The immersion style of teaching a language in the purest sense involves refusing to use other languages to aid in teaching the target language. So if you take a French class in France, you might not hear a word of English. Whereas if you take a French class in the US, some teachers will speak English at least in the first few stages.
I find the immersion approach extremely slow and error prone. E.g. if the teacher holds up an image of a red firefighter hat and speaks French, you might not know if she is saying “hard hat”, “red”, or “fire fighter”. You have to guess and if your guess is wrong it feeds into negative training.
There is an audio tape where a Brit teaches French. He said for the most part English words ending in “…tion”, “…ly”, “…ize”, “…ise”, etc are also French words. There are exceptions of course but in just one sentence of English I instantly learned hundreds of French words trivially.
Not sure how thoroughly this has been studied but I suspect immersion language teaching works better on quite young (highly neuroplastic) brains. As an adult it’s very frustrating.
A professor once told me: you don’t need school to learn. You can learn anything by teaching yourself by reading and experiencing the knowledge. But what school does for you is accelerates the learning by structuring it for fast consumption in an organized way. I agree. And I think that the most accelerated way to learn French is to use existing knowledge of English as a tool. Whereas learning by immersion is comparable to learning by experience (the hard way is slow!).
So my ultimate question is whether this as been studied on adults. Does an adult group reach fluency quicker or slower if they learn by immersion? A lot of people say immersion is more effective, but it always seems like this guidance is blind. They never say or imply it’s supported by research. It seems like an indoctrination that people just accept. Different brains are different. An adult who only knows one language will probably be more hindered by immersion because their brain perhaps relies more heavily on associative memory (making connections with existing language knowledge).
One thing I don’t see you talk about is the factor of life.
If you go to live in France you are likely going to learn the language because you are immersed in it. There is nothing but French around you, you’re either going to learn it or your communication will suffer.
For school, maybe immersion alone isn’t the most effective. But for some reason a huge portion of language students who struggle in school but then go to the country come back fluent. I assume living and breathing the language has something to do with that, where with school your immersion is maybe a maximum of 2.5 hours 3 of the days out of the week in class.
Indeed having a gun pointed to your head (in effect) helps; perhaps in the same way that military method works :)
Being immersed into a society where your native lang is useless is certainly a bit of motivation- and motivation is an accelerant of sorts. In Brussels that motivation isn’t there for English speakers. But in any case that’s still a separate learning mechanism from formal instruction. My post is really fixated on the efficiency within the structure of formal instruction.
There is a practical reason immersion is pushed on people: not all students necessarily arrive with the same native language. So certainly there needs to be a French class in France that’s immersion in order to serve all comers (Bulgarians, Polish, etc). But if you have ~25+ English-native adults in France, ideally they might do better to take a class together from a teacher who optimizes French for English speakers.
I believe you’re talking about Paul Noble’s approach. I’ve used his audiobooks for reviewing Spanish (which I already spoke quite well), and for early learning in Italian, German and French (which I had no experience speaking).
For me, his approach is unparalleled in terms of effectiveness, but extremely limited in scope. His audiobooks (if actively used) are perfect as a first step, for learning how to learn a language.
So far, my favorite follow-up for home language learning has been the methods described by Manu at Easy Italian. His method of active and passive listening was a revelation to me.
Of course, none of this work will achieve “fluency” on its own. That’s not my goal. I just don’t want to be comfortable and safe when traveling. I’ve studied Spanish to fairly high levels since middle school and spent many months traveling in various Spanish-speaking countries and still wouldn’t claim fluency.
Edit: just noticed that I needed out, without addressing your question. I have no Idea if there have been any studies on this.
It sounds like Michel Thomas’s method, too. I’d second the effectiveness of the method (Michel Thomas’s, at least; idk if they are the same entirely) for learning how to learn a language, but I also agree that immersion is needed for going beyond casual conversational level.
Absolutely. Immersion and book work. However, all the immersion in the world is fruitless until the code is cracked. You’ve got to get to the point where you can differentiate, at least some words, before the ceaseless torrent of sounds starts to make some sense. That’s where these methods really shine.