The flexibility of this Immersion speaks volumes about the diverse opportunities available and how you can create a distinct story and career path.
That included a pilot project funded through grassroots donations that allowed Khelsilem to live with two other indigenous youth for nine months in an immersion "language house" where they immersed themselves in speaking Squamish.
An immersion program usually involves speaking and writing only in the language you're trying to learn.
After a compulsory 17-year, full immersion course, Carlos speaks very fast French and very loudly, though, according to cognoscenti, with a Castilian lisp.
But the qualities the two poets have in common – fresh, modern diction, rhythmic vigour, mastery of narrative pace and an infallible ear – surely owe much to their early immersion in a spoken language handed down by "uneducated" old women who confidently owned their mother tongue.
It helped that Talbot, who grew up in suburban Montreal speaking French but entered an English immersion program in sixth grade, was bilingual on a team of English and French speakers.
One model of English immersion, used in Oceanside, Calif., requires teachers to instruct non-English speaking students in English exclusively.
They say if you have French and English you should be speaking Spanish pretty well after a month of deep immersion.
At its core, students in dual-language immersion programs initially spend up to 90% of classroom instruction learning and speaking in the foreign tongue, with that ration evening out as they move up through the program.
The Mandarin and Spanish classrooms at LePort are set up just like their English classrooms, explained Larson, so the activities and toys are all the same — but teachers exclusively speak the immersion language.
