Immersion Education

Within bilingual education, more and more programs are adopting the option of immersion education, in which a second language is used as the medium of instruction. This volume illustrates the implementation immersion education in North America, Europe, Asia, the Pacific, and Africa, showing its use in programs ranging from preprimary to tertiary level and demonstrating how it can function in foreign language teaching, for teaching a minority language to members of the language majority, for reviving or supporting languages at risk of extinction, and for helping learners acquire a language needed for wider communication or career advancement. A final section reviews lessons learned from experiences with immersion and explores new directions the approach is taking. This text will be of interest to teachers, teacher educators, and others involved in bilingual education.

"This book presents a unique collection of research studies on French Immersion conducted from the authors' base as a research team in British Columbia, Canada. It serves as an important resource for educators and policymakers interested in the impact of immersion on educational policy, student outcomes, second language curriculum, and teacher education." "Section I documents the authors' experiences in developing a systematic approach to evaluation and assessment of French immersion programs. Section II includes studies on important curricular and instructional considerations for immersion education, and Section III addresses teacher education and professional development, including in-depth case studies of immersion teacher education programs and immersion teachers' perspectives on their role and needs for support and improvement. A final chapter contains concluding comments and future directions for immersion programs." "Immersion has grown significantly not only in Canada but also worldwide. This collection of research studies will be informative to those involved in intensive second language education internationally."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This volume showcases the practice and promise of immersion education through in-depth investigations of program design, implementation practices, and policies in one-way, two-way and indigenous immersion programs. Contributors present new research and reflect on possibilities for strengthening practices and policies in immersion education to increase programmatic impact and promote higher levels of language proficiency and literacy among learners.

The body of research in this volume offers a detailed account of the success of young immersion learners of Irish in becoming competent speakers of the minority language. Taking account of in-class and out-of-class factors, it examines the variety of Irish spoken by the pupils, the extent to which the Irish spoken deviates from native-speaker norms, the degree to which pupils are aware of and attempt to acquire a native-like variety and the extent to which issues of identity and motivation are involved. The results highlight the limitations of an immersion system in generating active and accurate users of the language outside the immersion setting and will help immersion educators to gain a greater understanding of how young immersion learners learn and acquire the target language. The findings are placed in the context of other one-way immersion programmes internationally with a particular focus on minority language settings, and make an important contribution not only to our understanding of the Irish issues, but how the Irish situation can be placed in a broader scholarly and socio-political context.

Worldwide, more parents are opting for immersion pre-schooling for their children in order to benefit from its linguistic, educational, and cultural benefits. This immersion can be either bilingual or monolingual, aimed at early second language learning, or at language maintenance – offering minority language children mother-tongue support and enrichment. This book examines some of the key issues and policy concerns relating to immersion education in the early years. The term itself can be difficult in some political contexts, as can the differing outcomes noted by studies comparing monolingual programmes, and bilingual programmes for minority language children. The importance of training in immersion methodology for educators is discussed, as is the need to adapt preschool pedagogical practices to the immersion context, in order to provide optimal input for young language learners. One of the most pressing discussions surrounds differentiated provision – ensuring that the varying needs of children with language impairment, typical second language learners, and mother-tongue speakers with significant socioeconomic or linguistic disadvantages are all met. Overall, the book explores the challenges currently facing the sector, particularly with regard to training and professional development for practitioners, and the provision of appropriate materials in less widely used languages. Given the documented benefit of high quality immersion pre-schooling, this book fulfils an urgent need to increase the recognition of the sector. This book was published as a special issue of International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism.

This volume proposes solutions to the gentrification of dual language, bilingual and immersion education by examining how it operates across diverse school and community contexts. It brings together studies in a number of areas including instruction, curriculum development, classroom interaction, school leadership, parent and community engagement, ideological discourse and language policy. Through academic and reader-friendly summaries of research, this book makes a strong theory-to-practice impact towards equitable integration in education programs and their surrounding neighborhoods. It draws attention to how understanding and responding to gentrification of language programs is part of the broader fight for racial and educational justice for immigrant communities in US schools, and offers practical recommendations with action steps for educators, families, school administrators, activists and other key stakeholders in language education. The four stakeholder resource chapters in Part 2 will be made Open Access to allow all teachers and administrators to benefit from the research, with freely available practical guidance on working towards equity in language education. We will link to the chapters here as soon as they are available.

A Humanizing Dual Language Immersion Education positions bilingual education within a human rights framework, moving beyond pedagogical effectiveness in traditional schools to capturing the deeper mantra that DLI revolve around the present realities, epistemologies, and humanness of our bilingual youth.

This book is about two innovative methods for teachers of bilingual students to use in improving their academic achievement. Transacquisition Pedagogy or TAP developed by Tauwehe Sophie Tamati is the method described in the book’s first part. It uses principles of flexible bilingualism and a task sequenced approach. The success of TAP in an intervention study in two of New Zealand’s Māori schools illustrates how cognitive and linguistic processes can be used to increase student conceptual understanding and to improve their academic biliteracy. Part two is about the Curriculum Design Coherence Model (CDC Model) created by Elizabeth Rata. It shows teachers how to design concepts, content and competencies to connect academic knowledge and thinking processes. The CDC Model has proved its success in the Knowledge-Rich School Project in New Zealand and England. TransAcquistion Pedagogy and the CDC Model are aligned. TAP works by putting the CDC design method into practice. The separate usefulness of TAP and the CDC Model and the added value of their alignment provides an innovative approach to education. Used together or separately they provide invaluable teaching methods for bilingual, immersion and mainstream education.