presented during Immersion Parent Partnership meeting. The presentation explains how immersion students learn their L2 in foreign/dual language immersion classrooms.
23. Activity: “Find Someone Who” 10/15/11 2-Way CABE Summerl Conference 2009 … M.Y. . A.H. . R.S. Find Someone Who… Name ______________ ___ can share why he/she wants his/her child to become bilingual. ___ can share one thing he/she found interesting from today’s session. ___ discovered an effective way to encourage the child to do well in the immersion classroom .
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Notas del editor
This series of parent meetings are titled “Demystifying Immersion Education.” Some of you may be wondering how these children, being as young as 5 years old, start developing a second language while we adults struggle to remember only few words in another language? What is really happening in these so-called Spanish/Japanese “immersion” classrooms? Well, today, it is my intention to show you that how your child learns a second language in one of these classrooms is not mystery, but it is the result of a very effective bilingual teaching method called language immersion.
This series of parent meetings are titled “Demystifying Immersion Education.” Some of you may be wondering how these children, being as young as 5 years old, start developing a second language while we adults struggle to remember only few words in another language? What is really happening in these so-called Spanish/Japanese “immersion” classrooms? Well, today, it is my intention to show you that how your child learns a second language in one of these classrooms is not mystery, but it is the result of a very effective bilingual teaching method called language immersion.
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In a immersion classroom, a student is being immersed in a very language-rich context. However, this does not translate into becoming proficient in that language, as much as being in the water makes anyone to become a good swimmer. The person in the water needs to move her hands and feet and kick water trying to move forward. When a student in an immersion classroom tries to pay attention to her surroundings and to “make sense” of what is going on by picking up second language input, she is benefiting from being immersed in the language.
There is another side to this. It is true that students need to “pick up” the language input, they also need “a handle” on the language. This handle is called comprehensibility. Immersion teachers know how to make their second language instructions comprehensible in various ways.