How to Teach Spanish Through Total Immersion

By eHow Careers & Work Editor

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As a teacher of foreign languages, do you ever feel dissatisfied with the usable knowledge your students have at the end of the course? Part of the problem is that many of us teach about the language, while failing to teach from within the language. Immersion is a solution to that.

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Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Step1

Determine, in your own mind, that you are going to teach Spanish in Spanish, with little or no recourse to English. This one, solid determination makes the process of immersion doable.

Step2

Create a list of "survival phrases" that your students will need to use to gain understanding during the first few weeks. Include phrases such as "How do you say ___ in Spanish?", "What page are we on?", "What activity are we doing?", "Who is my partner?" and "When is the homework due?"

Step3

Give the students a list of very common words that will help them get meanings across to you and their classmates in the early stages of immersion. Include time-telling, colors, numbers, money, days of the week, months of the year and courtesy expressions. Students pick these up very quickly and begin using them from the first day.

Step4

Prepare your students mentally on the first day. Begin by speaking English, and telling them what they're going to be experiencing, and why. You must believe that immersion is the way to go, in order to convince them of it. Give them an "out," though: tell them that, if they absolutely need you to speak English, they can tell you to go to the "magic door." You tell them that once you're on the other side of the classroom door entry, you can speak and understand English.

Step5

Practice ways in which you can explain and show grammar concepts without falling back into English. For example, you can talk about "subjects" and "objects" in Spanish, because the words are so similar. When you write them on the board, the students will easily understand them.

Step6

Be prepared to draw a lot on the board or overhead projector, or prepare, ahead of time, detailed Power Point presentations rich with images to refer to. The more images you use, the less you'll have to fall back into English, and the more easily the students will go from translating to actual use of the language.

Step7

Act out and act up. Be emotionally engaging as you describe concepts and talk in the foreign language. We learn our own language in the context of the daily movements of those all around us, so you need to mimic that as much as possible in the classroom.

Tips & Warnings

Have fun with it! The more animated you are, the more involved the students will become.
Use TPR (Total Physical Response) techniques to teach verbs. Done right, this technique can aid in understanding verbs very quickly and completely.
Watch every student carefully. You have to be even more conscientious in monitoring each student to be sure that each is understanding you. It's very easy to think that everyone understands you, until you start individual questioning.
Be ready for students to protest, to some degree. Stay firm in your conviction so that they will see that the foreign language is more than just another academic subject.