low-income students from the Caribbean and Central American countries to participate in a two-year college program in the United States.

My wife and I have been host parents to four of those students. They came from Haiti, Nicaragua and Guatemala and were between ages 18 and 22. None of them spoke any English when they arrived.

The older you are, the harder it is to learn a new language. At the end of a six-month English immersion program, these students spoke good English and were sufficiently fluent so that they could take all of their courses in English.

It follows that children from 5 to 17 years of age are going to learn faster. Assuming that they have good teachers and devote full school time to learning English, there is no reason why they should not be fluent in English within the one year of their language immersion.

Vern Cook