Quote:
Originally Posted by mrscoach
I have to say, I'm all for immersing yourself in a language to learn it, but there are exceptions. I once worked in the special education department of a school and was assigned to a beginning Spanish class. The teacher started the class by introducing herself in Spanish and then asking questions of each student, in Spanish, and expecting the responses to be in Spanish. Um, HELLO?? This is a beginning class, these students don't KNOW Spanish!
The first couple of students were from Hispanic backgrounds and spoke Spanish (well, TexMex) at home, so they knew what was asked and answered appropriately. All the non-Spanish speaking students looked at me, panic-stricken. I had to speak up and inform the teacher that the students didn't know what was being asked or how to answer. She became upset and ranted how the last teacher did such a poor job. I then had to tell her that they HAD no previous teacher because this was Spanish I. She was still upset that they wouldn't speak in Spanish. Yeah, she lasted half the year then quit. (I won't even go into the time she gave the wrong test and insisted it was what they had been working on. I even had the packet they were to study, and it looked nothing like what was on the test.)
So, immersion is ok, if you know at least a bit of what is going on. I am totally lost if someone only speaks Spanish, or any other language, around me. Put me in a classroom only with another language and I wouldn't know anything.
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It sounds like the teacher in you case was a poor teacher. Total immersion works, millions of people have learned a second language that way.
Berlitz International has been around in one form or another since 1878, and the Berlitz method works very very well. The Benesse Corporation of Japan liked it so much for its employees that they decided to buy the company, it was joked that it was cheaper than continuing to send executives for English lessons.
This works, the method of teaching grammar works if you want a student that has the best grammar in the world, but can't speak the language. I had a student that if you only listened to her read from a book you would have thought she spoke English like a native speaker. Ask her how her day is and she would look at you like you had 3 heads. She was one of the most difficult students I taught, because she was fixated on the "Rules", native speakers generally have pretty poor grammar on paper, but know when a sentence sounds "Wrong".