DROWNING BY IMMERSION

In my opinion, immersion courses are officially a Great Idea. For students without the resources to study in an English-speaking country, what could be a better alternative than spending the whole day, over a period of several days, being exposed to comprehensible input, to coin a term familiar to Stephen Krashen acolytes?

Unfortunately, having experienced immersion courses run by shysters and charlatans, many preferable alternatives come to mind, from banging one’s head repeatedly against a firm surface, to watching adult DVDs dubbed into English from the original German and with subtitles in English switched on (actually, a variation on how I learned Spanish...*)

My first contact with the concept of immersion courses came here in Brazil, when I was offered a job with a company teaching Business English to groups of employees from various large companies. Their client list was imposing: Sony, Gradiente (a Brazilian electronics manufacturer), Petrobras (a Brazilian BP), insurance giants Sudameris, Banco do Brasil – the list was long and illustrious, if you are impressed by that kind of thing. I was offered work over weekends, normally starting on a Friday and finishing on a Sunday, and the salary, whilst not guaranteeing a stress-free retirement, would comfortably cover the bills. And the attraction of doing a three-day week was obvious – more free time would be available for some dedicated procrastination.

In my experience, in order for immersion courses to work, they require very careful planning. The material has to be varied and interesting, the teaching format must create an environment that maximises relaxed right-brain “acquisition” and minimises left-brain “learning” (which is extremely stressful, inefficient and mentally exhausting - do a Google search on “TPRS” for details...)

So imagine my despair when I arrived at the hotel where the course was to take place on the first Friday to find I had less than thirty minutes to review the morning’s material - material that hadn’t even arrived yet. Eventually, with about ten minutes to go until facing the first students, a battered Volkswagen Kombi screeched into the car park and, in an unseemly free-for-all, cardboard boxes full of photocopies were hastily unloaded, rummaged through and looted by desperate professores in scenes reminiscent of post-natural-disaster food and water distribution. And the name of the organisation I was working for wasn't the International Red Cross.

* - I learned Spanish by watching Disney films dubbed into Spanish with Spanish subtitles switched on... ;-)

Part Two to follow shortly...