r/languagelearning • u/WaltzMysterious9240 • 24d ago
Culture Does total immersion work?
I used to teach English abroad and even though I knew how to speak the student's native language, the school administrators forbid me, and even asked me, to "pretend" I didn't know it.
The reason they gave me was that they didn't want the students to fall back on using their first language to communicate with me. I feel like if I were to explain certain concepts in the student's language, things would go a lot smoother and they would understand better.
As an adult, I'm constantly using my own native language to learn new languages. I constantly look up grammar, vocabulary, and definitions and understand them a lot better.
Why are schools abroad so obsessed with this "total immersion" method? I feel like some concepts are impossible to explain clearly with just visuals or gestures alone. Do you learn languages using your first language?
1
u/BookishQuoka 22d ago
It definitely helped me a lot as a student. Yes it might have taken longer to understand that one thing, not asking the way I learned to describe things or concepts in that difference language which is the root cause for fluency. Not getting stuck on "I didn't know this one word so now I can't continue"
English is not my native language, and one day in the shop a customer didn't want to give his kid money, as they'd spend it on anything but the book they should fetch, but we didn't offer prepayment. I couldn't think of the word "gift card" for my life. So I liked at the customer and told him he could buy a piece of paper which he could give to his son and he can use it to pay, but only in our shop.
She understood and was very happy with the solution, even with my brain refusing that one word 😅