The Benefits of a Bilingual, Immersion Education

There are myriad options for parents who want their children to learn a second (or third or fourth) language, from after-school activities and in-school classes to international and bilingual schools. But the most successful way to become proficient in another language is learning through immersion, according to Sharon Huang, founder of HudsonWay Immersion School, a Spanish and Mandarin full-immersion school with campuses in New Jersey and Manhattan.

In an immersion setting, students are taught core subjects in a target language.  The most effective model of immersion is full immersion, in which the target language is weighted heavier in the early years, according to the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition at the University of Minnesota. This is the model HudsonWay Immersion School follows: 2-year-olds spend 100 percent of their time learning in the target language, 3- and 4-year-olds spend 90 percent of the time learning in the target language, and by the time students reach middle school, 50 percent of the day is spent in the target language. “It’s harder initially, but the benefits are tremendous,” Huang says.
   

The Benefits of an Immersion Education

“When children are completely immersed in a second language, additional synaptic connections are being made. Children become smarter. They become more flexible, creative thinkers. They become much more aware of other cultures…They become very proficient in the second language,” Huang says. “We try to help parents understand that just because the content is being taught in a second language doesn’t mean their child will be at a disadvantage in English. In fact, immersion students in fifth and eighth grades are shown, in studies, to be ahead of monolingual students.” 

Here are the five major benefits of children learning in an immersive, bilingual setting:
   

Enhanced Critical Thinking

Research has shown that bilingual individuals have higher executive functioning, says Sue Ha, head of school at HWIS—meaning bilingual students are able to focus on the important information and tune out the rest. This likely is the result of the way synapses form in the brain at a young age from learning more than one language, Huang adds.

Because children in immersion programs go back and forth between two (or more) languages, their brains are used to tuning out extraneous information. This boosts kids’ ability to multi-task, their working memory, and their ability to problem solve and analyze things from various vantage points, Ha says.