Introduction

[kellogg]

1: What is immersion? (Introduction)

a) Getting Attention: Is it immersion?

b) Giving Information: What is immersion? What kinds of immersion are there?

c) Checking Integration: Will immersion work for Pak Eunyeong? How can we make it work a little better?

d) Let’s Look Back: Some answers

e) Let’s Look Forward: Some new questions

a) Getting Attention: Is it immersion?

Ms. Yi Minkyeong is teaching a 재량 수업 in English. Like the famous New Zealand teacher Sylvia Ashton-Warner, she simply asks the children what words they would like spell. Then she spells them for the children.

In Ms. Ashton-Warner’s class, every child got the name on a card. The child would carry the card around for one day, and the next morning Ms. Ashton-Warner would BURN the card. This meant that the children had to REMEMBER the words.

Sometimes they did it by teaching each other in pairs or groups. But at the end of the day, Sylvia Ashton-Warner would ask the class as a whole and get thirty five different words, which she shared on a blackboard…and then erased.

Ms. Yi is not using cards today. She’s simply writing all the words on the board.

S8: Donut.

Some Ss: Donut.

T: Do you want to write 'donut'?

S8: Yeah.

S3: 왜 ‘도너’를 말해? (“Why did you say ‘donut’?”)

The word “doughnut” is not in the English curriculum. It won’t help S8 pass an English test, or get an English grade, or even get a doughnut, because the child can easily walk into any donut shop in Seoul and order in Korean. Why did S8 say “doughnut”?

The answer is that the other children have thought of words starting with “d” (such as “dragonfly”). The child is also thinking of “d”. And then the child thinks of “Dunkin Donuts”, an English sign he has seen many times on the street.

The child remembers “dunkin” because of its sound, not its meaning. But the meaning is interesting too. It’s an abbreviation of “dunking”, which means…well, it means immersion, actually. To “dunk” a donut is to immerse it in coffee. You don’t SUBMERSE it in coffee because if you did you would hurt your fingers. You just dip it into the coffee.

“Immersion” means that you “dunk” the children in English. You don’t SUBMERGE them in English, because if you did they would be over their heads. But you do provide a LOT of English in use, English which is used exactly the way English is used in a classroom setting, by teaching across the elementary school curriculum in English.

Now, is Ms. Yi Minkyeong’s lesson an example of immersion? Before you answer, let’s have a good look at what some of the founders of immersion education have to say about it. Here is a list of the eight “core features” (핵심 특질) of immersion, according to Robert Keith Johnson and Merrill Swain (Immersion Education: International Perspectives, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 6-8.) Which ones are TRUE of this data? Which ones are NOT true?

1. “The L2 is a medium of instruction.” Here, L2 means English. It’s true that S3 is not speaking English. But S3 is not instructing either. Who is instructing? What language does she use? Is the L2 a medium of instruction? 

2. “The immersion curriculum parallels the local L1 curriculum.” Here, L1 means Korean, and the L1 curriculum is the Korean elementary school curriculum: Math, Science, Social Studies, Science for Living, Ethics, Physical Education, Music, Art…and even 재량 수업. It’s true that Ms. Yi doesn’t really have a set curriculum at all here. But let’s suppose she IS teaching the curriculum. Which class do you think it is?

3. “Overt support exists for the L1.” When we listed the subjects of the elementary school curriculum we left out the most important class of all: Korean! Does overt support exist for Korean in elementary schools in Korea?

4. “The programme aims for additive bilingualism.” To be bilingual does not mean that one has two mother tongues. It’s not exactly clear what two mother tongues would mean, anyway! Do you need two mothers? Or perhaps, as in an experiment that Vygotsky suggests (1997: 259), your mother speaks one language to you and your father speaks another?

This two-tongued definition of bilingualism is based on ideas of culture (and ultimately race) that have no actual basis in linguistic science, much less education. An illiterate five year old, who has a vocabulary of a couple of hundred words and a mean length of utterance of two or three words, is a “native speaker” of English. But a Korean graduate student, with a vocabulary with many thousands of English words who can write a one hundred page thesis in English is not a “native speaker”. According to the “native speaker” ideal, the five year old has a higher level of language proficiency than the graduate student!

