If you’re a parent who wants your kids to learn a second language, you’ve probably heard the term “immersion” a lot. It’s even right there on our TruFluency Kids home page.
Now, “immersion” is an important word in language learning. But it’s not a magic word. Immersion has to be done with a very specific recipe and ingredients to get the outcome that you want: bilingualism. This means getting your kids truly speaking, understanding and making themselves understood in their second language.
That sounds hard, right? No worries; you just have to make sure to get help from real professionals. That’s why we’re here today! We’ll show you great videos to learn about immersion best practices.
Ingredients for the Best Immersion Recipe
A language-immersion environment for children isn’t easy to create, but it’s essential for language learning. Here are some of the ingredients for a successful immersion recipe:
- Images
- Stories
- Gestures
- Games
- Music
- Questions
Videos about Language Learning
Videos are a great tool to get informed on the best language learning practices for your kids. Just make sure you’re watching videos from professionals. To help you, today we’re sharing some videos about language learning and the immersion method from experts in the language space.
We’re going to summarize the main points for you, and then you can check out the videos anytime. We’ll also share some insights on these videos based on our own immersion methods. Since we’re an online Spanish immersion school for kids, we’ll be mentioning Spanish in a lot of our examples. But our advice about immersion applies to any language your children are learning.
Hopefully, this review will help you make more informed choices when it comes to your kids’ language learning. Remember: Don’t pick out an “immersion” school without making sure it has the ingredients and recipe needed for successful language learning!
Steve Kaufman
Steve Kaufman is a renowned linguist who speaks 20 languages. Twenty! Clearly, he knows a thing or two about mastering new languages.
In Kaufman’s video, he talks about how his grandchildren, who are native English speakers, went through French immersion programs in school.
He says they now understand French very well, since all of their classroom lessons were in that language. But they’re not nearly as good at speaking French. That’s typical in school immersion programs with classes of more than five or so kids.
So why is this the case? Well, Kaufman goes on to share that, in his grandkids’ classes, they spent a lot of time listening to French, but not speaking it. Big mistake!
Let us tell you: Conversational practice MUST HAPPEN if you want your children to become fluent. This is the core of the Bellieu Method, the language-learning process created by Micah Bellieu, TruFluency Kids’ founder and CEO.
She is a longtime language teacher and has learned three languages as an adult (Spanish, French and Japanese). Plus, she’s raising her daughter in three languages (English, French and Spanish). In other words, she knows her stuff when it comes to language immersion!
What’s the key takeaway from this video?
Immersion programs are wonderful, and they do the best they can with 10 to 30 kids in the class. Yet simply being in an immersion class is not enough for your kid to become truly fluent in a second language.
It all comes down to how much speaking practice the immersion class provides. If you sit in class and listen to the teacher, you might learn to understand well. But you won’t learn to speak unless you’re speaking.
How can I get my kids to speak in their target language?
Kids need speaking practice in a very small group a few hours a week, in addition to immersion with teachers who have methods to get kids talking and confidently responding to questions and telling stories.
Are your kids mostly listening and reading in their second language, but they don’t speak it as much? Supplement their school’s immersion program with experiences that give them more chances to speak in the target language.
What kind of experiences give kids a language immersion experience?
- A babysitter who only speaks the target language
- A family member who only speaks the target language
- Summer camp in the target language
- Small group or one-on-one online classes. At TruFluency Kids we teach Spanish classes with a specific recipe for bilingual success that are a great complement to schools’ immersion programs.
Give Your Child the Gift of Spanish!
Olly Richards
Olly Richards is the founder of StoryLearning and creator of the StoryLearning method. He’s a giant in the language learning space. Richards starts out his video by saying immersion is “hyped far too much.” We agree: Immersion works only when it’s done with the right ingredients (specific high-use words) and recipe (method for getting kids talking).
He argues that while some people can quickly learn a new language in an immersion environment, for most of us it’s far too intimidating and frustrating if the whole language is thrown at us at once.
Imagine this scenario: You have a job at a global corporation. Your employer sends you to the company’s Madrid office for a month. You don’t speak a bit of Spanish, but suddenly you are completely immersed in the language. You hear it on the train, in restaurants, on TV. You sit in on meetings where your colleagues speak Spanish.
Are you going to end up fluent in Spanish by the time you go back to the U.S.? Of course not! You didn’t have the time, the ingredients or the recipe to get fluent. The full-on immersion with no comprehensible input was not helpful to you as a beginner in Spanish! Being surrounded by native speakers is like getting thrown into the deep end of the pool without a swimming lesson.
Richards recommends an approach that we actually use ourselves at TruFluency Kids. The fancy term for it is “comprehensible input,” coined by Stephen Krashen — the man for language acquisition!
What is comprehensible input?
It really just means learners are exposed to language they will understand. In other words, if you understand 90% of what someone is saying in your target language, it’s relatively easy to learn the other 10%.
What are some examples of comprehensible input?
- An image
- A gesture
- Short phrases
- Help responding
- A memorable and simple story
So, here at TruFluency Kids we make sure that 90% is understood in class from Day 1. In our classes, we do not ask beginners to follow long, complicated stories filled with Spanish vocabulary they won’t understand.
We start them out with two-word questions that require one-word or two-word responses.. It’s very similar to how we all learned our first language. To boost kids’ understanding, we also make sure to use gestures, images and stories that are logical.
What does that look like in practice? A teacher shows a photo of the object they’re talking about in Spanish so that the meaning of what they’re saying is clear. This is still immersion, but it’s meeting our students where they are with their Spanish skills. It really, really works. Just check out our testimonials for proof.
Real Fast Spanish
There’s a really good analogy in this video from Real Fast Spanish. It says that expecting to learn a language simply by being immersed in it is like thinking you’ll get buff just by being inside a gym.
For immersion to work, you need association and spaced repetition. “Association” means linking the lessons to the students’ real lives. This helps us learn a second language, because it’s how we learned our native language.
Here’s an example that Micah told us:
When she was teaching her 2-year-old daughter the words “hot” and “cold” in French, she showed her fire when she said “hot.” Then she put an ice cube in her hand when she said “cold.” Micah could practically see the light bulb come on above her daughter’s head!
Now her kid loves using these words every time she sees something hot or cold. This experience stuck with Micah’s daughter instantly, and those words are now solidified through the association.
We also use association in TruFluency Kids classes. For example, we have kids bring readily accessible household items to class each week to help them learn the associated vocabulary.
TruFluency Kids Has the Perfect Recipe for Spanish Immersion
Now you can see how great immersion works when it’s done well. It’s a super helpful method. But you’ll need to make sure the school and teachers who work with your kids truly know how to put it into practice.
During TruFluency Kids’ Spanish immersion classes, our native-speaker teachers do all kinds of fun things in every class, like storytelling, singing, dancing, playing games, doing crafts and even cooking! Kids won’t get bored, and will learn through everyday activities. Every lesson is based on our Bellieu Method for Spanish fluency.
Take a trial class now! It’s super personalized, because there are no more than four to six students per class. Afterward, you can join a parent Q & A to answer any questions.
Helping your kids learn Spanish is our passion, and they’ll have a lot of fun along the way.
