Learning English Through Immersion – A Case Study
(Immersion learning in India)
The first thing you need to keep in mind if you wish to learn absolutely anything is to throw yourself into it completely. This is called immersion learning. You get immersed in the English language. You get English all around you – you place yourself in an English-only environment. This takes a tremendous amount of time and effort. But, if you don’t have any other option and you have to learn English, you do it.
Immersion learning is to do everything in English. I’ll tell you about my sole student in my English Immersion Learning Programme. It worked like a charm. But then she was a willing student. Now, she’s in Australia doing her PhD.
Let’s see what we did.
Oh, incidentally, she didn’t want me to reveal her name. So, I won’t.
She was staying alone on rent here in Delhi. So, we got her on my English Immersion Learning Programme.
The moment she got up she would switch on her iPod and listened to English songs as she freshened up. Then she did her workout.
In the beginning, she admitted that she would become sick and tired of listening to, what she later described as, “oppressively cheerless songs”! She didn’t understand them at all! But then, I must add that today she has her own favourite list of singers and bands!
After her daily workout, she turned on BBC Radio 4 (I just love the programmes, don’t you?) and played an episode of something or another at full blast, while she did her cooking, ironing, cleaning, and so on. At full blast, because that helped her keep the outside world outside. When she had the time, she would sit down and listen to the play. In the beginning, she couldn’t understand a word. But her faith in my programme (God bless her soul) paid off and in three months she started understanding the plays.
We used to have two-hour one-to-one English classes six days a week. We also added her IELTS classes after three months.
After that, she would go home and follow up on the TELW class for about half an hour. Later, she would cook lunch for herself listening to some music – again playing it at full blast! After lunch, she would sit down with an English novel.
I started her on Enid Blyton! She soon became a great fan of Saki and the Percy Jackson novels by one Rick Riordan. I even got her to read a Bertrand Russel – Why I am not a Christian! After a month she started narrating the stories in the class. Quite animatedly, I must add, which reflected her love for the programme. And we fashioned the classes around her story of the day!
After the class, she would get to her course books. That used to be a 6-hour marathon each day. Her day would start at 5 in the morning and end at 10 in the evening.
She refused to speak with anyone in Hindi. Except for her maid, of course! Later she confided that that helped her let off steam!
She followed my English Immersion Learning Programme religiously. And in six months flat, she cleared her IELTS with an overall score of 8.5. (Note, her initial IELTS score was 3.5.)
So, language immersion to learn Engish is possible but it is heavy-duty, time-consuming, gruelling, and calls for a single-minded focus on the part of the learner. It is doable but needs a lot of courage.
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