It’s probably easier to conceptualize bilingualism as something you DO rather than something you ARE. By that definition, anyone who has lexis, grammar, and some pragmatic ability in more than one language is “doing bilingualism”. So of course these children and their teacher doing bilingualism too, because they are adding a language.

At the end of the year, there will be no difference in L1 (Korean) proficiency between these children and children who have not had Ms. Lee’s class. Their Korean ability will be the same. But Ms. Yi’s children will have something more: they will have more than one language.

5. “Exposure to the L2 is largely confined to the classroom.” Swain and Johnson point to a study by Baetans Beardsome and Swain (1985) which compared students in immersion French programmes in English-speaking Canada with students in the same programme but in French-speaking Belgium. Both groups reached the same (very high) level of proficiency. But the Belgian group took HALF the time.

Of course, Korean children DO get some exposure to English outside the classroom; that is why S8 recommends the word “donut”. But signs provide exposure to English VOCABULARY (especially nouns, and especially names). They don’t provide much exposure to English GRAMMAR.

Besides, although Swain and Johnson clearly use the word “exposure”, Professor 이완기 argues that children exposure is not enough. In addition to exposure, the kids need “use”. What about use? Do children USE English outside the classroom in Korea? (Remember, 학원 study is ALSO classroom study!)

6. “Students enter with similar (and limited) levels of L2 proficiency.” When I was four years old, my parents moved to France, and I went to a 유치원 with other French children. My French proficiency was not the same as theirs. This situation is called SUBMERSION and not IMMERSION, because the child’s head goes RIGHT underwater for a while and it takes a long time for the child to get his head above water and catch his breath!).

The same thing is true of Korean children whose parents take them to America to “learn English” (and forget Korean). And of course, the same thing is true of Korean children who have to enter bilingual education programmes in with Chinese, Russian, South American and Indian children in public schools in the USA. They all have DIFFERENT levels of L2 proficiency.

But in Ms. Yi’s class the situation is different. Of course, the levels of L2 proficiency are not identical. We can imagine, for example, that S3 does not really understand what S8 is saying about the donuts. But S3 may know quite a few words that S8 doesn’t know. So we can say that their levels of English are fairly similar.

7. “The teachers are bilingual.” In a typical immersion programme the teachers need to understand the questions that kids ask in their L1, and to formulate good, but simple, answers in L2. They also have to be able to teach (quite consistently) the subject in the L2. Is Ms. Yi bilingual in precisely this way?

8. “The classroom culture is that of the local L1 community.” We saw in point 2 above that the immersion teaching is teaching the L1 curriculum. We want to be able to teach Math, Science, Social Studies, Science for Living, Ethics, Physical Education, Music, Art…and even 재량 수업 in the L2, in this case, in English. But the curriculum itself comes from the L1, not the L2.

Any curriculum is a cultural artifact; it’s part of the local, regional, and national community. So are the learners, of course, and in this case so is the teacher, Ms. Yi Minkyeong. This is not an English village, or even an English corner. The culture of the classroom is NOT going to be the culture of an English speaking environment in any way. This is a Korean classroom which speaks English.

Is Ms. Yi Minkyeong an immersion teacher? And what about THESE situations? Are they immersion? If not, why not?

Now, all the features we have given above are CORE features. That means that they are features that all immersion programmes have in common, at least according to Johnson and Swain. But Johnson and Swain also give ten VARIABLES. These are features of immersion programmes that may vary in practice.

1.        Ms. Bak Eunyeong wants to teach a demonstration math class in English. She translates materials from her math book.

2.        Ms. Lim Eunsuk wants to write a thesis on immersion and teaches her regular science class in English for three years, collecting data for analysis.

3.        A family goes to an English camp in the Philippines. During the day, the father and mother play golf and at night they study English with their children.

4.        A public school sets up a special school for the children of immigrants from Indonesia, Vietnam, China, and Bangladesh. They teach the public school curriculum in Korean.

5.        The “Ban Kimoon Leadership Academy” teaches all of its classes (except Korean) in English in order to promote future world leaders.

6.        In Taiwan, a Korean company constructs “English Villages” for learning English along the lines of Paju English village. Foreign native speakers are hired to staff mock shops, police the streets, etc.

7.        Oxford University Press markets American high school science books for use in immersion classes in science here in Korea.

8.        A Korean school in Qingdao, China, teaches the Korean public school curriculum in Korean to the sons and daughters of the Korean community in China.

b) Giving Information: What is immersion and what kinds of immersion are there?

