Applied linguistics and language learning/teaching
OPTIMUM AGE
Immersion language teaching
Over the last twenty years, immersion language teaching in Canada has been widely celebrated as a success story in bilingual education (Johnson and Swain 1997). What immersion means is the teaching of the second language as the medium of instruction. This use of the second language as medium is much older than the Canadian enterprise, and is still the practice in many colonial situations such as anglophone and francophone ex-colonies.
But it is important to examine carefully just what is claimed for this Canadian version of bilingual education. Its applied linguistic evaluators are very careful to make clear just what those claims are and just what constraints must be put on those claims (Swain and Lapkin 1982). These restrictions remind us that immersion education cannot easily be transferred to other situations where the same conditions do not pertain.
Canadian immersion programs of various types (early total, early partial, late partial, beginning in Grade 8) have all been shown to be successful in terms of their objectives. But they require the presence of four factors:
1. The parents of the students need to be involved in establishing and ensuring the continuation of the immersion program.
2. The immersion students (and their parents) must be members of the majority community in the local bilingual setting.
3. Both students and their parents must have a positive attitude towards the target language and its speakers.
4. The immersion program must be optional.
In other words, immersion language teaching has worked well in Canada (primarily in Ontario) not only because it has offered the kind of resource-rich exposure to French that is not possible for English in Nepal, but also because the learners, like their parents, are members of the majority community of English speakers who desire to learn the language of the minority French-Canadian community. Transposing the immersion project to a country like Nepal would be hazardous. Once again, we can observe that the role of applied linguistics is to describe and evaluate language problems within their own contexts.
