Find In-Person and Online Volunteer Opportunities for Teens: Ideas for Virtual Learners
by Valerie Kirk
How to Do Language Immersion at Home to Help Students Learn Better
byConnections Academy
7 min to read
Many people around the world speak more than one language. But, in the United States, 78 percent speak only English. If you would prefer that your child is among those who are multilingual, what can you do?
One great path is language immersion. Research has repeatedly proven that language immersion programs are a highly effective way for children to learn a second language. While a number of public schools around the nation offer such programs, classes are typically held in a physical classroom. For parents of children who are learning at home, language immersion may seem out of reach. Fortunately, that’s not the case.
Even if you only speak one language yourself, there are plenty of ways to provide your child with immersion language learning at home. Here’s what you need to know.
What Is Language Immersion?
Language immersion programs for kids drop students right into a new language. Rather than functioning like a standard language course where students slowly learn vocabulary and phrases, students in language immersion programs are taught primarily in the language they are learning.
Benefits of Language Immersion for Students
Being multilingual is a pleasure all its own, but immersion language learning can have many more benefits for your child. These include:
- Improved learning: Language immersion programs can help your child succeed academically. Studies show that kids in such programs pay better attention in school, have higher test scores, and read at a higher level than their peers.
- Better brain health: People who are bilingual are better protected against cognitive decline and dementia later in life.
- More career opportunities: In a globalized economy, being able to speak two or more languages is a highly sought-after skill in many industries.
- More cultural empathy: Children who learn another language develop a deep understanding of other cultures, which can help them thrive throughout their lives.
Choosing a Language for Your Child to Learn
When choosing an immersion language for kids, you should consider multiple factors. These include:
- Where you live: Many Americans live close to immigrant communities that speak a language other than English. Choosing the language of such a community can open up local opportunities for immersion.
- Worldwide use: Some languages are spoken by hundreds of millions and some have far fewer speakers. From a practical standpoint, choosing a common language can have more lifelong benefits than choosing one that fewer people speak.
- Available resources: While you’re likely to find some language-learning resources for every language, certain languages have many more resources available than others. You may want to check online and at your local library for what’s available and then choose a language that has more of what you need for immersion.
- Personal familiarity: Did you study a language in high school or college? Even if you lack mastery of the language, immersing your child in the same language you once studied can give you a leg up when helping your child learn.
Supporting Your Child’s Language Immersion at Home
Many parents who want to start a language immersion program at home are hesitant because they don’t speak a second language. If that’s you, don’t worry. While being a bilingual home might help, it’s not at all necessary when immersing your child in a new language.
It’s all about making use of resources—many of which are free or low cost. The more you can use these resources to immerse your child in the secondary language, the better and faster they’ll pick it up. You might learn something as well, but knowing how to immerse yourself in a language isn’t the goal. When you’re older, it’s harder to learn a language. But kids pick up languages faster, and exposure to a new language is extremely helpful in their learning.
When setting up a language immersion program at home, you can take advantage of the following resources and opportunities:
Audio and Video
If your child is immersing themselves in one of the more common world languages, you’ll be able to find countless audio and visual recordings in that language. These do not have to be educational. They can include age-appropriate movies, TV shows, podcasts, and music. If you live in an area with stations in the language your child is learning, you can also watch live events like sports and news or listen to the radio while in the car. Because audio and visual media typically involves native speakers speaking casually, they’re a great way for a child to immerse themselves in a dialect.
Graphic Novels, Picture Books, and Comic Books
Before children can read, picture books help them connect words with their meanings. The same method of learning can be applied to immersion in a new language. Books in another language that include plenty of pictures will help your child associate the words on the page with what’s going on in the images. The same word/image association also makes age-appropriate comic books in another language a great resource. The goal is to provide your child with the types of books they would enjoy in English and then let them explore.
Apps and Websites
There are plenty of apps and websites that help people, including children, learn a new language. While some of these follow a traditional model of language acquisition, some are much more immersive. They can be a great addition to a language immersion program, but they’re not the only ways to use digital resources. You can help your child go to websites written in the language they’re learning or even change the language on sites they routinely use, switching them from English to a second language. Seeing familiar content in a different language is a great way to build comprehension.
Friends and Community
If you know any native speakers of the language your child is learning or if you live near a community of native speakers, you can give your child a strong, in-person immersion experience. Invite your friends over and have them speak in only their native language. Or go to a market or event in the local community where people will be speaking in the language your child is learning. Being around people who speak a language regularly and fluently is a great way to learn how a language is used in everyday conversation.
The Home Environment
You don’t have to speak a second language to turn your home into a language immersion classroom. In addition to all the other ways you can bring a new language into your home, you can also use the label method. This involves labeling the commonplace items in your house with the word it’s known by in the language your child is learning. For instance, if your child is learning Spanish, you would label the kitchen table as “mesa de cocina.” Don’t worry about whether your child can properly pronounce the words; simply having everything labeled can help them significantly expand their vocabulary and accelerate their learning.
Online School
High-quality online schools like Connections Academy have great foreign language courses. And a foreign language course can be the perfect supplement to your child’s language immersion. Plus, because Connections Academy is online, your child can stay at home, surrounded by the immersion experience you’ve created. But that’s not the only advantage of online school.
When you enroll at an online public school like Connections Academy, your child can learn in a flexible environment, giving them—and you—more control over their daily and weekly schedule. This makes it possible for you to focus on the immersion experience when and how it works best for your child. At the same time, you’ll have teachers and counselors available to help you and your child through their overall learning journey.
To find out more about the ways that younger students learn, read our article on the different types of learning styles and intelligences.
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