But what is immersion? Is it a whole theory of human psychology and human language? Is it a way of teaching? How much teaching—a decade, a year, a lesson? Will it help you decide what to teach on Monday, or will it only help President Yi Myeongbak decide how to turn Korea into a 747 society?

Let’s figure this out. Richards (Richards and Rodgers, 1986; Richards and Renandya, 2002) make a distinction between: 

1.       Approaches. These involve both a theory of LANGUAGE and a theory of LEARNING.

2.       Methods. These involve a CURRICULUM and a repertoire of TECHNIQUES.

3.       Techniques. These involve idiot-proof RECIPES and “how-to” INSTRUCTIONS.

The questions we try to answer with approaches are abstract (e.g. “What is language? Why do people learn languages? How are they learnt?”). These tend to be the ones that we professors like to talk about. We will call these ideas “approaches” (because that’s what Anthony [1963] calls them).

The questions we try to answer with methods tend to be more concrete (e.g. “Why do people learn languages?” “How much will they pay to learn them and for how long?” “Who should teach languages and how much do I have to pay them?” “How can I control my teachers?”). These tend to be ideas that businessmen and method-makers like. We’ll call these ideas “methods”.

The questions we try to answer with techniques tend to be very immediate (e.g. “How do I teach this lesson next Monday?” “How can I correct the mistakes the kids make?” “How can I get the children to concentrate and for how long?” “How can I control my children?” “What is the point of this lesson?”) These tend to be ideas that teachers want to talk about. We’ll call these ideas “techniques”.

You might think that with our “core traits” we are describing a fixed method, or even a technique. But, at least according to Swain and Johnson (pp. 8-11), there are a number of VARIABLES which are NOT fixed—ways in which techniques and even methods can vary and still be “immersion”. They are:

Starting point: This is the level of the education system where immersion is introduced. For example, we can introduce it in primary school (early immersion), high school (late immersion) or even university (late late immersion). What kind of “immersion” are we interested in, and why?

Range: This is the extent to which the curriculum is taught in the L2. For example, we can teach only math in English. Or we could teach math and science. Or math, science, and social studies. Or all the subjects of the curriculum except Korean (full immersion). We CANNOT teach all the subjects of the curriculum in English and still call it immersion, though. (Why not? Look at point number THREE above and see!)

Ratio: It’s not at all necessary to keep the range of immersion the same from year to year; it’s perfectly possible for an immersion programme to start out with only one or two subjects taught in English and then gradually increase. Actually, the OPPOSITE is somewhat more common; Canadian immersion programmes often started out with 90% immersion to maximize exposure and then gradually introduced more and more subjects in English to provide support to the child’s developing cognitive academic language proficiency in the L1. (Suppose Ms. Yi wants to do what Ms. Bak and Ms. Lim are doing. Will she INCREASE the ratio of L1 or DECREASE it?)

Continuity: Some programmes are short, and they last only during a year or even half a year. Other programmes last throughout primary, secondary, and even tertiary education. Many immersion programmes that try for long term diachronic language development, however, have a high drop out rate. (Why do you think this happens?)

Support: Remember that immersion is not the same thing as submersion (that is, throwing the child in over his head). All immersion programmes have to provide support for the native language, which in our case is Korean. But this support is not just designed at maintaining the child’s native language ability for everyday purposes. It’s designed to help the child bridge two gaps: at first, the gap between the old everyday language and the new language of study, and later on between the old language of study (English) and the new one, where the child must also develop cognitive academic language proficiency. Now you can see from this that the amount of bridging support that is given the child really HAS to vary, both qualitatively and quantitatively. (How does Ms. Yi provide support in the data we looked at earlier, and why?)

Resources: We saw that we can’t just take the “hand me downs” from English speaking countries like the USA or Britain or Canada or Australasia and start teaching them in Korea. (Why not? See point 2 above!) We need our own materials. Of course, it costs money to translate and prepare, and it costs even more money to train or hire teachers who can do it. Some immersion programmes can be very rich (Finland), but they can also be very poor in resources (Hungary), and the success rate doesn’t always seem to be directly related to the investment rate (Canada).

