Being thrown in at the deep end works

Immersion language learning pays dividends for British students

Everybody was shouting out "yuanchang jiuqiu" (home run), as a year 9 student passed the fourth base line on the Bohunt school playground during a physical education lesson involving a game of rounders, a softer version of baseball played in British schools.

This PE lesson was jointly run by a Bohunt school physical education instructor and a Chinese language teacher, allowing students to play the sport and learn Mandarin at the same time.

This innovative pedagogy, known as immersion language teaching, was introduced by Bohunt School in 2010. As the first secondary school in Britain to introduce this approach, its students were invited to teach Prime Minister David Cameron some Mandarin before he visited China a few years ago.

Bohunt featured in last year's BBC television documentary Are Our Kids Tough Enough? Chinese School, which sought to compare British and Chinese teaching techniques.

"The immersion program is content-and-language integrated learning where students will learn other subjects in a different language," says Neil Strowger, head teacher at Bohunt School.

Immersion teaching means a group of students in Key Stage 3, normally known as Year 7, Year 8 and Year 9, are taught a third of their curriculum in the target language, which can be French, Spanish or Mandarin.

As in each core subject, there is a lot of content to get through, so the immersion technique lends itself more to practical subjects with less heavy content, such as art, physical education, and personal, social and religious subjects, as well as information and communications technology, says Philip Avery, director of learning and strategy for Bohunt Trust, which runs the school.

Those in the immersion group have a more positive attitude toward learning than those outside it, Avery says.

"That gap opens up during their first year and it stays all the way through their time with us. There is something about how they perceive themselves as learners, how they perceive learning and how they perceive school that is more positive because they've been in an immersion group."

Tania Horak, a language lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire, says immersion teaching is an interesting concept and she believes it has many advantages, among them that "the main concept behind this approach is that language is being used for real-life goals of actual communication, which is often missing from other types of language classrooms".

Horak's viewpoint was vividly illustrated when one of the Bohunt students realized halfway through delivering a technology workshop that her audience was primarily French-speaking and thus, because of her increased confidence through Bohunt's French immersion program, switched languages and presented the rest of the workshop in French.

Juan Cole, head of Chinese at Bohunt School, says the immersion program creates an authentic environment for students to learn the language and, for example in the physical education lessons, "you learn by doing, which is exactly the same as when you learn your first language".

The proof can also be found in the results of Cole's GCSE class who are taking the exam, which is aimed at 16 year-olds, three years early, with 90 percent of them predicted to get an A or A-star, well above the national average.

The program, especially the inclusion of Mandarin, has received widespread acclaim through the British Council and HSBC's National Mandarin Chinese Speaking Competition, in which students from Bohunt reached the national final three years in a row.

This year, Lila Marshman, 13, a Mandarin immersion program student at Bohunt, impressed the judges with her language skills and won the first prize of the beginner level section of the contest.

However, even with the immersion program's recognizable successes it is nowhere close to becoming widespread around Britain.

The main problem, Horak suggests, is that the effectiveness of the approach relies on the quality and commitment of the teachers.

"They need to be confident, enthusiastic, and proficient users of the language, notably not necessarily native speakers, however, who above all understand key principles of second-language acquisition."

Lara Wolfe contributed to this story.

wangmingjie@mail.chinadailyuk.com

(China Daily European Weekly 05/20/2016 page7)