What Is Total Immersion In Learning A Second Language?

IntroductionIn the 1990's when I was contemplating learning Spanish, I Rosetta Stone Language was told repeatedly by well-meaning friends that if I really wanted to learn Spanish I would have to live in a country in which Spanish was the dominate spoken tongue. If you Google "Spanish Immersion," you will get 1,790,000 hits. After exhausting myself by reading about 250 websites, all of which tried very hard to get me to enroll in their costly Spanish Immersion Courses located in various Spanish-speaking countries, which would have required me to re-mortgage my home a billion times plus hope some rich philanthropist would bequeath me the entirety of his off-shore accounts, I decided to include this quote representing the consensus of what "Spanish Immersion" means:"It is learning a foreign language the same way we learned English (or whatever our native language is): by living it. In a typical language immersion school, the student doesn't study only in the formal sense he or she lives the language. Classes are taught entirely in Spanish, speaking in another language at any time is discouraged, and the student lives in Spanish-speaking Rosetta Stone English environment." (Spanish Immersion School FAQ, Schools Help You Combine Study and Travel, By Gerald Erichsen, About.com)With an idea similar to this quote as the definition of "Spanish Immersion," my wife and I, who also wanted to learn Spanish, sold all our earthly belongings and moved to Guanajuato, Mexico in the year 2003 to "live in the language." After four months of Spanish classes (five days a week and three hours per day) and four years of living here, we could not speak or understand Spanish any better than we could before we came to Mexico. Though we could tell you the differences between the verbs estar and ser and when to use the subjunctive, we were not anywhere close to fluency though we lived in the language as full-time expatriates.We suddenly and very disturbingly had an "Oh my God, what have we done" moment!Being the person I am, I went into research mode (research which led to many books and about 600 articles, by the way) to take apart and dissect the points of the uniformly-accepted definition of Rosetta Stone Korean what "Spanish Immersion" or "Language Immersion" meantthe true meaning!

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