Commitment: Just as language learning takes a lot of motivation, language teaching takes a lot of commitment. This is especially true of immersion programmes because of course the shortfall in resources in a new programme often fall on the shoulders of the teachers. I can still remember when “level based teaching” was introduced and teachers were told to supply their own materials, and if it were not for Professor 이완기 we might all have to provide the raw materials for “Let’s Play” too.

Attitudes: Some immersion programmes (e.g. Hawaiian, Welsh, Scots Gaelic) are designed to keep a language from dying out altogether. Other programmes (e.g. Hong Kong English immersion) are simply designed to provide children with the ability to study in another language. It makes a difference, because of course the commitment is different. (What about Korea? Is it closer to Hong Kong or closer to Hawaii?)

Status: In some countries, immersion programmes are carried out in national languages (e.g. French in Canada) while in others they are used for foreign languages (e.g. Japanese in America). And in still other countries, the status of the language has changed (e.g. before 1987, Hong Kong English was an official second language; it is now taught as a foreign language). Besides the status of English itself is changing worldwide: in many, perhaps most, countries it is taught neither as a second language nor as a foreign language but as an international one.

Standards: In 1980, Stephen Krashen predicted that immersion programmes would enable students to become functionally indistinguishable from native speakers, because they provided so much comprehensible input. That has not happened; the results of immersion programmes have been quite varied, but in no case to they consistently produce learners who cannot be told from native speakers. (What do you think the result of Ms. Yi’s “immersion” programme will be?)

You can see that immersion is highly variable. It’s not a fixed technique, nor does it have a curriculum of its own; it always uses the curriculum available in the L1 community where it is being taught. So we cannot really call it a method either.

Is immersion an approach? Let’s see. That would mean that immersion has a clear theory of language and a clear theory of learning. What might that be?

Well, according to the theoretical work of Jim Cummins, who was one of the pioneers of Canadian immersion, the language of the classroom is different from everyday language in important and systematic ways (Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency, or CALP, vs. Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills, or BICS). This is completely backed up by the work of Vygotsky on everyday and academic concepts (1987), which was in turn backed up by the work of Piaget on spontaneous and nonspontaneous concepts (1921).

Now, unlike approaches which depend on the simulation of communication (e.g. information gap exercises, or some task based work), immersion doesn’t try to make the classroom something it is not (e.g. a bus stop, or a convenience store). Immersion doesn’t try to make the teacher act a non-teacherly role (e.g. a passerby, a friend, a conversationalist).

Instead, immersion allows the language of the classroom to be classroom language; immersion recognizes and uses the way in which language adapts to the environment in which it is used; and immersion uses the academic concepts that are really needed by children as the grist for communication.

There are problems too. As we’ll see, the biggest problem with the underlying theory of language is that it appears to be based on a rigid distinction between form and meaning which teachers find very hard to sustain in practice (Wilkins, 1972). But some of the biggest problems we are going to look at with immersion, and the most interesting ones, have to do with the underlying theory of learning.

The reason why these are the biggest problems is the same reason why they are the most interesting: they cover the whole primary school curriculum rather than simply language.

For example. Consider the way this chapter (and every other chapter) is laid out: first we focus our attention, in this case by using a very short section of Ms. Yi Minkyeong’s data. We then give new information, in this case information about the larger issues involved in the data. And in the end of the chapter, we’ll look at things that you can do to integrate this new information with what you already know about teaching.

As you will see, this pattern of getting attention, giving information and then checking for integration of old and new information is quite pervasive. We find it on the very highest level of methods (Introduction to a class, followed by lessons, and then a test) and also on the very lowest levels of techniques.

S8: Donut. Some Ss: Donut. T: Do you want to write 'donut'? S8: Yeah. S3: 왜 ‘도너’를 말해?	Getting Attention
T: (gesture) Short one or long one? S1: Long one. T: Long one? Okay. S3: 그거 무슨 뜻이야? S1: 긴 거... (inaudible) T: (writing) d. o. u. g. h. n. u. t. (pointing) Dough. Nut. Doughnut. Ss: Doughnut.	Giving Information
T: Doughnut. Ss: Doughnut. T: 두넛 아니고 doughnut. Some Ss: Doughnut. T: Okay, two more times, please. T & S10: d. o. u. g. h. n. u. t.	Checking Integration

We can even find something LIKE it on the most smallest unit of teaching: the turn.

