A positive example of the "immersion" theory

Prof. Dr. Max Riedlsperger, September 28, 1997

I was originally a supporter of bi-lingual education as a means of gradually introducing non-English speaking children into the English-language mainstream. It does, however, appear to me that there are a number of "agendas" operating among the advocates of bi-lingual education that go beyond simply helping non-English speaking children adapt to the language requirements of living in an English-speaking country. They deride "imersion" as an effective means of learning English, and yet the children of earlier waves of immigration learned English precisely through imersion, my father and my wife among them.

"My story," is not actually my story, but rather my daughter's. I served as director of a university program for a year. During that year, we enrolled my daughter as a "guest pupil" in a German gymnasium (rough equivalent of high school which begins in Germany with the fifth grade.) At the beginning of that year, my daughter knew only how to say her name, where she lived and count to twenty. After 2 months she was speaking fluent, if grammatically flawed German and by the end of the year, she had earned a B+ on an essay in a NON-BI-LINGUAL German language class and her accent was that of the region, not mine, learned primarily in Austria, nor that of her mother who is a trained German teacher and who speaks the German equivalent of BBC-English. YES, she had help at home and YES most of her teachers knew enough English to help her out when she was having trouble. However, she mostly learned, as her accent attests, from her friends in an IMMERSION environment.

Extrapolating from this experience, might we not better immerse non-English-speaking pupils, while providing them with a lot of help via teachers aids, than create a linguistic ghetto from which some never emerge?