Stuctured Immersion in English As a Second Language (ESL)

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Structured Immersion and the truth

Structured Immersion is an ESL (English as Second Language) program designed to be a bilingual instructional tool for students who are in a sense none native English speakers. Even though this program is still used in some US states as well as in other parts of the world, it is to my point of view a masked excuse of a program created to control the essence of a language by teaching on a need to know basis the true sense of bilingualism.

This Program is a really bad copy of a program used in Canada. In Canada their bilingual immersion is introduced through strong instruction in two languages for grades k through 12, the United States copied it but failed to implement the most crucial element which was that the students native language was not included in the instruction and teachers only taut in English.

The United States failed to recognize the importance of an English language learning student's first language. The program was based on teaching the language in a step by step structure, the source of its name, "Structure Immersion." This was leaving out the fact that the natural language acquisition process is more complex than just following the SI program, and that students were doing bad and just moving through the classes but were not able to adapt their English skills in later grades.

The material clearly states that even today some schools in the US still favor this program lacking the sense of reason, not knowing that ESL content classes using something called discovery learning has proven to be very effective.

This is telling us that there is more than one way to go through teaching ESL students, and that there is not really a "best way" to do it, but it helps if the teacher or instructor takes the time to correctly assess his or her students considering the students best interest and not the other way around.

Neglecting the student's native language is not the way to teach a second language; these students will not be bilingual but prisoners of an instruction that truly restricts them from it. To impose is not to teach, I guess that this is telling us to be original and to be considerate of our students this way they'll actually learn something and as teachers we would have accomplished our goal.

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