T: Okay (getting information). Two more times (giving information), please (checking integration).

So we find it everywhere. But does it really work? In a sense, it must work, or we would not find it everywhere. But in another important sense, it CAN’T work, because we are really looking for something much more important than just getting the children to integrate information. We want them to be able to create new knowledge, to say things they have never heard before, and they will never learn this just by hearing more and more and more. It’s a big world, and the classroom is, after all, a very small part of it.

c) Checking Integration: Will it work for me? How can we make it work a little better?

In order for children to be able to say things they have never heard before, it’s not enough to give them new words. They have to know how to put the words together in new ways, that is, they have to know some grammar.

This brings us back to the problem we mentioned earlier when we talked about problems with the theory of language that underlies a lot of work in immersion. We said that immersion assumes a quite strict distinction between form and meaning. Immersion is, generally speaking, a question of teaching meaning, not form. The original idea was that if we simply attend to meaning, the form will be supplied automatically.

Actually, one of the major results of nearly fifty years of the study in Canadian immersion is that we now know this doesn’t really happen. Children learn a lot of language, but they don’t learn that much grammar. So it appears that immersion programmes cannot just teach the L1 syllabus in the L2; the teacher will have to focus a little on grammar issues that come up in the lesson.

That is what we are going to do here. We’ll look at the lesson plan that Bak Eunyeong did as part of her “immersion” class in math. We’ll then see if we can IMPROVE it, by drawing attention to certain LANGUAGE problems that come up in the lesson.

Unit	5. Time and Weight		Topic	Estimate, measure weight	Period	6/10
Objective	Students will be able to estimate, measure weight.
Materials	video clip, objects, banana, milk, scale, 1kg weights, paper, ppt
Steps		Teaching-Learning Activities			Time	materials (◆), remarks(※)
		Teacher's Activities		Student's Activities
Warm-up Build-up		◦Motivation -Let's sing the math song. (1) -Let's make some banana milk. (2) (showing how to make banana milk) -What do I need to make a delicious drink? (3) ◦Objective -Let's check today's objective. -Let's read.		-(singing a math song) -(seeing how to make banana milk) -You need a scale! -(checking today's objective) -(reading the objective)	6´ 10'	◆song ◆banana,milk,honey,recipie ◆video clip (생활의 달인) ◆여러 가지 물건
		Students will be able to estimate and measure weight. (4)
		◦Activities -There are 3 activities in this class. Let's read about them together.		-(checking and reading today's )objective
		<Activity 1> : Feeling weight         <Activity 2> : Guessing weight         <Activity 3> : Playing a weighing game
		<Activity1> : Feeling weight -Let's watch TV.  You'll be very surprised. -OK, you can be a 달인, too. Let's try it. There are a lot of materials on your desk.		-(watching a TV program) -Yes, I do.

Steps	Teaching-Learning Activities		Time	materials(◆),remarks(※)
	Teacher's Activities	Student's Activities
Build-Up	Feel the weight. Light or heavy? (5) -Now, line them up from the lightest to the heaviest.  I will give you 5 minutes. (6) -I'll do it first. Who is heavier? -Who is lighter? -So, we line them up, like this 규현 first. And next 세환?  Let's start. You have 3 minutes.  How many minutes? -Let's start. -Let's check.  Measure the weight with scales, and correct the order. -Say the right order for your team. -Let's move on to the second activity. <Activity 2> : Estimate and measure weight -Let's move on to the second activity.  Open your books to page 20, and do Activity 1, fill  in the blanks. -Prepare the things on your desk.  What things are there in your box? -First, feel the weight. Compare it to a 1kg carton/bottle of juice, Is it lighter, heavier, or the same (7)?   Now, estimate the weight. Lastly, measure the weight. How much does it weigh? How heavy is it? Were you right? <Activity3> : Playing a game -Let's play a team game.  -Today is my handsome friend 타이비‘s birthday. He likes fruit very much.	-(listening how to do activity 1 carefully) -세환 is heavier. -규현 is lighter. -Yes. -(lining the order from the lightest to the heaviest things.) -(checking the weight with a scale and correct the order) -Pencil, glasses, notebook, doll, story book -(solving the questions of the textbook) -Cup, pencil case, cell phone, dictionary, clock -(feel,estimate and measure the weight) -Yes, I do. -Whaaa! -(making an 1kg fruit bax by estimating the weight)	10' 9'	◆timer,scale ※The students speak English. ◆textbook,cup,pencil case,cell phone, clock,dictionary,scale

(1) Should it be “Let’s sing A math song” or “Let’s sing THE math song”? It all depends.

