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So: a quick post for now of this book recommendation from lefty, who is a linguist: Handbook of Research in Second Language Teaching and Learning edited by Eli Hinkel. I asked for a book or books to read because I'm curious about foreign language immersion programs: do they work?
Or do they suffer from the same (or similar) flaws as whole language or balanced literacy programs?
I'm curious because I ordered a copy of Fluenz Spanish 1 + 2 this week. I took enough Spanish courses to consider majoring in the subject in college, but never came close to fluency either in speaking or listening. That has always bothered me, and I've decided now is the time to do something about it.
I chose Fluenz because Concerned Parent said a while back that she thought it might be the better bet for C. Then, once I looked at Fluenz and Rosetta Stone I realized that Fluenz may have been created in "opposition" to Rosetta Stone, which teaches foreign languages through immersion while Fluenz explicitly says that English-speaking adults should learn foreign languages by relating the foreign language to English:
2. It really helps to use English to learn a new language. When learning a new language as an adult, nothing makes more sense than to understand the process in English. While small children learn arbitrarily, absorbing language like a sponge, modern linguistics points to how adults are better off having a clear understanding of what they're learning and how it works. It's rather difficult to understand how Italian works if the explanation is in Italian, not to mention if no explanation is given at all.
Fluenz is so committed to the idea of explicit instruction that it features an educational telepresence.
I don't like educational telepresences, it seems. I don't know why. (Does anyone?) I ended up purchasing Fluenz in spite of its educational telepresence, not because of.
More on that anon.
lefty book recommendation
11 comments:
Aack! Now I'm worried that it was a grass is greener kind of thing? You see, I'm not completely sold on Rosetta Stone, it just seems to be missing something. I liked the fact that Fluenz relies on direct instruction of a sort. It hadn't occurred to me that the telepresence could be annoying and/or distracting.
I remember reading a few consumer comments in a comparison of the two programs and it seemed that Fluenz was coming out on top. I look forward to hearing what C thinks and how he feels about a telepresence.
Research shows that yes, immersion works. Would you like references to some SLA research compilations?
However, this is one of those topics where common sense should have told us that immersion would be vastly superior to other instructional methods. Immersion works because that's the way we learn language.
Immersion is fantastic. I'm not familiar with Rosetta stone or the other programs, but I'm pretty confident that they are not providing immersion. Immersion is being surrounded by real, live native speakers all day long for months and struggling to make yourself understood until things finally click. It also involves having your grammar and pronunciation corrected, rather than saying things wrong and practicing your mistakes. I just don't think that immersion is the right term to describe a canned language program. (I'm a Russian major, a Russian MA, and the survivor of two immersion type experiences in Russia, as well as a former ESL teacher.)
Immersion works???
I'm flummoxed.
The book Lefty recommended seems to say that immersion programs in Canada have failed - so is that an implementation problem?
Amy p --- thanks! I hadn't thought of it that way, but of course you're right. "Immersion" software has got to be completely different from "immersion."
As to real immersion, I've had so many people tell me they learned to speak really fluent French from living in France and watching French TV. (These people were also studying French or had studied French in the past.)
It seems like immersion works when you are actually immersed in the language, something one could achieve by living in that particular country.
I would think it would be more difficult to pull off in a class that meets for 40 minutes twice or three times a week.
SusanS
I would asbolutely agree with Susan. I can attest to the value of "immersing oneself" in a language. It is very much different from simply learning something in class.
However, having some degree of foundational knowledge as to basic vocabulary, sentence contruction, and the sounds of the letters or symbols makes the immersion experience much more valuable.
In my case I have a number of different experiences with immersion. At one level, I experienced immersion from the very beginning in that I spoke only Spanish when communicating with my father and grandparents. At the next level of immersion, I spent summers with family in Mexico. Later, I would become an exchange student in Mexico City and study literature not with my exchange student peers, but with Mexican literature students in university undergraduate courses at UNAM.
I've experienced immersion to a much more limited degree in Italy and Germany. However, in both these cases I had some foundational knowledge of the languages. Without this, I can't imagine that the immersion experience would have been as fruitful.
Catherine,
If I recall correctly, the Canadian immersion involved a bunch of Anglophone kids talking French to each other. Quelle surprise that that would lead to fluent but error-ridden French. Native speakers (and lots of them) are the only way to get real immersion.
Following on what Amy P said:
We are in Toronto, Canada. The French "immersion" stream in our public school system is full of kids whose parents think they are too smart for the regular stream but they haven't tested into gifted. It's generally acknowledged as a way of providing extra challenge if the parents think their kids will be bored at school.
However, anyone I know that has graduated from the immersion stream admits that it did them no good - there is a real dearth of teachers who meet all 3 requirements of a good immersion teacher (especially in the higher levels): they know their subject material, they are natively fluent in French, and they are good teachers. So the farther you go in the immersion stream, the worse the teaching gets and the less the kids learn.
My husband was researching this and came across the term "interlanguage fossilization" which describes one result - kids learning a second language from each other and from non-native speakers, who end up creating a language that is not a natural language spoken by anyone.
On top of that, the reaons for parents choosing the French has the further effect of devaluing the regular English-stream, creating all kinds of problems in the student populations of schools where both streams are offered.
I haven't read the book you mentioned, but if it disparages the Canadian immersion system, I wouldn't be surprised.
DeeDee
"...kids learning a second language from each other and from non-native speakers, who end up creating a language that is not a natural language spoken by anyone."
I don't know much about the phenomenon of international non-native English, but that sentence reminds me of it. It's not a terrible thing that non-native speakers have created their own weird English to communicate efficiently with each other, but I don't think that the parents of these French immersion kids had that sort of goal in mind. As for me, I'd want to learn Mexican Spanish or Spanish Spanish or French French or Russian Russian, not some weird American version. (Which reminds me, when I was a graduate student TAing for a Russian course, our textbook unit on food included such vocabulary as "nachoz" and "chizstek" even though not one Russian in a thousand would know what that was. So much for learning culture through language.)
I've changed my mind about educational telepresences.
I'm not familiar with Rosetta stone or the other programs, but I'm pretty confident that they are not providing immersion.
I'm sure that has to be true.
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