Immersion

I want the author Colin Baker to be this guy, but it's not.

Up until now I've been writing this from my own personal perspective.  While there's nothing wrong with that, today I thought I'd talk a little about what the Immersion in Language Stars Instant Immersion means and why it's beneficial.

Unfortunately actually finding legit research in this area is more than a little problematic.  It's easy to find assertions like, "The bilingual people can have some specific advantages in thinking." but with nothing to back it up.  The best research I've been able find, by way of wikipedia, is Colin Baker's book Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism is every bit the exciting thrill-a-minute read you'd expect it to be.

Mr. Baker identifies several different types of models of bilingual education such as submersion, dual language and heritage language but speaks extensively on the immersion approach that Language Stars uses.  If it's not obvious immersion, specifically early immersion in my younger daughter's case  is a teaching method where the teachers speak nothing but the language being taught.  In Leili's case this is vital because if she hears English, she'll speak it.  However there are criticisms of the approach, specifically that students may become worse at their "primary" language.

Fortunately there doesn't seem to be much evidence of that.  Many students studied did struggle early in other subjects, but those students were leraning English as their second language.  That said this gives me a warning, as Leili gets older we should spend more time with the other subjects.  While students typically caught up with their classmates, our school system can certainly penalize a slow starting child.  

On the other hand our society, and I say this without citation, certainly can reward a bilingual adult.  Learning that language is not easy once you reach adulthood, I assure you, and I think any possible difficulties with other subject (which is far from a guarantee anyway) is well worth it.