Do they know the song already? Then you can use "Let's sing THE math song". But suppose they DON'T know the song? Suppose you want to teach a NEW song.

T: Do you like songs?

Here's a song! The song is Banana Milk Arirang!

What kind of milk? Banana milk! What kind of Arirang? Banana Milk Arirang!

What's the name of the song?

Now, let's sing!

Remember that we use the PLURAL (-s) to express the general idea (songs).

We use the INDEFINITE ARTICLE ("a") to give a new example. (Here's a song.)

We use the DEFINITE ARTICLE ("the") or a NAME ("Banana Milk Arirang") to point out a unique individual.

(To the tune of Arirang)

One banana, two bananas, three bananas, four!

Five bananas, six bananas, eight bananas, more!

Weigh up the banana, and measure out the milk.

If you put in too much honey in the drink

Then you call it honey milk not banana milk!

Here’s some honey! There’s some milk…(etc.)

T: Listen! "Here's a fruit!" Repeat?

You can see that this obeys the D-I-C pattern. "Listen" is used to DIRECT, "Here's a fruit!" is used to INFORM. And "Repeat?" is used to CHECK.

(2) Now, notice that "s" and "a" and "the" are used with objects. We say:

Do you like bananas?

This is a banana!

The banana is for making banana milk!

But what do we do about MILK? We can't really do this:

Do you like milks? (sic)

This is a milk! (sic)

It's not because this is WRONG. It's not wrong. But it doesn't mean what we want to say. It means this:

Waiter: Do you like milks? We have banana milk, strawberry milk, and chocolate milk.

Now, that's not what the teacher means to say. The teacher means to say this:

Do you like milk?

Here is some milk.

Notice that "some" is NOT the same as "a" or "the" or even "s". It means something new. What does it mean?

It means this: with "a" and "the" and even "s" we don't have to measure. We can just count, like this:

One banana, two bananas, three bananas, four!

Five bananas, six bananas, seven bananas! More!

But with MILK we can't count. We have to MEASURE, like this:

One glass, two glasses, three glasses, four

Here's some milk. There's some milk. Woops! It's on the foor!

Of course, THIS is the real teaching point: Counting and measuring, but also counting WORDS and measuring WORDS in English. So we want to teach ARTICLES for counting and "some" for measuring.

(3) Of course, banana milk isn't a food. It's a drink. That’s why it’s not very countable!

(4) You can see that words like "objective" and "activity" are not going to be useful. The children don't understand them (except insofar as they mean something like "aim" or "goal" or "point" or "game".

It's always much better if we can put the content of the lesson in terms the kids understand.

T: Look! Listen! This lesson is about light and heavy things. It's about trucks and bicycles, whales and 멸치. It's about ME and...?

Ss: 이끔미! 

T: Right! It's about LIGHT people and HEAVY people. It's about LIGHTNESS and HEAVINESS. It's about LIGHT weight and HEAVY weight. It's about feeling, guessing, and measuring WEIGHT.

There is really NO reason for making promises that we cannot keep about what the children will be able to do. All we have to do is tell the kids what the lesson is about.

(5) We saw that the teacher has to break up a lesson into SMALL PIECES. Each piece becomes an INFORM. The teacher has to get the children's attention, give them the information, and then check to make sure that it has been assimilated before moving on to the next bit of information.

Now, IMPERATIVES are useful for getting attention: Look! Listen!

STATEMENTS, especially "X is Y" statements are useful for giving information "This is a banana". "That is milk".

But what about CHECKING? Well, the usual way is something like this:

T: Do you understand?

T: Are you ready?

T: Have you finished?

Now, this LOOKS easy. All the kids have to do is answer YES or NO. But precisely because it is easy it doesn't really help us check INTEGRATION very well; it doesn't tell whether the newer, more abstract knowledge has been integrated with the older, more concrete knowledge into a single unified structure. So for example we don't know if the children understand that "weight" refers to "light" and "heavy".

So suppose we do this:

T: Do you understand? What is the WEIGHT? Is it LIGHT or HEAVY?

