Planning an Immersion Experience

Abstract

For the past eight years, our small, liberal arts college in eastern Kansas has hosted foreign lan guage immersion days for local high school stu dents of French, German, and Spanish. These immersion day workshops have proven beneficial for all parties involved. Not only do the visiting stu dents and teachers enjoy participating in the day's activities, but our university also benefits from at tracting potential students, namely language ma jors. In this article, we will discuss the benefits of hosting an immersion workshop and outline the steps for organizing such an experience. We will focus particularly on the workshops in French and German, as one of the most important goals of Im mersion Days is to attract more students to these programs. French and German enrollments have suffered similar terrible losses in the past two decades (Brod and Welles). As professionals in the two fields, we have worked together tirelessly to compensate for these losses. Davidheiser offered several possibili ties for attracting and retaining university French and German students, one of which is a day visit that allows high school students to learn about the programs offered by the university. If students are given the chance to experience the language on campus and to get to know the faculty, then they may be motivated to become part of the program. This idea was the basis for holding immersion workshops and we can report that these workshops have been successful in attracting students to our language programs. There are many other benefits of hosting an im mersion workshop in any type of educational insti tution. The activities conducted during these work shops allow students to interact with each other in a relaxed and enjoyable setting. Also, the students have the chance to use the target language outside their classrooms and make new friends while speaking the language. Sometimes activities that cannot be feasibly implemented in the classroom due to time or resource constraints can be done during an immersion workshop. Finally, immer sion workshops allow students and teachers from different institutions to interact and share ideas, therefore promoting better articulation between the high school and university-level language cur ricula. Immersion experiences are nothing new and have been conducted in several different formats. One such format is the summer immersion camp. These camps take place over a week or longer and can include both students and teachers. These im mersion camps require substantial resources and staffing. It is also clear that the students and teach ers who attend will have to pay larger fees for their attendance, a factor that may prove to be prohibi tive for some students. However it is obvious that a lengthy experience such as those provided at these camps is invaluable and can allow students to im merse themselves in the language when they might not have the opportunity to travel abroad. In order to overcome the demand for resources, Nylus and Maiwald stressed the need for community involve ment in an undertaking such as the immersion camps. Sponsorship by members of the commu nity could help to defray the costs of running the camp. These longer immersion experiences allow for some innovative structuring. Shrum wrote about her experiences with high school teachers, native speakers of the language, and junior counselors working together to form curricular teams that led group of students through the foreign language camps (219). In so doing, the students who at tended received close attention from more than