In the past, we’ve practiced this style by having a portion of the session in the base language (especially the introductory lessons) and moving on to the target language for the rest of said session. The tutors will also have resources to help you immerse yourself outside of lessons, resources that can be tried out and utilized in session as well, of course.

Inspired by Dra. Iliana Alanis Early Multilingual Classrooms

• Languaging-Translanguaging

  1. Linguistic freedom spaces: Students are free to use their entire language repertoire 

  2. Translanguaging: Using gestures, sounds and visuals to communicate to students

• Interdisciplinary Biliteracy Sequence (IBS)

  1. Direct sensory experience (Exploring insects for example, using all senses like touch, smell)

  2. Writing about experience (Drawing these insects for example, or writing a story)

  3. Reading about the experience (Reading and conversing about the insects)

     • Using the real insects or having a real garden can really help the students to get involved in the learning, or Arts and Crafts

     • Bilingual students can translate for each other 

• Play based language learning, like making a pretend family situations, or a pretend market place

  1. Children were at times found to make up loan words from english and implement them with spanish grammar

• Story telling bilingually 

1. “The benefit of immersive language-learning experiences and how to create them” by Maija Kozlova is a prime explination of how when a language learner (child or adult) is dropped into an immersive setting with language learning, their learning accelerates if it’s paired with an intense interest in acquiring it.

   The author suggests videogames as a way for children to surround themselves with a language, demonstrating the absolute abundance of dynamic strategies one can implement around them to become familiar with the language.

   Our tutors introduce learners to resources like these but primarily strive to give the learner a sense of initial comfortability by speaking with the learner in this target language in a judgement-free zone and WITHOUT hypercorrection.

2. “The Complexity of Immersion Education: Teachers Address the Issues.” is another great source in which researches had 6 immersive language teachers of elementary school children (2 teachers from 3 schools) get together and compare their strategies and challenges in this immersive teaching with student demographic data included.

   These are schools where academic subjects are taught to grade-school children in both L1 & L2 (English and Spanish in this case) exposure. Because the teacher is speaking in Spanish & English, there were concerns of the level of profiency or the dialect that the teachers spoke with in either of the langauges, a fair concern! Here, we take a similar stance as “Susan” does in this article: “… I invite people to correct me. Even in front of the children. I want to be as open as possible because I feel I model myself as a second language leaner.”

   Considering some of our tutors are teaching a language that is not their native, any questions regarding the dialect of which their speaking or confirmation of their fluency will be provided if ever requested.

   Walker, Constance L., and Diane J. Tedick. “The Complexity of Immersion Education: Teachers Address the Issues.” The Modern Language Journal, vol. 84, no. 1, 2000, pp. 5–27. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/330445.

1. Tutors can introduce you to several Google Extensions that have subtitles for streaming services in TWO languages available simultaneously.

2. Tutors can introduce you to online chatrooms where the language is spoken by natives and by other learners like you. These are through text and voice calls.

3. Tutors themselves can talk to you in the target language whenever you become comfortable enough, and can provide you with flash cards while speaking for reading-listening association.

If you’d prefer a different style of tutoring, or simply would just rather the tutor to help with homework, exams, studying, etc., just let the tutor know! The point of this style is to promote proficiency in recalling words and becoming comfortable with the language, but if you find it not to work for your learning process, no difference! The tutors will always be flexible to change.