You can see that by using "weight" with "light and heavy" we are able to integrate  newer and more abstract knowledge with older and more concrete knowledge.

There's more! By using  "light or heavy" we are able to integrate the ANSWER and the QUESTION: we can be sure that the children will know how to answer,

(6) Try not to use passives (e.g. "5 minutes are given"). Passives are not elementary English; they are a feature of high school English. We want children to treat the part that comes before the verb as the SUBJECT. So...

T: I'll give you FIVE minutes.

(7) Notice we can use THREE part choice questions like this:

Is it LIGHTER, or HEAVIER, or the SAME?

Of course, you can also ask this:

How much does it weigh?

Or even:

Tell me about the weight.

Now, what this means is that we can set up a kind of hierarchy of difficulty, like this:

OPEN QUESTIONS (Many possible answers, and so quite difficult)

Tell me about the weight.

How much does it weight?

Is it lighter, or heavier, or the same?

Is it light or heavy?

Is it light?

It's light, isn't it?

It's light!

CLOSED QUESTIONS (Only one possible answer, and so quite easy)

That is good news. It means that the flexible teacher can always find a level at which the children CAN respond. The REALLY flexible teacher can then "take it to the next level" like this:

T: Is it lighter, or heavier, or the same?

Ss: Same!

T: Good. It's the same. Now, how much does it weigh?

(8) Good idea. THIS is what I mean by putting the objectives in language the kids understand. Here's another way.

T: Now, let's make money! We're going to sell FRUIT BOXES. All kinds of fruit for only ten thousand won. Put in many DIFFERENT kinds, and it will be colorful! Colorful boxes sell well!

BUT...each box is ONE kilogram. No more, and no less. Less, and the buyers get mad. More and...you LOSE MONEY.

The advantage to doing it this way is that you have a way to punish students who get it WRONG (by having them "lose money") as well as rewarding ones who get it right.

(9) In immersion, we always need to be on the look out for PRODUCTIVE teaching points, and this is a good one. Look:

gram                   meter                  volt                       watt

kilogram              kilometer             kilovolt                 kilo…

centigram            centimeter           centi...                  ........

milligram              milli....                 ......                                  ........

micro...                ...                                      ...                       ...

You can even talk about TEN kilo원! (\10,000).

10) It's very useful to look FORWARD to the next lesson. One way to do this would be to take the quiz questions you've got and complicate them a little, like this:

T: ONE kilogram plus HALF a kilogram. How many grams?

d) Let’s Look Back

Before we go on, let’s look back. What kinds of answers have we got? Remember, we asked THESE questions:

a) Is it immersion?

b) What is immersion? What kinds of immersion are there?

c) Will it work for me? How can we make it work a little better?

Is Ms. Yi Minkyeong’s class an immersion class? Not yet. But it could be. It really depends on how much of this she wants to do. She is using English as a medium of instruction, she’s following the Korean primary school curriculum in English, she’s giving plenty of support for the children’s Korean (by responding to questions in Korean with English answers and by offering simple yes/no questions and questions that contain the answer (e.g. “Long one or short one?”). Exposure is certainly is largely confined to the classroom, and the children are at roughly similar levels of proficiency. Ms. Yi is a bilingual teacher, and the classroom is 100% Korean. If she teaches this way across the WHOLE curriculum it would certainly be immersion. So we see that immersion is not only possible in Korea, it is, in some ways, already the way we teach.

b) What is immersion? What kinds of immersion are there? Immersion is NOT submersion; it’s not isolating children in the class because their L1 is different from the language of instruction, and it’s leaving children alone on the playground because they can’t speak the language of their classmates (Saville-Troike). It’s not just throwing a child in over his or her head and hoping they can swim. It’s also not “sheltered instruction”, where children who do not speak the language of instruction are given a special class apart from other children. It’s a way of teaching your regular elementary school curriculum AND teaching English (which is, of course, also part of the regular elementary school curriculum) at the same time.

Putting it in this intensely practical way, however, is a little misleading; it make immersion sound like a technique. As we saw, it’s not just a technique. It includes a fair amount of new curriculum, because we have to be able to focus on difficult grammar when it comes up in the lesson. For example, a lesson on measuring and weighing is going to have to use articles like “a”, “the”, and “some” and we are going to have to explain the difference.

