The Immersion Technique

If you’ve ever studied a foreign language and suddenly surprised yourself by knowing or saying a word that you didn’t know you knew (!), then, you’ve just proved that ‘immersion’ as a technique to learn a second or foreign language, works.  I found myself doing just that when I was studying French.  There I was, having a rather stilted, but very enthusiastic conversation with mon amie, when suddenly and quite unexpectedly, I found myself answering her “je ne sais pas,” with “non, moi non plus.”  I didn’t actively learn it – I’m sure my teacher never taught it to me, or wrote it on the board, or got us to repeat it – but my clever old brain had somehow picked up the fact, maybe from listening to other people or reading it somewhere, that “moi non plus” means, “I don’t know either!”  Magnifique!

            And that’s pretty much the basic idea of the ‘immersion technique.’  By surrounding yourself in a language, and even without actively setting out to learn it, your brain picks things up, stores them without you even realising it, and then, suddenly, just when you need it, out it pops.  In fact, as I’ve often told my students who are glued to their electronic dictionaries, if you think back to your first words when you were developing your language in your mother tongue, no one gave you a bilingual ‘Japanese/Baby talk’ dictionary.  Children learn by what they hear, read and see.  They absorb words like sponges and then use their stored knowledge to communicate.  So why should it be any different for an adult learning a second language.  Preconceptions maybe, about what a ‘language lesson’ should be?

            The ‘immersion technique’ works on the principal that language learning shouldn’t be confined to text books and rehearsed and formulated listening exercises in the classroom. Rather, the target language is used as a tool and is used constantly.  The idea was first developed in the 60s in Canada when English-speaking educators tried out an innovative programme to help their students learn and understand French language and culture. Many studies followed, including Dr. Chen Ya-Ling’s 2006 study of the immersion technique on Taiwanese children, published in the Asian EFL Journal which looked at the worrying possibility that immersion at a young age might devalue a learner’s original cultural values.  Luckily, this assertion was proved unfounded by Dr Chen’s research, but importantly, what this research proves, is that the success of ‘immersion’ is now so widely accepted by today’s educators, that its efficacy at language learning is not even called into question, rather its value culturally and socially has to be assessed – proof, since people are actually worried by its potential negative effects, that it works.