Yu Huang

YU HUANG

Spring 2018

LANED-GE 2206-001

Professor: Dr. K. Philip Choong

SECOND LANGUAGE: THEORY & RESEARCH

Title:

Is Immersive language learning more effective for intermediate level learners

or beginning level learners?

Yu Huang
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Is Immersive language learning effective for intermediate level learners or

beginning level learners?

Introduction

Immersive language learning has been discussed as a method to acquire language over

years in the studies of second language acquisition filed. Many researchers have studied and tried

to use immersion classroom in ESL teaching. More than two decades of research indicate that

this approach is highly effective in developing an impressive level of foreign language

proficiency in English-speaking children and grade-level or above achievement in English skills

and contents subjects (Curtain & Pesola, 1998, Genesee, 1987, Swain, 1984). However, some

people discussed that students who are only immersed in the target language instruction would

not be scored comparably in their other subjects or programs by the end of the elementary school

as those students in both types of programs (Melanie McGrath). My goal of this paper is to exam

the immersion classroom in beginning level and the intermediate level and see which level

classroom can gain more effectiveness and progress in the immersion classroom.
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Personally, I am interested in immersion classroom and these questions because language

learning is a long-term process and people are always trying to find an effective approach to

study a language. Additionally, lots of people have spent and wasted a myriad of time on

language studying with less success.

Observational studies of Immersive language learning and target learners

Merrill Swain and Sharon Lapkin designed an immersion classroom experiment for four

grade 8 French immersion classes. In the experiment, the students were grade students who had

been in an early French immersion program since kindergarten. All of their initial instruction,

through grade 3, had been in French. After that, instruction in English was introduced and by

grade 8, approximately 50% of their instruction was in English, 50% in French. In the

experiment, student dyads received a set of numbered pictures that told a story. The students

were to work out the story together and then write it out. After five-week immersion classroom

study, most students had reached the highest proficiency level according to Teacher’s Rating of

overall Ability in French (Table 2). 

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The immersion classroom experiment has accessed for the young age immersion classes of

an elementary school in the previous experiment. What is more, I found out that the immersion

classroom also can effectively work for University level learners, which the experiment is

provided by The University of the Basque (David Lasagabaster., 2011). This experiment was

asked to teach Basque language. there were three linguistic models. Students from Model A are

all Spanish speakers. And their goal is to understand Basque well and give basic explanations in

Basque on everyday matters; Model B is an early partial immersion programme in which both

Basque and Spanish are used as means of instruction, these students’ L1 is usually Spanish.

Model D is a total immersion programme for those students whose L1 is Spanish and a

maintenance programme for those with Basque as L1. Spanish is taught as a subject for only four
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to five hours per week. It is easy to see the result of these three models of students’ evolution in

the below table.

We can see that Model A goes steadily down whereas models B and D go steadily up.

         Steven Barnett and Donald J. Yarosz (2007) conducted an experimental study

program of two immersion teaching teams. One team consists of a teacher and an assistant who

teach in English. The other team consisted of a teacher and an assistant who teach in Spanish.

Thus, each week half of the students in the school are taught in English and half are taught in

Spanish. All students were taught English and Spanish before either at home or in classes. All

students were under 5 years old. Then later a test was settled for these English and Spanish

speaker students, which was about the comprehensives sets of individually administered tests of

cognitive abilities and achievement in English and Spanish. They also administered the Pictures

Vocabulary and Applied Problems subtests from these batteries in both English and Spanish.
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Discussion and Conclusion

All these three observational studies above (Merrill Swain and Sharon Lapkin; David

Lasagabaster; Steven Barnett and Donald J. Yarosz) presented that immersion classroom setting

is effective for language learning. Additionally, according to the University of Basque, it reflects

that the immersion classroom setting is acceptable and developmental in young language

learners. However, researchers above did not mention the efficiency of immersion classroom in

beginning level. All evidence were reflections about the immersion classroom in the intermediate

level.

Research Questions

Based on the careful analysis of previous research and the limitation found, this study aim is that

whether the immersion is more effective for beginning learners or intermediate learners.

Therefore, the research question is:

Is immersion classroom more effective and progressive for beginning learners or intermediate

learners?

Method
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Participants

Two 8th grade Spanish classes in a middle school in the suburbs of Barcelona city of

Spain and will include students whose home language is not Spanish. Each class has

30 students and will be referred to as Class A and Class B. students will take an

entrance exam of speaking, reading, and writing to place them either in Spanish I

(class A) or Spanish II (class B).

Instruments:

• Spanish I and II textbook will be utilized as a material source for this study.

