The Immersion Model for Teaching German to Children

Despite mounting evidence that children are best equipped to learn new languages before reaching adolescence, many public schools do not begin teaching German, if at all, until students reach middle school. Today, standardized testing in math and English dominates the national curriculum, and public schools have shifted their attention and resources accordingly. Important decisions about foreign language instruction are often being left to parents.

Whether teaching German or any foreign language, many experts believe that beginning instruction before children reach adolescence, will significantly increase their chances of attaining fluency and native-like accents. Widespread acceptance of this theory has fueled the surge of immersion programs, beginning at the kindergarten or pre-K level, where schooling is primarily conducted in the target language, and English is gradually introduced as the child grows older, often around second grade.

Teaching German to toddlers through full-immersion makes perfect sense from a theoretical, educational and physiological standpoint. Depending on location, however, parents may find that there are no local programs teaching German at the pre-kindergarten or elementary school level, even though immersion programs for some languages, like Spanish and Chinese, have become increasingly popular in recent years.

In areas with no pre-existing language program for young kids, many parents have turned to private tutors and at-home multimedia programs for teaching German to kids, building a linguistic bridge from the crib to the classroom.

History of teaching German in an immersion setting

Parents looking for ways to take charge of their children's foreign language education may wonder how immersion programs work. Language immersion is not a particularly new approach for teaching German to children. The Milwaukee German Immersion Elementary School, for example, was founded in 1977, and today continues to serve as a public "magnet" school for kindergarten to fifth grade students.

The Milwaukee school was launched by foreign language specialist Anthony Gradisnik, and based on successful French-immersion programs in Canada. Helena Curtain, now a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, was hired to implement the school's curriculum and recruit its first class of students. Curtain reflected on her early experiences in the June 2000 newsletter of the American Council on Immersion Education . Thirty years ago, it seems, teaching German to kids in an immersion environment was a radical proposition.

According to Curtain, the Milwaukee school weathered a major crisis in 1978, after a school board member charged that the school was in violation of World War II-era state laws stipulating that all scholastic instruction, except foreign language classes, must be conducted in English. Teaching in German, the critic alleged, was "illegal" and "psychologically damaging."

However, Curtain writes, enthusiastic parents of the school's students joined together and successfully lobbied the state capitol for support. Within the next few years, immersion schools in French and Spanish were added in the Milwaukee school district, and the German program continued to grow and thrive.

With evident satisfaction, Curtain notes that today's German-immersion students equal or surpass their monolingual peers when it comes to standardized testing.

Curriculum for teaching German to toddlers

Having been practiced and continually refined for over 30 years, the Milwaukee approach to teaching German in an immersion setting was recently studied by Turkish scholar Sumru Akcan, who published her observations in the June 2005 issue of Early Childhood Education Journal.

Akcan sat in with a first-grade class led by Frau M, who spoke to her students solely in German throughout the day. "You cannot go back and forth between English and German," the teacher explained. "I think you have to work really, really hard to keep the kids using the target language by being a good role model."

The class listened as Frau M. read stories about rain forests, arctic animals and Native Americans, and answered frequent questions about the material. The children also participated in math-based activities like "calendar time," and then broke into smaller groups to practice vocabulary and pronunciation. Akcan describes a classroom stocked with visual aides, including charts, posters, picture books and "math manipulatives" like blocks and cubes.

"Early childhood educators need to offer learning experiences that surround young learners with meaningful and interactive literacy-based activities," Akcan wrote, a conclusion that could easily extend to any first-grade classroom, whether the instructor is teaching in German or English.

Teaching German with new technology

Back in 2000, Helena Curtain wrote that a lack of computer programs and technological study aides presented difficulties for German immersion students. "Since German elementary schools until recently had little access to computers, it had been very difficult ... to find child-appropriate educational software," she wrote. Fortunately, a great deal has changed since then and computers, the Internet and other digital media have enriched learning in the classrooms of the Milwaukee school.

Likewise, ever-changing technology continues to provide broader experiences for those teaching German at home too. Many multimedia language programs have been developed for teaching German, and some, like the award-winning MUZZY from the BBC, are specifically designed with the young child in mind – making learning a new language like German a possibility for every family.

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