Response Paper of the Short Movie ‘Immersion’

In the movie ‘Immersion’ by Richard Levien, there is a Spanish immigrant boy, Mosses,
studying in one of the United States of America’s schools where classes are taught in English.
It seems that he is really good at maths because when the teacher asks a question to the class,
no one except Mosses can find the correct answer; however, he is not proficient in English, and
he cannot explain how he finds the solution. The maths test is imminent, and Mosses starts to
get worried, not because of the difficulty of maths but because of the language of the test—
English. The biggest challenge for him is that all the questions are given in English, leading
him to misunderstand, or not understand at all. When he asks his teacher to give the exam in
Spanish, the teacher says it is not a big problem, but she cannot get permission from the
principal because the principal claims that they all should not be using Spanish to learn English.
Even though one of his classmates tries to persuade Mosses not to take the exam, he decides to
take the exam. Once he encounters the long English maths problems, he does not understand
anything and tries to use the dictionary which her teacher does not allow. In the end, being
unable to solve the problems, he is all alone with the questions asked with a quite confused
mind.

This movie is actually a really good reflection on what is going on with linguistically
diverse children. Although the intention of teaching kids English seems innocent and okay, the
struggle of kids when they are obliged to deal with a language that they do not grasp is
represented in a realistic way. Even if an immigrant child may be one of the best students in
the class, he or she may not show actual potential inside just due to language incompetence.
Other than the maths part, we can see in the movie that he is having a hard time communicating
with his schoolmates while playing a game. Therefore, it can be seen that not only in their
academic lives but also in their social lives, immigrant children give a massive effort to
understand and to be understood. This movie should be an awareness-raising movement to
understand immigrant children and find the best way to teach them a language with the highest
efficiency. I personally believe that linguistically diverse, or immigrant, children should be
taken care of more attentively and affectionately because mostly, it is difficult to understand
what they feel and how hard the struggle that they should take in the language learning process.