• The textbook itself includes a short reading paragraph, speaking exercises, and writing

activities at the end of each chapter

• Writing sheets, pens or pencils and record machines are asked for completing the task.

Objective:
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To compare the exam scores of pre-exam and post-exam and see which level classroom can

gain more effectiveness and progress in the immersion classroom for beginning learners &

intermediate learners.

Procedure:

For beginning learners:

• Students will be asked to speak/share their opinions based on the topic of each chapter in

the course textbook. Topics include themes like family, travel, and food. Students will

learn words and how to make sentences based on simple grammars which relate to the

topics they learn every day. Students will be divided into six groups; each group has five

students; students will be asked to write down their opinions based on the written task at

the end of each chapter and share to their groupmates as daily practice; for speaking,

firstly students will work in pairs to ask and answer questions for each other, and then

share their opinions based on questions and topics they learn in the groups; finally, at the

last week of the programme (the eighth week), students will work as pairs and be asked

to choose one topic and have presentations for the class. Only Spanish is allowed to use

in class conversation, cannot use mother language to communicate.

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For intermediate learners:

• The course textbook will not be same and used topics will not be the same as the Spanish

I level class uses. The Spanish II textbook will be harder than Spanish I. Students will be

asked to express their opinions based on the topic of each chapter in the course textbook

of Spanish II with vocabulary they learned from the previous study. Topics include

environment (climate, the geography of your city), the transportation of your city,

description of one place you would like to go on vacation etc. Students will learn words

and harder grammars and instructions which can help their study every day. Students will

be divided into six groups; each group has five students; students will be asked to write

down their opinions based on the written task at the end of each chapter and share to their

groupmates as daily practice; for speaking, firstly students will work in pairs to ask and

answer questions for each other; and then share their opinions based on questions and

topics they learn in the groups; finally, at the last week of the programme(the eighth

week) students will work as pairs and be asked to choose one topic and have

presentations for the class. Only Spanish is allowed to use in class conversation, cannot

use mother language to communicate.

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Closure:

All students will be asked to take the final exam based on what they learn from

immersion instruction, which includes the speaking, reading and writing tests, to exam

students’ from uses of words in speaking and writing, accuracy and fluency of

pronunciation, accuracy of grammars’ usage in speaking and writing, comprehensive

ability of reading, etc. Teachers will collect their scores from this exam and then compare

to that of entrance exam to see how much improvement did these two groups students

achieved respectively.

Expected Result:

It is expected that both groups improve by the immersion classroom and it is effective for both

language levels learners. I also expected that the intermediate level learners gain much progress

which presents on pre-exam and post-exam than beginning level learners because language

learners are at least able to receive meaningful input. Intermediate level learners have mastered

some comprehensible inputs and got a solid foundation then build on materials that are not too

hard for these people to understand.

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Analysis:

I think that immersion classroom setting is an effective approach for intermediate level

language learners to learn language especially for learning a second language because human

beings have a limited capacity for process information and central to the ability to process

information the ability to attend to deal with and organize new information. So It is very

effective when language learners are placed in an immersion atmosphere and pay attention

(theory of Attention in SLA) to learn the language because attention is effortful, limited and

selective; the more one can handle routinely, the more attentional resources she has available for

processing new information. If the actual result of this experiment showed that beginning level

learners gain much progress from presents on pre-exam and post-exam than intermediate level

learners, then the reasons could be like: intermediate level learners encounter the bottleneck

during their study process; beginning lever students spent double or triple times on studying

while intermediate level learners just normally follow the schedule times; or teacher of Spanish I

is an expert and designed lessons that all Spanish I students loved and enjoyed while teacher of

Spanish II was a new teacher who did not have much teaching experiences so her students were

not fully paid attention to the lessons. However, immersion classroom setting has its
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disadvantages too, which researchers did not mention in studies. It is hard for immersion

classroom instructional setting to explain and implement advantaged academic knowledge to

students.

Reference

David Lasagabaster (2011). Bilingualism, Immersion programmes and Language Learning in the

Basque Country. The University of the Basque Country.

Merrill Swain. Sharon Lapkin (1998). Interaction and Second Language Learning Two
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Adolescent French Immersion Students Working Together. Modern Language Journal.

September 1998.

Chamot, Anna Uhl. El-Dinary, Pamela Beard. Children’s Learning Strategies in Language

Immersion Classrooms. Language Research Projects Georgetown University.

W. Steven Barnett, Donald J. Yarosz, Jessica Thomas, Dulce Blanco (2007). Two-Way and

Monolingual English Immersion in Preschool Education: An Experimental Comparison.

National Institute for the Early Education Research Rutgers-The State University of New Jersey.