immersion teaching in secondary.. does it work?

[robinpud]

history in french geog in german .. have your dc's tried it? Did it work?

bump

Well, they do it in the European schools here in Brussels and I understand that it is very tough at first.

A friend of mine is a SEN teacher at one of these schools, and SN is not being dyslexic etc, but not being able to cope in 2-3 languages simultaneously.

my friends dds did it in Canada {ontario} so not completely french speaking iyswim

All lessons were given in French apart from English lessons

SO now they are completely bi lingual

Kanga mummy- I have friends in Ontarion too and they rave about the system there.
This is the Uk though and not complete immersion, but the teaching of one subject through the language. I'm just wondering if any other UK schools have done this. We are assured there is research to back it up!

For goodness sake!

If the teacher is genuinely bilingual it might work - but how many geog teachers are bilingual in german?

It happens in some English language medium schools in Wales. Humanities subjects are taught through the medium of Welsh, often to the tope 10% of students.

Not sure how well this would work, since it presupposes that the top 10% would all be good at languages, which doesn't always follow

A local secondary does a proportion of History and Geography lessons in French or German for the top sets in those languages in year 8.

In year 9 everyone has regular teaching in History, Geography and Science in French or German.

This is a high-achieving state school that specialises in languages.

The children I know at the school don't have a problem with it but obviously that's not representative of the whole school.

gagarin- head of geog and german teacher will be team teaching having prepared lesson before hand. So, potentially the chn will be taught in smaller than average groups as it is, so far, an opt in rather than compulsory. All german teaching for those who opt in will be separate from the rest so as to reinforce the vocab covered in Geog; so again could well be a small group ie less than 20.
wheresthamster- that sounds a similar sort of set up.

I have no experience in this but it sounds like it could be amazing or end up with the kids learning very little geography or German.

I would just be concerned that a full discussion of geography issues - from 3rd world debt to immigration to sweat shop workers in Pakistan (to name but a few!) would be inhibited in another language and teaching would be more information giving than discussion based.

It would be interesting to know if they have a high drop-out of History and Geography at GCSE

Its quite common here in Ireland for children to go to a gaelscoil (all Irish speaking primary school), less common to a gaelcolaiste (all Irish secondary). Gaelcolaistes consistently have the best results in all subjects.