Читать книгу The Multicultural Classroom: Learning from Australian First Nations Perspectives - Jasmin Peskoller - Страница 17

Another possibility for actively acknowledging various linguistic and cultural backgrounds in educational settings is immersion education, which qualifies as a strong form of bilingual education (Baker 2011, 222) (see Table 1). Various scholars have demanded that educational approaches only qualify as immersion education if at least 50% of class time is spent on subject-specific education using a language other than students’ L1 for instruction (Surkamp 2017, 134; Tedick, Christian & Fortune 2011, 2).

Generally, Brown (2007) outlines that immersion education is predominantly adopted in additive bilingual contexts in which learners normally share the same home language and show close levels of proficiency in the target language. Frequently, the teachers in immersion education know or even share the students’ linguistic or cultural background (Brown 2007, 141). In this regard, García (2009, 149) emphasizes that “[d]espite the immersion of the child in the other language for education, the child’s home language is honoured, respected, used throughout the school, and taught right after the immersion period.”

Differentiating between programs, Tedick, Christian, and Fortune (2011) name foreign language immersion, bilingual immersion, and Indigenous language immersion as the three major types of immersion education. These as well as their respective characteristics are consolidated in Table 2:

Foreign language immersion programs (one-way)	Bilingual immersion programs (two-way)	Indigenous language immersion programs
linguistically homogenous students; speaking majority language additive bilingualism and biliteracy academic achievement fostering development of intercultural understanding	language minority and language majority students learning each other’s languages additive bilingualism and biliteracy academic achievement cross-cultural understanding	indigenous and increasingly more non-indigenous leaners revitalize endangered indigenous languages and cultures can be one- or two-way additive bilingualism and biliteracy home identity academic achievement

Table 2: Types of Immersion Education7

Building on this three-fold typology, Baker (2011) suggests a further differentiation be made according to the learners’ commencing age and the total amount of immersion time. Table 3 illustrates Baker’s approach:

AGE	Early immersion (infant stage)	Middle immersion (approx. ten years)	Late immersion (secondary level)
TIME	Total immersion commences with 100% immersion, reducing to 80% after several years and finishing junior schooling with 50% immersion in the second language per week	Partial immersion comprises 50% immersion in the second language throughout schooling

Table 3: Decisive Factors in Immersion Education8

In reference to both Table 2 and Table 3, Surkamp (2017, 134) notes that education systems in multicultural contexts favor two-way immersion programs in which teachers and learners from two language groups work together.