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Language Immersion
February 22, 2004The year was 1962. Dennis Cullinan enlisted in the U.S. Army and was sent to study language in California. After a battery of tests, Cullinan was asked which languages he'd prefer, and was assigned Korean (one of his least-preferred choices). He writes:
At the Presidio of Monterey I was one of six GI students in a small classroom. Our faculty were three well-educated Korean emigres, who came at us one by one, an hour at a time. For four weeks we had no printed course materials. Instead, the teacher chattered away in Korean for an hour. Then a different teacher came in and chattered away in Korean for another hour. Same for the third hour, after which we had a two hour lunch break. Afternoons brought three more hours of teachers chattering in Korean. Eventually we got textbooks, but they were written in Korean only.(Hat tip: Amritas) While class-size mavens might drool at the ratio presented in the story, we'd add that the presentation was, at least in the beginning, in lecture mode, making class size irrelevent for a time.
But after forty-seven weeks, six hours a day, five days a week, we learned the Korean language.
No, the point for us is that these guys didn't learn Korean by speaking English in class, or by using English-language materials. They were immersed.
Contrast this with the way bilingual education proponents recommend we teach English Language Learners: in Spanish.
In fact, up until the passage of 1998's Proposition 227 in California, if a child in a public school had sub-par English skills and happened to be Hispanic or a new immigrant, it was against the law to instruct that child only in English. In many schools, "Bilingual Education" meant that all subjects were taught in Spanish, even if the child's first language wasn't.
It would seem Bilingual Education boosters could learn something from the U.S. Army.
I learned English mostly by watching television and by the so-called sink-or-swim method. A form
of immersion, and, frankly, it works!
I just asked my mother the other night how long it took her to learn English by immersion when she moved to Kansas from Germany in 1967. Three months, she told me. Note that, probably unlike Dennis Cullinan, she had very few opportunities to speak German when she first moved here.
I spent two years of my youth in Argentina on a religious mission. I had learned Spanish almost fluently in public school (and in part by my own initiative) by the time I got there, but I saw many other guys arrive with little or no formal training in Spanish, and the most it ever took them to learn enough to converse was about two to three months.
Roy W. Wright February 24, 2004 01:51 PM