Language Immersion Schools Follow-Up

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

A few episodes ago, I told you about touring language immersion schools for my son, who’s turning five this year.

We got a huge response.

We sure did.

In email and voicemail from people who were more than willing to tell us their opinions and their experiences about language immersion schools.

So I just wanted to share a couple of these with you.

Yeah.

Nathan went to a German immersion school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and he said it was like one large puzzle.

He loved it and had no problem with his English skills.

And this is one of the questions that comes up among people who don’t know anything about language immersion schools.

Sure.

Does it hurt your language?

And what I found in doing the research, because, of course, I researched it, Jeff.

What?

What I found was that there is a little bit of a delay in the advanced English skills, but it’s not more than a year or two, and they’re caught up by third or fourth grade in general.

And look what you get.

Yeah, look what you get.

But, yeah, they’re also, like, working full time on another language on the side, right?

So their total language acquisition is enormous.

Their English language acquisition is a little bit reduced, but they catch up very quickly.

Nathan said the German school didn’t hurt his English, and he went on to take English honors.

So that’s a plus.

Sandra, who lives in Encinitas here in California, she said her grandchildren go to a Spanish immersion school,

And she said her granddaughter is great.

She reads, writes, and understands Spanish first grade,

And she says they seem to accept and adapt to the variety.

So this is the other thing that the research shows is that the language immersion becomes the new normal for these kids.

They just stop thinking of it as exceptional.

We think of it as exceptional because if we didn’t have that opportunity, it seems unusual to us.

My wife and I grew up in basically monolingual communities in the Midwest.

Yeah, I did too.

And so for us, any language that we speak, we learned in school.

We didn’t learn it from the parents or grandparents or the community around us.

One more from another Sandra.

She was telling us about a Spanish immersion program in Redwood City, California.

She says her family, all English-only speakers, took a bit of a risk enrolling her in the immersion classes.

But since she was starting at such an early age, it was easy for her family to learn along with her.

And this is the other thing that we heard at both of these schools that we went to and that we found out in our reading,

Is that a lot of these schools have programs where the parents can learn as well.

And sometimes it’s the other parents who may already speak this language getting together to do these after-school or weekends programs

To teach the monolingual parents what they need to know to help their children in their schoolwork.

That’s really cool.

And I like that idea of this community coming together over a – I mean, they could be building robots.

They could be doing anything.

But in this particular case, they’ve decided to get together over a language and become friends.

That’s fantastic.

And have a relationship there instead of sending their kids off to the school as if it was a one-way relationship.

I love that.

That’s great.

So the general sense of all these emails that we received is that language immersion is mostly a positive experience.

And where it’s negative, it usually comes from some misunderstanding about what the results are supposed to be.

There are some people who refuse to believe that learning a second language doesn’t have to hurt your first language.

Yeah.

You will not believe that children can learn five or six languages easily.

Yeah.

Easily.

And be fluent in all of them if they have this full immersion experience in all of them

And have a community of people who speak these languages and their family speaks these languages

And they have standard instruction in these languages.

You know, that reminds me of when my little brother was born, my mother said,

Love doesn’t divide, it multiplies.

Exactly.

You know, the same thing.

I mean, your storehouse of knowledge just gets bigger when you learn another language.

Yeah.

More is open to you.

You learn to see the world in a slightly different way.

And frankly, all knowledge is good knowledge as far as I’m concerned.

Right on.

Wouldn’t you say?

Yes.

I’d still love to hear your stories about language immersion.

Did you go to a language immersion school or did you send your kids or have your grandchildren gone?

Send us an email to words@waywordradio.org or call us and tell us about it, 877-929-9673.