The immersion style of language learning essentially entails an instructor who speaks only the target language, not the language you already know. The same way children learn their first language.
Immersion has irrefuted widespread acceptance and respect touted by pretty much everyone as the best way to learn.
I think that needs to be challenged. One of my wise profs once said something like:
You don’t /need/ school. Everything you learn in school can be self-taught and learnt informally the hard way from books and experience. What formal instruction does is accelerates the learning. I am here to organise the information for maximum absorption over time. What you learn here in 4 years would take you a decade to learn in an ad hoc disorganised way…
^ (Paraphrasing from memory). Seems spot-on to me. IMO, immersion is comparable to learning the slow way, by experience. The first language someone learns must be immersion, of course. There is no choice but to learn that the hard way through experience. But then the first language can be used to learn the next.
I was listening to a Brit (possibly Thomas Michael) teaching French on an audio tape. He said (in English) consonants at the end of words are not pronounced, but exceptionally if the consonant is in the word CAREFUL then it is pronounced (the “CaReFuL consonants”). He quickly conveyed a lot of information in a short time because he was able to give an English memory aid. At another moment he said something like: all words ending in TION, TY, ABLE? (I don’t recall all the suffixes) are all French words. Just like that in 1 single sweeping English sentence, I learned thousands of French words. He just needed a minute to give some examples of the French pronounciation (liberty→liber-TAY, revolution→ray-voh-loo-see-own).
In an immersion class that would have been impossible. It would have taken an absurd amount of time playing sherades one word at a time in an immersion class to accomplish the same learning task.
Yes, there are good reasons for immersion. E.g. a gov-administered public French class in a French-speaking region has students with all different mother tongues coming together to learn French in the same classroom. Such classes have no choice but to use immersion style.
But I conjecture that if you have 25 English speakers who want to learn French together, then that group is best served by a teacher who is good (better than fluent) in both languages. Those English speakers have the same uniform advantages and disadvantages that the instruction can account for. E.g. they would all benefit from the vocabulary tip (words ending in TION). They would likely all equally have the same struggle with pronouncing the R’s, and gender of objects. So the instruction can be tailored exploit the language simularities and differences.
I have never met anyone who agrees with me on this. But I think it should be studied (hence the post to [email protected]). It would be easy to take two groups of English speakers who don’t know a word of French and teach one group immersion style and the other group without the immersion limitation. Have a race measuring how many hours of instruction and study to reach the same passing level of fluency.
