2702. Immersion in the Target Language



I don’t know whether we’re aware that we teachers of English or French or other languages are connecting people. 

Our school subject is not theoretical but practical: we are teaching and helping to learn and acquire a vehicle language to communicate with anyone on the other side of the very world. 

Do our students realize of that fact? Some teachers abuse of translation too much, from English into Spanish, and this is the homework, while that text is shouting communication: let our students read and understand that text in the language it was written. 

Some weeks ago I was strolling around some school workshops where you could see different school subjects. One of them was English. It was a school exhibition of what they do at their school. 

 The students were young children, and they were connecting shapes with words – the shapes were a triangle, a rectangle, a circle…, and I asked the young teacher aside if she spoke in English with the kids all the time: yes, they were, they were in immersion of English, without worrying too much if that was their native language or not – awesome. / Photo from: teaching-second-language-young-children lifebehindthewall wordpress com

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