But it’s not just a matter of adding a little new curriculum either, because immersion does have certain ideas about language and ideas about learning. Classroom language is different from everyday language; the classroom is in some ways a bad place to learn everyday language, but it is the perfect place to learn classroom language. Since language learning means learning forms and meanings together, we need to choose the meanings that are naturally found in our curriculum to teach the forms of English.

Of course, immersion in Korea is not going to be like immersion in Canada. It’s going to be much more like immersion in Ms. Yi’s class. But the founders of immersion tell us that this is good, not bad; immersion programmes vary according to their starting point their range, their ratio of L2 to L1, their consistency and continuity, the amount of support provided (“bridging support”, according to Johnson and Swain), the resources available, the commitment of the teacher, the attitudes to the language, and what counts as success. All of these things are going to be different in Korea, and so they should be: 물입교육도 신도불이!

In the end, we considered some practical problems in one immersion class. We looked at how the teaching point, measurement, was reflected in a language point, namely articles. We found ways to draw attention to this and highlight it without making English the major focus of the lesson. And finally, we looked at how this lesson and every lesson is constructed around three basic pedagogical, classroom language functions: getting attention, giving information, and checking for integration between old knowledge and new.

e) Let’s Look Forward

In a word, we’ve been thinking about what immersion IS. That’s a good place to begin. But WHY is immersion this way?

In the next chapters, we’ll look at the things that make immersion what it is one by one. So for example in the next chapter we look at English as a medium of instruction (as opposed to a means of everyday communication). In Chapter Three, we consider the primary school curriculum, and in Chapter Four we’ll think about how we can include the children’s Korean. In Chapter Five we’ll think about the classroom as an “island” of English in a sea of Korean, and in Chapter Six, we’ll consider the problem of variable proficiency. In Chapter Seven we’ll look at the teacher, and in Chapter Eight we’ll consider the English classroom as an example of Korean culture.

Of course, there aren’t any large scale immersion programmes in Korean public education yet. In fact, there may NEVER be, and that might be a good thing. But we can’t just keep saying “may” and “might”; we need to find out whether or not immersion is right. That means that this book is really a question rather than an answer, an inquiry rather than a clear result.

But it’s a serious question, and we must try to make it a rigorous inquiry. So in each chapter we’ll have an introduction involving data—our data, Korean data, either from an actual immersion experiment or from a situation which is in some ways similar to an immersion situation. We follow this with a section which has three elements: a theoretical inquiry, an empirical study or a summary of empirical studies, and experimental data, not necessarily in that order. We’ll conclude with something practical; a way of using what we’ve done in the chapter to improve (often in quite small ways) the way we teach today or tomorrow.

How can we include so much data if there aren’t any large scale immersion programmes in Korean public education yet? We can do it exactly the way we did it in this chapter. First of all, we will find that we have a lot of the elements (but not all) for immersion in our classrooms already. Secondly, we will need to consider what happens when children don’t have the kinds of things that immersion provides.

So for example in the next chapter we’ll look at English as teacher talk, or English as “teacherese”. This is already quite common in our classrooms, at least in English class and sometimes in the 재량수업, and of course it’s one of the fundamental elements of immersion teaching. So we will find that we can get a lot out of studying English as teacher talk in classrooms right now and considering how it might look if we used it in other classrooms.

In particular, we want to look at the kind of vocabulary and the kind of grammar we will find. Is it the same as ordinary English classes, or is it somehow different? We will argue that it is different, that it is morphologically more complex, and that this creates opportunities as well as difficulties. In fact, we may consider that “opportunities” and “difficulties” are just two different words for exactly the same thing.

References:

Ashton-Warner. S.   Teacher.

Harley, B., Allen, P., Cummins, J. and Swain, M. (1990) The Development of second language proficiency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Johnson, R.K. and Swain, M. (1997) Immersion education: International perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Richards, J.C. and Rodgers, T.S. (1986) Approaches and methods in language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Richards, J.C. and Renandya, W.A. (2002) Methodology in language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Saville-Troike, M. 1988. Private speech: Evidence for second language learning strategies during the ‘silent’ period. Child Language 15: 567-590.

Vygotsky, L.S. 1997. Collected Works, Vol. 4. New York and London: Plenum.

Wilikins, D. (1972) Linguistics in language teaching. London: Arnold.