An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

5.3 Immersion language teaching
Over the last twenty years, immersion language teaching in Canada has been widely
celebrated as a success story in bilingual education (Johnson and Swain 1997). What
immersion means is the teaching of the second language as the medium of
instruction. This use of the second language as medium is much older than the
Canadian enterprise, and is still the prac tice in many colonial situations such as
anglophone and francophone ex-colonies.
But it is important to examine carefully just what is claimed for this Canadian
version of bilingual education. Its applied linguistic evaluators are very careful to
make clear just what those claims are and just what constraints must be put on those
claims (Swain and Lapkin 1982). These restrictions remind us that immersion
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education cannot easily be transferred to other situations where the same conditions
do not pertain.
Canadian immersion programmes of various types (early total, early partial, late
partial, beginning in Grade 8) have all been shown to be successful in terms of their
objectives. But they require the presence of four factors:
1. The parents of the students need to be involved in establishing and ensuring
the continuation of the immersion programme.
2. The immersion students (and their parents) must be members of the majority
community in the local bilingual setting.
3. Both students and their parents must have a positive attitude towards the
target language and its speakers.
4. The immersion programme must be optional.
In other words, immersion language teaching has worked well in Canada (primarily
in Ontario) not only because it has offered the kind of resource-rich exposure to
French that is not possible for English in Nepal, but also because the learners, like
their parents, are members of the majority community of English speakers who
desire to learn the language of the minority French-Canadian community. Trans -
posing the immersion project to a country like Nepal would be hazardous. Once
again we can observe that the role of applied linguistics is to describe and evaluate
language problems within their own contexts.