Language immersion program encourages participants to dive in headfirst

Chicago-area woman creates classes that try to replicate the more natural way to learn new languages

September 07, 2011|Dawn Turner Trice
  • Leslie Lancry, right, helps out during a Spanish language immersion class for toddlers. Lancry started Language Stars, a program she calls equal parts language immersion and fun immersion, in 1998.
Leslie Lancry, right, helps out during a Spanish language immersion class for toddlers. Lancry started Language Stars, a program she calls equal parts language immersion and fun immersion, in 1998. (Chris Walker, Chicago Tribune)

The summer before Leslie Lancry went off to college in 1986, she transformed the backyard and basement of her Winnetka home into her very own French language immersion school.

She passed out fliers around her neighborhood and soon she had eight 4-year-olds who came every weekday for two months. It didn't matter whether they played bingo in the basement or ran through the backyard sprinkler. They spoke only French.

Lancry believed total immersion was the best way for her young charges to learn the language because that's how she learned it when she was 12 and spent four months in France. She said she returned to this country, thinking and dreaming in French.

"As I became a teen, I learned more languages and by the time I was 18, I was convinced that the younger children are when they're immersed in a language, the more quickly they pick it up," said Lancry, 43, who is fluent in six languages and is the founder and CEO of Language Stars, a Chicago-based foreign language institute.

"That summer, not every parent knew they'd be thrilled, but I knew it would have an impact on the kids."

Lancry said many of the parents were delighted with the results. Beyond being more fluent in French, the children were more confident and self-possessed.

I became a fan of language immersion this summer after my 16-year-old daughter spent a portion of June and July at a Japanese language camp at Concordia Language Villages in northern Minnesota. She began teaching herself Japanese when she was about 11, after having been introduced to the language and culture through Japanese manga books and anime films and cartoons.

But two weeks of total immersion at the camp — during which students learned about Japanese culture and currency, ate the food and spoke the language — have moved her so much further ahead in her learning experience.

Shahrzad Mahootian, a professor of linguistics at Northeastern Illinois University, said we learn language either informally, such as when we're very young and our parents talk to us, or in more formal, instructional settings. The reason immersion often works is that, although it may be instructional, it attempts to replicate the more optimal, natural method.

Mahootian said that anyone at any age can become proficient in a new language, but studies show that there's a window, birth through puberty, when children can pick up another language more easily and speak it without an accent.

"It's during that period, when the young brain is more plastic and pliable," she said. "Once puberty hits, different chemicals in the body change the brain. Before puberty, the brain doesn't just choose one language pathway as the primary language.

"A child can receive more and different sounds and comprehend them and repeat them in the way they're produced. That's one reason the accent is better."

Lancry said a younger brain is also more adaptable to a new grammatical structure and syntax, and the child often isn't doing a lot of translating in his head.

"In English, I might say, 'I like the cookie,'" said Lancry. "But in Spanish I would say, 'Me gusta la galleta,' which means 'The cookie pleases me.' Their brains just absorb the difference."

She said studies have shown that flexing the brain in this way makes kids better at verbal and spatial skills, which often helps them perform better on standardized tests.

Mahootian said it's not clear exactly how learning a new language helps kids on tests, but what is clear is that children who are exposed to more than one language early on seem to do better overall with abstract concepts.

"Language is an abstract symbolic system, a series of sounds that we assemble in an arbitrary way to communicate," she said. "If you have standardized tests that deal with abstract concepts and logic, you can expect that someone who's had to manage two abstract systems such as language will do better in cognitive tasks."

Patricia Thornton is the director of summer programs at Concordia Language Villages and has taught Japanese at the camp and in the Minneapolis public school system.

She told me that the camp's mission is to prepare young people for responsible citizenship in a global community that has become smaller and more connected.

Thornton said the camp has received funding from the National Security Language Initiative that has provided scholarships for students studying Arabic, Russian, Chinese and Portuguese. These are among the critical languages the government has identified that young people need to start learning at an early age to better navigate the world.

"In a post-9/11 world our students need to know more Arabic languages, and we've been quite successful in providing scholarships to students coming from across the country," she said, including large groups from Chicago and Minneapolis.

"And this is the fourth year we offered Portuguese, because Brazil is on track to eclipse everybody's economy."